This is the saddest metaphor for this admin. Claiming that they're adding gold to these spaces when everyone knows that it's cheap plastic crap from Home Depot. All surface bluster with no actual values underneath, other than the illusion of wealth and prosperity.

Donuts in the break room. My willpower's going to get a hell of a workout today.

"Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors." -Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Nine Inch Nail's just released soundtrack album for Tron: Ares is everything I hoped for. A massive electronic assault on the senses. Too bad Disney are such cowardly shits that I won't be seeing the movie itself.

Reposting this because it's a great, concise explanation of the madness we've all descended into. The news media need to get on board with this understanding.

Reposting this just because it's cool.

Just cancelled our Disney+ sub and told a friend that an upcoming trip to Disneyland is off. No money for Trump lickers!

Received an email this morning that I need to complete my annual ethics training. There's something darkly ironic about requiring government employees to pass an ethics test in this "interesting" time.

cato institute analysis of murders by political ideology since 1975, excluding 9/11

Gee, I wonder why. www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

Accurate

Five Small Pleasures 1. The smell of fresh bark mulch 2. A cat napping in your lap 3. My model train running for hours without derailing or uncoupling. 4. The spark of nostalgia from seeing something from your childhood in a thrift store. 5. Conceiving a fun twist for an RPG I'm GMing.

NEW: The messages on the bullets are from a video game called Helldivers2. My latest: www.muellershewrote.com/p/new-the-me...

The message should not be that political violence is bad because it targeted a good guy who was “practicing politics the right way” (which Kirk definitely was not). Political violence is bad because it inherently corrodes the democratic polity, because it makes democracy impossible.

We can be against political assassinations without pretending that Charlie Kirk was anything but an awful, hateful, despicable human being.

How long until internet sleuths track down a clear image of the shirt?

Remembering MN house speaker Melissa Hortman, her husband Mark and their beloved dog Gilbert. Murdered in June at their home by a rightwing Trump-voting evangelist, who also shot another MN lawmaker and his wife at THEIR home, 9 and 8 times, respectively (miraculously, they survived).

Lot of people much smarter than me are explaining the nuance of this event much better than I ever could. I've long said that a poor appreciation and understanding of nuance is one of the biggest problems in today's political culture.

Charlie Kirk spent his life‘s work and all of his energy and time targeting out-groups while arguing for a world in which gun massacres would be easy to enact, plentiful, and inevitable, and he became famous and wealthy doing it, and we’re now not supposed to mention that because it’s not polite.

Violence towards anyone should not be accepted but its hard to have sympathy towards someone who passed away who actively made the world a worse place to live in for so many people and got loads of money doing it

I condemn violence and murder in all its forms, including the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Also, Charlie Kirk was a racist, transphobic, homophobic, anti-democratic ‘activist’ who helped make this country a worse, less just place for millions of people. These statements are not contradictory.

Elizabeth Warren on people who say Dems needs to tone down their rhetoric: "Oh, please. Why don't you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he's posted and every ugly word."

rarely have I more acutely felt the dynamic by which Dems are held responsible for the rhetoric of every random left-leaning person on the internet and Republicans are not even asked to answer for their own personal words

Apropos of nothing, here's a thread of some Charlie Kirk highlights

We must stand resolutely against political assassination and political violence of all kinds, and just as resolutely against everyone who exploits acts of violence as the pretext or excuse for political repression of political opponents.

Hannah Arendt said 'The death of human empathy is one of the earliest & most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism' We saw the recent cruelty of MAGA denying empathy to Melissa Hortman Empathy for Kirk—not because he ever acted like a decent human—but because we are decent humans

No matter your place on the political spectrum, violence is never an acceptable form of debate or protest. I'm not a fan of Charlie Kirk or his detestable political positions, but I hope that he survives this despicable attempt on his life.

Once again, FedEx's status for my package is "We'll add a delivery date as soon as your package starts moving." Don't you mean, when you resume moving it, FedEx? I don't think my box of games is likely to move without your intervention.

Everytime I see a skeet that calls on Congress to step in, take action, or do anything at all to slow the Trump Admin's roll, my eyes roll so hard it hurts.

It sure would be nice to see Congressional Democrats grow a damn spine for once. It's way past time for them to recognize we're not in a business-as-usual situation. Time to take a cue from Dem governors like Pritzker and Newsom and use all the tools available to fight like hell.

Wish we could have nice things...

I am discovering, at 53 years old, that I suck at receiving constructive criticism.

The Internet has been down in my office since before I arrived today, but because telework must be approved at the highest levels of DoD, we're all sitting here twiddling our thumbs. What a fucking waste. Are we great again yet?

Marlowe would like you to know he's very agile. #cat

This is the stupidest timeline.

I don't know what it is lately, but every time someone heats up their lunch in our office's kitchenette, I find it absolutely revolting.

And more than two hours late, our plane is finally taxiing. This being LAX, we could still be 30 minutes on the ground to the runway...

Ballasting complete! I'm hoping that the two colors I used on the main lines dry to a more common color (I ran out of the darker stuff about halfway through), but if not, I'll weather it down later. #modeltrains

I've been hard at work on my model railroad club's traveling layout in prep for the Ventura County Fair, our signature event. The yard on the layout, which was previously barely functional, has been entirely redone, new track, switches, and switch machines. Hope I can ballast it before the show.

This is really important context to the reports of "anarchy" in Los Angeles. Don't get sucked into the false narratives being spun by the right.

Multiple large accounts today have posted “the girls are fighting” or something similar. Carol nails it. That’s not what’s happened. These are dysregulated megalomaniacs, and it’s insulting to compare girls to them. Also, using girls as an insult is misogynistic. Please stop doing that!

I really, really hate that the feud between Trump and Musk is news.

This right here (not PoC or female characters having actual roles) is my problem with the sequels. The storytelling seems to have been entirely in Abrams' head and not on the screen. No sense of who or what the First Order is. Two lines in an opening crawl could have fixed this.

Really wish I'd remembered to save this game before November 5th last year. It sucks that I can't reload this broken playthrough.

(I know it's just confirmation bias, but) why is it that every time I turn on the Red Sox mid-game, they suddenly fall apart?

How many doctors and scientists have to say that a "universal flu vaccine" that protects you "for life" is a fantasy before people will demand that our government focus on what actually works year by year?

The sad fact is that a majority of the Republicans who voted for this bill will never face consequences for their vote, either because their voters are so marinated in right-wing media that convinces them that only "other people" need Medicare/Medicaid or their districts are safely gerrymandered.

An unfortunate side effect of the ongoing nonsense *everywhere* is that my personal tolerance for stupid has declined precipitously. Sitting in a Teams call and listening to people who have obviously not listened to two years of training on a new system ask painfully dumb questions, I just can't.

Noem is either appallingly stupid or lying. Either disqualifies her from administering the security of the nation.