Hope everyone had a good week. Little bit of whiplash with the weather. Tonight I’m going to see these three guys talk about Stand By Me. Should be fun!
Middle East crisis live: US has carried out strikes on ‘every military target’ on Iran’s Kharg island, Trump says
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/13/iran-war-news-live-updates-us-israel-middle-east-crisis-latest
Kyrsten Sinema says in court filings she had a ‘romantic’ relationship with guard
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/kyrsten-sinema-romantic-relationship-guard
Judge blocks DOJ’s criminal probe of Federal Reserve, blasting it as political
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/13/nx-s1-5747122/doj-federal-reserve-jerome-powell-jeanine-pirro
Kennedy Center president departs – months before the art complex’s scheduled closing
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/13/nx-s1-5747149/grenell-kennedy-center-president
So dumb
Have a great weekend!
hey look on the upside….half of those 13 dead are accidental
now if you send the troops in…you are going to see some real numbers…
irans not joking when they said they are waiting for it you know…
course…previous administrations knew this…this one… well… im sorry for your losses if it happens…hope we stay out of it
…not to be snide about it…but…the on camera haircut keeps tripping out numbers & saying how much they read like a winning scorecard…but however much the rate at which they lob stuff might have slowed the stuff they keep hitting seems to be pretty on purpose in ways that don’t leave that looking as one-sided as the one side is trying to advertise?
i mean it helps if you cook the books right?
after all iran only killed 6 american soldiers….vs however the fuck many civilians we have dubbed combatants we killed
and im not even saying the counts wrong….just that its apples to oranges
but tell me how the us is winning?
the regime still stands
the straight is still closed
and missiles and drones are still flying everwhere?
hell the us wont even provide escort to tankers coz the straight is too dangerous… for them.. not the tankers…the escorts
if thats your idea of winning….id hate to see what losing looks like
…it’s kinda lazy to dip to the bill hicks quote but all the same…in the bit he did about the one gulf war that still sounded new when there was another of those bill wasn’t alive for because the son of the admin got the team back together…he had the thing about the weapons catalogue…& also about the disparity in the butcher’s bill side of the equation when the US goes to war
…it sort of paralleled the part that was (iirc) elsewhere in the same set about gun deaths in the US vs deaths at soccer games in the UK…where there had been a bunch of those…so it was a bigger number than the deaths from firearms he attributed to US tourists mad at being served bland food (“ya don’t *boil* pizza…”) but the part that floats into mind for me is [some five digit number] killed…USA…79…does that mean if we sent 80 guys we still woulda won that fucking thing…one guy in a ticker-tape parade…how’d ya do it…”ah pulled up G-12…it was right there in the catalogue”
…bill was a funny guy
…hairslick pete is a funny guy the way pesci was in goodfellas…& whatever the putative difference might be between the consumer-facing & the military-networked stuff anthropic/palantir & all their merry mil-tec buddies like that anduril muppet are SaaS-ing that shit up with are serving up targeting options off the back of at best mostly the same code that is unnervingly pro-escalation in simulations on the civil settings
…I know the medical texts all seem to agree that “self-medication” is bad…but…there aren’t enough prescriptions to account for the number this surely has to be doing to the collective psyche of humanity in all its multiple-personality-having messy bitch flailing about between flares of genius that somehow keep us just about waving & not drowning in the bathwater with the baby we’re trying to save…or…whatever?
…oh…&…uhhh
…[somebody]’s “idea of winning”?
you know….i for one….am deeply comforted by the fact the biggest military in the world..with all the nukes…is now a banana republic what can be bought by the highest bidder,
i live in a very rich country
any chance you could sink belgium? they speak dutch funny
also i couldnt read the article..wanted my email to give it to me…and im having a very hard fuck off wanting anything from me moment
…the TL;DR is broadly all the stuff you’d already been the same sort of irritatedly disbelieving of while believing it because of course only about slapping rank on tech-types so they had weight to throw around in a chain of command…only…straight up for the money…give or take the rank part in at least the sense that comes with stripes
…oh…speaking of…stars & stripes got a new manual & now that can’t have cartoons…&…other stuff you don’t do if you can take it & not just dish it out when it comes to the face presented to the enlisted core of the corps you claim as your people the way pete do
…embarrassment doesn’t begin to describe these people…the shame alone ought to be fatal to a genuinely conscious & self-aware mind?
but if you cant have cartoons…how will americans understand it?
it seems very optimistic from stars and stripes to assume anyone reads the not pictures or cartoons
fuck me mate…..if yous ever want to outlive the stereo types…you got born in the wrong time
no offense intended to any here…i knows you are bright sparks….but if its taken..well fuck you stop fucking shit up….
i dont wake up thinking you know what…ill insult americans…i just feel like it by the end of the day…
and whilst i will happily admit im an asshole…i think thats a you problem
…I think at least part of the problem is that it’s a situation where for any I or you could pin a moral (or economic) IOU to from the perspective of the one that might be intended to make whole in a way it never can but might be better than the worse-than-nothing it’s about…you can find a way to re-rack your row on that fruit machine to make the other side the asshole…until if we’re honest there isn’t a way to run it consistently that doesn’t produce a standing result of “it’s all of you – you’re all assholes” like the bit in spaceballs & all major asshole’s relations in the room where that happens
…like…in that respect you’re an asshole…sure…we all are…some more than others depending on the day…but…I guess I think of it…like…well…I don’t in that until approximately now I wouldn’t have attempted this analogy & it might not really hold but it sort of occurred to me it might & I’m winging it
…a batman comic is a batman comic…is a batman comic…& batman is batman…but…batman is also adam west…& lego batman…& the one with the big chin in the cartoons that are actually not half bad…& also michael keaton…& also…& so on…but that’s no biggie…or it used not to be…marvel maybe fucked it up a little but they’ve always gone the other way about a consistent house style to the art…not that there’s zero variation but wolverine in one artist’s book is a lot more like wolverine in almost all the others than the batman in the dark knight returns is the same as the one in…I dunno…knightfall…or year one…much less the killing joke…although they pulled stuff out of all of those for one trilogy of movies my mileage varied well off factory-spec for based on popular reception
…in that sort of way…or…maybe the way they sometimes try to run the “who gets the shield” part of the legacy side of the position the captain america character stakes out…that might work better…these fuck-knuckles like hegseth all want to co-opt the punisher & for my money they want that because they missed the point of the character being the anti-batman
…captain america is like lex luthor if he wasn’t a bad guy…lex’s whole pitch is nobody but him…for basically the same logic that only-batman-can…is capable of being the thing behind the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency for if the emergency is superman going to the darkside…except for “america” in the sense of the ideals underwriting the whole proposition that the good guys won WWII…when the bad guys become the nominal good guys & most of the good guys go along to get along & do the register-with/work-for the government thing cap is out from the off with the outlaws…& that’s part of what flags who the narrative is pointing the good guy brush at
…so…comics-speak-ing…if ever there was a SHIELD or a nick fury or whatever…the thing in the uncle sam suit at the minute is arguably a wizard of oz deal based on the age of the motive agents…but…no SHIELD…that’s HAMMER now…& norman osborn…AKA the hobgoblin…that talks to his own reflection & flies about lobbing explosives with his feet in stirrups on a drone like man-portable works the other way around…that’s all in pretty much full effect for plot or character purposes in the visible parts of the cast
…so…based on current casting…”america” or “americans” the way “uncle sam” is both of those…r/AITA probably wouldn’t have a lot of takers for the other guy over that guy these days?
also..we had an earthquake last night
woke the missus up and she came down being all like…did you feel the house moving? wtfbbq?
and i was like? what?..didnt feel a thing…guess my chair is well suspended
https://nltimes.nl/2026/03/14/magnitude-30-earthquake-near-eleveld-gas-field-wakes-residents-near-assen
didnt hear a thing either…..but you know…2 am…i am in my cans blasting music
Obama didn’t authorize strikes that killed Iranian school girls.
i feel like thats the kinda thing what makes a difference….
also… the money stack thing is very misleading..
pretty sure bombing the fuck out of iran is costing a lot more than not doing it did…
https://bsky.app/profile/roryjohnston.bsky.social/post/3mgzk67mze22c
Sinema, one big scarlet letter of a personality.
…it’s not making any more sense…so…I tried to distract myself from the kharg island WTFnow stuff with zitron’s latest attempt to make me feel like I get to say those DOTs are on the shorter side…& he references things he was writing stuff about a couple of years ago & it’s all in some senses the same stuff he’s banging on about but a different cross-section under the microscope or whatever…but…it has me wondering something…because he sort of seems to be saying some stuff that maybe I could be vulnerable to reading too much into on account of some priors about things to do with how we use tech & what tech we get/have to use & how that works & how maybe it could work…& things I know I don’t like or want & things I know contribute high levels of annoyance & other sorts of friction to the day to day of a great many people…but…all the same…the SaaS stuff he talks about is largely experienced by huge numbers of people/users as a subscribe-to-not-purchase model…that sort of makes sense…unlimited rental from a library is enough like a library to make sense even if you don’t love the way that turns out to have impacted the ability to derive revenue from your material as an artist…but overall the “ecosystem” in which you have broadly two lanes for a phone or a tablet & according to the last thing they seem to have said on the subject google aim to have a pop at putting the 3rd party app stores out of business under the flag of improving security on the OS by making some changes that don’t seem to improve on the ways they already handle the security side of not hosting dodgy apps on their store but do fence out the stuff that the likes of the people maintaining that AOSP thing or all the XDA dev forum stuff might get as scarce as last I checked it was for iOS stuff…& if they can retroactively make a thing that ran on your device not run on it anymore…& they’re the same companies that have a pretty spotty record for locally-relative moral stances across “markets” when those are run by people who want them to do stuff you hope they wouldn’t get away with where you live…so…that’s…not…great…but…also sort of works kind of a similar way to the way the SaaS stuff works in the enterprise sense except for the hassle-factor of switching out this over that subscription for streaming/reading/gaming/internet-ing/banking/insurance/whatever vs OEM “ecosystem” for…even before you get to smart-home people…phone, computer, tablet maybe, TV…maybe some sort of PVR…maybe a stereo…maybe some distributed speaker set up…the A/C…the hot water…all of which maybe talks to your watch that measures your blood oxygen levels…half of which pisses you off making you think about it at least once a week in a way that its existence is supposed to be about you not having to…people…don’t like this stuff
…they like stuff they’ve managed to make it do for them enough to put up with it because they haven’t been offered an alternative for the most part…& the hypetrain says you can vibe code an app now…but your vibe code won’t run on android or iOS unless you’re all apple/alphabet certified…which…doesn’t seem so much “free enterprise” as it does “moat & drawbridge, please – & we’ll be having those silos of yours, too”
…& bigger names are starting to lay off big numbers of staff & say “it’s the AI, stupid” about that…but…ed makes some pretty sound sounding points about how the SaaS thing has evolved…&…it might not be altogether nuts to say that the things that made the number-go-only-up-can stuff work the way it did for the SaaS stuff going back to around 2010 until not so long ago…sort of don’t…& I dunno that ed is exactly saying this but it could be it don’t enough to maybe explain more of the lay-off figures than the “AI” can account for…&…not looking for a grandmother to enroll on my eSaaS* course
[* – egg Sucking as a Service…like…obvs?]
…but…that zitron thing runs long
…& block is one of the places it runs to…or through…or around…or whatever the appropriate term is…probably not “over”…more or less deliberately…but all the same your boy ed is over there talking about how you gotta look at monetary policy trends over a 15 year period to understand a landscape making claims about where things are headed over the next 5…like…I dunno…homework happened
…& the “secretary of war” is telling a camera he’s a war-crime kinda guy in as many words faster than you can say “define ‘no quarter’, shitstain”…& palantir-guy AKA mirror-universe taika waititi is taking to stages to platform how his platform can specifically disenfranchise educated female dem-leaning voters to empower the lowest of the low-information voters to be scraped from the manospheric barrel they shoot those fish in…& we somehow don’t call people like that the existential threat
…sigh…I suppose it…almost…makes sense that wondering if all the money thrown at AI & its limited-use-seemingly-unlimited-expense-with-no-path-to-profitability datacenters being maybe closer to all the money meta threw at making the metaverse something that would make it less embarrassing to have tried to brand yourself meta than all the money people who went out of business laying the stuff enabled others to make piping stuff down fibre optic cable…might be making us take less notice of how the rules might have gone & changed on the only games in town in ways they might not have been so much more prepared for than the ones that never watched war games?
…sorry…but…if I didn’t I might have done tomorrow & probably better not to find out how long that would have run?
…not to make it worse by digging up more to scroll past…but the marisa kabas one is trying to reference this part
…which I know somewhere or other I saw someone say was slightly misleading as it might be more accurate to say the judge said “I need a couple of days to get some people in front of me before I rule on that”…but…for now they seem to be down…unless the internet always remembers is still a thing…& from the bits of some of that trove I did see…the one about giving them enough rope seems to apply?
They can’t leave those videos up. The videos prove without a shadow of a doubt that the DOGE bros are imbeciles and they took huge sums of money to fuck things up as much as possible. And now there’s mounting proof that they stole everyone’s data.
Bad news is that I’m sure plenty of people downloaded that crap before it disappeared. There’s way too many lawsuits going on over it to just let it get disappeared.
…I mean…it’s like a perfect storm of a perfect example of how *the whole time it was happening* there were people crowdfunding bigger bullhorns to scream about it louder from more rooftops & still if you tried to convey what it looks like if you plug exactly those kinds of dumbshit semi-capable don’t-know-what-they-don’t-know in as an expendable resource someone like the DOGE-meister thinks they can “spin up” like an instance of pre-built module in a system for fucking up everyone’s shit while murdering anything that might mark his thesis & charge him for the docked points that buy him that failing grade across his boards…it’s you there trying to explain it…not these dipshits doing that part to camera in a certified deposition…so *you* sound like the one who probably ought not to be taken seriously?
What do they mean “cause” reputational damage? It’s already done. I wouldn’t hire any of them because I can’t trust them.
As for the other’s rep… Emol has always been a thin skinned sack of elephant dung. His asshole view that the rules only apply for us is why I’ve wanted to punch him since I met him.
The USN never did mine warfare well. They left that to the Brits/Germans/Dutch/Canadians (like Arctic warfare).
They have one FUCKING squadron of aging CH-53E SEA DRAGON mine hunters. Don’t know if they’ve been deployed to the Hormuz.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2026/03/12/the-us-navy-decommissioned-middle-east-minesweepers-last-year-heres-what-they-did/
HOLY FUCK! THEY HAD 4 MINESWEEPERS IN THE PERSIAN GULF AND DECOMMISSIONED THEM!
LAST FUCKING YEAR.
…so…I heard some people discussing some of that…or stuff that overlapped…& it sounded like to bring in the stuff you might…if you were some people…& the people saying it were some of those people on account of it having been a field of study & debate & gamed-out-for-&-in-exercises sorts of ways for decades, plural…you might have given some thought to…as indeed many of the people you’d expect to have had input into the decisions currently being made…had & did & tried to offer & he wouldn’t hear it…they figure that stuff is maybe four weeks out if you’re lucky on the logistics
…but starmer is under fire in the less literal sense for the thing he wants under way towards cyprus to protect some interests still hustling to be putting out from port weeks early that’s presented as days behind a schedule there wasn’t
…& depending on what you think constitutes the board or the affiliations you’re calling teams with players on that either all that’s happening is a political sideshow with dire consequences for the running costs of people who have those imposed by people that don’t count them…or enough of the right ones have picked a side to call it a world war except for the rationing & the digging for victory stuff…vote reform & let’s burn this sucker down for good just in case the mid-terms go course correcting anything about this tanker that already hit the fucking iceberg broadside…or…whatever
…it’s like for every thing they’ve done they hunted down the thing you could do that would make the first thing maximally dumb & did that next…it’s a literal midfuck to so much as think about what their version of thinking it through must be like?
I worked for assholes (Plutonium Jack’s special breed of Six Smegma Proteges, too!) like that at Nortel.
What a bunch of shitheads.
The Epstein Party is afraid that Trump’s endless wars and bullshit is going to kill them.
MAGAts are shrieking that they can’t afford high gas prices or high food prices or healthcare.
Seeing both groups of motherfuckers keep doubling down as their orange calf Satan keeps destroying them and much of the world…
I always wondered if I would be acting like Nelson Muntz as the world burns. Well, I guess I knew the answer… Ha HA!
I only have some empathy and feeling to give before I start emotionally distancing myself from the idiots. You (MAGAts, billiionaires, tech brahs, etc, etc, etc) created this fucking mess. I’m glad to see you get a piece of it now.
Someone asked the question if we were to get US refugees. I don’t want no fucking MAGAts ruining my beautiful flawed nation. Cold, but necessary to save ourselves.
Doesn’t mean I don’t want US refugees. I just don’t want no fucking MAGAts.
…wait up…that reminds me…brb
…found it…but…uh…also found…this?
…anyway…the “oh, there might be one for that part” part was this one?
This was well thought out…
https://www.thedailybeast.com/football-stars-slam-white-house-for-using-them-in-sick-war-video/
Would be hilarious if the NFL sued over copyright infringement.
Another day, another grift (now with lasting implications!)…
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-to-receive-10-billion-from-tiktok-deal-report-11677622
…seen a lot of people ask this but still have yet to see anyone offer an answer…but…what does it say on the part of the check that says who it goes to?
…what account is due to be $10billion up off the back end of that…the way kushner is pulling ghoul rotation while sniffing for $5billion here or $2billion there while the people with job descriptions that actually require them to be in those places at those times take instructions from a guy who thinks jared is doing the important work where the serious money is?
Wow, I don’t have to go to a Mara Lago bathroom anymore for my top secret info? Winning!
national security briefing member…..huh
NSB
oh…thats real unfortunate over here…