Week 2: It just continues

At the risk of doing the very thing I was advocating against doing the other day, this is another Outrage Post regarding POTUS47. Triaging the firehose of fascist actions is proving to be awfully difficult, what with so many things being RED ALERT level nightmares.

45/47 and his flunkies, with apparent heavy involvement from Elon Musk, have invited Federal workers to quit by implying an offer of nonexistent severance packages. They have violated the Impoundment Act and have indicated they will do it again and again. 45/47 flew a planeful of deportees to Colombia in chains on a flight with torturous conditions, got into a social media slapfight with Colombia over it, traded concessions, and crowed to the MAGA dupes that he'd just pwned Colombia when they in fact succeeded with their demand that deportees be treated humanely and not escorted by armed soldiers (45/47 won a concession from Colombia allowing him to continue using military planes). He claimed that he'd sent the MILITARY into CALIFORNIA to turn his imaginary spigot on to give Los Angeles more water and crowed about it as some sort of real achievement when it was all in his imagination. His OMB nominee perjured himself in admitting during a Senate hearing that he champions the Big Lie.

All of that is horrifying and that barely scratched the surface of what's gone down in the past two days.

My top-line concern for this brief time period, though, is the attempted firing of at least 17 inspectors general. (This actually happened on Friday night—when administrations often will, in West Wing parlance, "take out the trash" when the fewest people will notice—but I'm catching up to it late. Triage is hard.)

The Office of Inspector General was established in 1976 as one of the post-Nixon reforms designed to protect the nation from a corrupt chief executive and/or corrupt government officials. The job of Inspectors General is to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse in the executive branch of the Federal government. Initially this office was limited to a dozen IGs in the department of Health and Human Services, later it was expanded to cover other agencies and departments. There are now 72 IG positions, tasked with policing waste, fraud, and abuse by policy and policymakers.

45/47 tried to fire 17-20 of them (reports vary on the number), all without cause.

To no one's surprise, the firings are illegal. Inspectors General operate independent of an administration, and though a president can fire them for cause, he must submit a written rationale for the firing to Congress and give 30 days' notice. The only rationale made in this case was that the firings were "due to changing priorities." Since the only purpose of IGs is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, this was a tacit admission by the POTUS47 administration that their priorities are to not root out waste, fraud, and abuse. Couple that with all of the actions taken in the administration's first nine days and the obvious conclusion is they want to commit vast amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse and not be held accountable for it.

Which, I know, shocker. Who'd have though that a guy who headed up a fraudulent "charity" and a fraudulent "university," who routinely refuses to pay contractors, who grifts as frequently as he breathes, would be up to his cotton-candy-swirl combover in waste, fraud, and abuse?

It's not the first time a Republican president has tried to purge IGs, of course. Reagan fired the lot of them (there were only 16 then) in 1981 only to rehire five of them under pressure from Congress. Bush41 also tried to fire the whole lot but was thwarted by backlash from within and without the government. 45/47 fired several during his first term after his first impeachment.

Among other things, this move puts the lie to what Musk's "job" really is. We were told, after all, that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was there to find waste and identify inefficiencies. No, no, turns out they're just fine with waste—remember that planeful of shackled and sweltering deportees forced to sit in their own urine? They, and all planned future deportations, were on military aircraft at enormous expense, costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the typical method of chartering a traditional civilian-style jet in order to give the whole thing more machismo and, probably, to allow for more control over how poorly the passengers can be treated; in past years there were typically dozens of such flights per week, so even if we're conservative in our estimates, this administration is choosing to spend around a billion dollars or more, annually, on unnecessary photo ops and cruelty. If you're looking for efficiency and budget trimming, you want the IGs—actions taken by Inspectors General save the U.S. billions of dollars every year, at least they used to. No, Musk's real job is to be the unofficial Secretary of Corruption and Self-Dealing.

Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are calling 45/47’s bluff, sending a letter to the president seeking clarification and rationale, as required by law, and noting, "IGs are critical to rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct within the Executive Branch bureaucracy, which you have publicly made clear you are also intent on doing." (Emphasis mine.) They know better, of course, they're just establishing a paper trail for the hypocrisy.

Maine senator Susan Collins, however, remains just as dense and clueless as always. She told reporters, "I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission is to root out waste, fraud and abuse. So this leaves a gap in what I know is a priority for [POTUS47]." Really, Susan? You don't understand? I'll explain: He lied to you. It is not his priority, it is, in fact, the opposite of his priority. (How does Maine keep reelecting this person?) Susan, if you're still confused, go ask your fellow New England Senator, Elizabeth Warren. She sees it for what it is: “[POTUS47] is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”

45/47 has achieved his primary goal in running for another term: He escaped prison. Now he's on to secondary and tertiary goals: Inflict cruelty on people he hates and grift, grift, grift from the American people. Can't have oversight for that.

It's only Tuesday.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on January 28, 2025 at 11:35PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Pandemic II: Avian Bugaloo

The horribly depressing first work week of the doofus administration started off badly and just kept going, capped off with yesterday's confirmation by half of the Senate (and the vice-president who thinks women without children shouldn't be allowed to vote) of an incompetent, alcoholic neo-Nazi as Secretary of Defense. This leaves us in the unenviable position of wondering: in a crisis, are we better off or worse off if the SecDef is drunk off of his ass? Perhaps the best option is if he's passed out? It's tough to say.

Yet, the thing I'm even more upset about is that our new president—petty, vindictive, stupid excuse for a human being that he is—silenced all public health agencies.

(Aside: This all has had me thinking a lot about my mom in recent days. Mom was a professor of public health and, unbeknownst to me while she was alive, a seriously big deal in those circles. She would be utterly appalled by what's happening now, and in an odd way it has me missing her in a manner I really hadn't been since she died, given how all that went down.)

We all expected him to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization, that wasn't a surprise despite how incredibly dumb it was. What wasn't expected—but maybe should have been, given what we know of the guy?—was his putting an immediate halt to all communication from outfits like the CDC and the FDA and the NIH.

People who don't follow the news probably don't know this, but POTUS47’s department of Health and Human Services ordered a stop to publication of anything from these agencies. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is prevented from communicating with the public. The National Institute of Health cannot publish reports. The Food and Drug Administration can't tell us anything about our food and pharmaceuticals. NIH is the largest funder of medical research in the world, and its meetings were canceled and research was stopped across the board.

The administration insists this is merely a "short pause," but what is going unstated is, why? Why pause/halt/stop at all? Is it because, oh, I don't know, maybe POTUS47 and company don't like it when the public knows things and want to install a propaganda apparatus to public health communication? The exception in the "pause" order is for communications that are approved by "a presidential appointee." I fully expect that to be the new overall rule in some form or another.

Recall what happened when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit. As POTUS45, the idiot-in-chief pleaded to "slow the testing down," saying that we shouldn't test because if you test, "you're going to find more cases." Then there was a tweet: "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!" He didn't like that the world could see how the virus was spreading here. He didn't like that Americans could see how the virus was spreading here. (There's another possibility, unlikely but you can't dismiss it because of how stupid 45/47 is, that he doesn't understand that the tests didn't cause COVID cases. Again, the tweet said, "cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing." There is a non-zero chance that he didn't understand that the cases existed whether they were tested for or not.)

Further, he was infuriated that his nonsensical happy talk about how COVID would just "go away" and that injecting bleach was a viable treatment option was contradicted and condemned by actual experts in public health, doctors of many stripes, and people with even a rudimentary level of education and/or experience. His vendetta against Anthony Fauci was such that President Biden felt the need to preemptively pardon Fauci to protect him against potential action against him by the conspiracy mob of MAGAts, and all Dr. Fauci did was try to tell the public the truth about what was known regarding COVID-19. To 45/47, that was unacceptable.

Dr. Chrystal Starbird (great name, she's like a comic-book hero; she ought to be a member of Alpha Flight) of the NIH commented of the communications halt, "I don't think the people who just made that decision fully understand what that may mean in terms of implications for really important and critical research." Starbird is undoubtedly correct, but the more chilling thing is that it isn't just that they don't understand, they don't care. Which, given the timing of it all, should scare the bejeesus out of all of us.

 Firstly, we're just five years from the onset of a global pandemic that had enormous consequences. One would think the new administration would not want a repeat of that.

Secondly, we're already looking at a possible new problem, namely H5N1 and H7N9, or "bird flu." Are you among the people complaining about eggs being $9 a dozen now? Well, it's because of bird flu—chickens and other poultry are, you know, birds, and the infected ones are killed to mitigate further spread and thus there are far fewer hens to lay eggs. The outbreak is quite serious, and the prevalence of it has caused it to spread to other species. It's now in cattle, potentially infecting beef and milk. From poultry, eggs, beef, and/or milk—or from the secretions of the birds and cattle themselves—it has infected other mammals, including two of the most important ones (subjectively speaking), cats and humans.

Infected cats got it from raw milk (probably intended for people, not cats, but either way, WTF, people? Raw milk?!). CDC data (now outdated, of course) noted 67 cases of human infection, 63 from poultry and dairy farms and four with unknown points of infection.

But without research and monitoring and, you know, communication with the public, this will get worse. Right now the human (and pet) infection rate is small and the largest symptom people notice is the price of eggs. By doing nothing, the infection rate will rise, species jump will continue, mutations will likely occur, more food will become dangerous, and then we're off to the races. (Oh, and eggs will be even more expensive. Good job, people who voted because of grocery bills.)

So what better time to cut the legs out from under the CDC, FDA, NIH, and any other public health operation?

Even when the "pause" is lifted—with a newly installed unofficial Secretary of Propaganda clearing any messaging?—POTUS47 has nominated the worst possible people to head up HHS and the NIH. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., up for Secretary of HHS, is not just an anti-vaccine crusader, he's also a proponent of raw milk. What a combo right now! He's also completely unqualified, but that's nothing out of the ordinary for a POTUS47 nominee. Jay Bhattacharya, nominee for Director of the NIH, said attempts to mitigate the COVID pandemic were misguided and the best approach was to let people get infected and thus create "herd immunity." Actual public health experts and medical professionals called Bhattacharya's views reprehensible, irresponsible, unscientific, and, at the most generous, "fringe." Said one expert from the University of Saskatchewan, "Bhattacharya belongs nowhere near the NIH, much less in the director's office. [He] would be absolutely disastrous for the health and well-being of the American public and actually the world."

Which nominee is worse, Kennedy or Bhattacharya? You know what, it doesn't matter, they're both utterly horrible and would be devastating to the globe if put in those jobs. Is the "pause" on communications until one or both of them is confirmed by the Senate? So they can order only irresponsible, unscientific, and fringe messaging to the public?

Kathleen Sebelius, HHS secretary under President Obama, had this to say: "You can't pick and choose when an infectious disease is going to break out. And in fact, [Kennedy]'s clearly not reading the news because we are, I think, a year or so away from a major outbreak of avian flu in humans. We've seen avian flu jump from birds to farm animals and from farm animals to farm workers. That's just a step away from a major outbreak of avian flu, which right now has no vaccine. Do I want people to stop researching what could be an effective counter to an avian flu outbreak? Absolutely not. Because it's coming."

This is just week one. Strap in, folks.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on January 25, 2025 at 6:42PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Snitching

The President has demanded that government employees rat out anyone working for the Federal government that is a "DEIA hire" (the A is for Accessibility, so not just no darkies, broads, or queers, but also no gimps and crips) so that said individuals may be purged from the payroll in favor of more deserving applicants. And he isn't just requesting snitches within the Washington agencies, he's opened it up to everyone and directed reports be emailed to DEIAtruth@opm.gov. As a patriotic American, I felt it was incumbent on me to do my part, particularly since the directive promised "adverse consequences" for those failing to report on DEI leeches and their sympathizers within ten days.

My email is transcribed below. 

To: DEIAtruth@opm.gov

Subject: unqualified employees

 

It has come to my attention that there are affirmative-action hires in the executive branch, none of whom are qualified for their posts and none of whom were hired on merit. All were given their jobs based on their race, gender, and backgrounds and have zero business being in government if we are to be, in fact, a meritocracy as President Trump has declared.

As the president and the Secretary of State and acting Attorney General have stated, such employees are wasting taxpayer dollars in a shameful attempt to undermine American values. They have taken jobs from far more qualified true Americans that happen to be of a different gender, ethnicity, or background. Some have criminal records and many are even born of immigrant parents and grandparents, people who were not even actual Americans!

There are dozens of these individuals, including the following: 

• Donald John Trump
• James Donald Bowman AKA James David Vance
• Elon Musk
• Devin Nunes
• Susan Wiles

In addition, there are several people being considered for jobs that are not qualified and are clearly DEI applicants to fill some sort of quota:

• Peter Hegseth
• Pamela Bondi
• Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior
• Linda McMahon
• Tulsi Gabbard
• Kristi Noem
• Russell Vought
• Lee Zeldin

If we are to reward merit and cease discriminating against worthy individuals in favor of unqualified losers in the name of "inclusion" then all of these people need to be shown the door. Get on that straight away, will you?

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on January 24, 2025 at 3:31AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

American Carnage 2.0

What a week it's been, and it's only Wednesday.

I've been trying to keep myself busy—site update project, TV shopping, umpiring shifts, making a bunch of appointments I'd been putting off—to combat the utterly depressing events happening in DC. It only worked to a small degree, I'm pretty depressed anyway. (Aside—as a clinically depressed person I am obligated to point out that this is not the same version of "depressed" as what I usually contend with. It's just that English isn't broad enough to have a word that differentiates the two types properly. For today's purposes we're using the term as is commonly used by the masses who don't know from clinical depression.)

I did not watch or listen to or in any way engage with the inauguration of POTUS 47 on Monday. This is highly out of character for me as a politics nerd, but I frankly knew it would be unhealthy for me to do so this time. I knew what he was going to say, more or less, I knew it was all going to be lies and projection and, in the words of George W. Bush, "some weird shit." Which it was. I knew he would take the Oath of Office and mean exactly none of it, which is exactly what happened; he betrayed the oath within hours of taking it, just as he betrayed it countless times when he was POTUS 45. I knew he would then make his way to the Oval Office and commence "flooding the zone" with an obscene slew of executive orders that would be at best harmful and at worst utterly illegal, which he most certainly did.

The fact that this all happened on MLK Day was just salt in the wound, as the new president mandated government discrimination against LGBTQ persons on the day we were supposed to be celebrating the advance of civil rights. On top of that, he declared that he and his minions would begin firing anyone they didn't like at any position within the Federal government for any or no reason, which had previously been out of bounds.

One thing we should have learned from the POTUS 45 administration is that their "flood the zone" strategy worked then. The continual onslaught of awfulness was so overwhelming that it was simply impossible to cover it all, and attempting to do so gave every piece of it more or less equal weight. So this time around, I'm hopeful that we (that's a very broad "we," meaning anyone trying to educate the public on what's actually happening, anyone trying to counter-program the propaganda coming out of the mouths and keyboards of Republicans and Republican media) will learn to triage the components of the flood and call out the worst of the worst. The lesser offenses are for sure still offenses, still deserve to be fought, but when it comes to communication and messaging, we have to understand that most Americans (a) do not read well if at all, (b) are easily gaslit, and (c) respond to threats more than they do to logic. This gives the autocrats, and by extension the entirety of the modern Republican party, an advantage: they know how to manipulate people. Or, in the words of 45/47, "I love the poorly educated."

So we should focus on meeting the bandwidth the public has and not exceeding it and thus shutting down all reception. With that in mind, the worst things to come of the first few days of this administration in the opinion of your humble webmaster:

• The Orwellianly-named "Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives" executive order along with the "Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce" EO. This is a rebrand of what, as 45, he called "Schedule F," the reclassification of all Federal employees to be subject to political hiring and firing. The "accountability" sought here is more accurately described as "be loyal to Trump or you're gone." This is a direct response to the experience of the 45 administration in which people like Miles Taylor and Andrew McCabe displayed ethical behavior and tried to stop policy moves that would harm the country. Those kinds of people will be pre-purged now so sycophants can take their place.
• Actions to promote climate change. Not to promote combating or mitigating climate change, but promoting the climate crisis itself. These include withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord as well as "any agreement, pact, accord, or similar commitment" to the Paris agreement; revocation of the U.S. International Climate Finance Plan; orders to "prioritize economic efficiency" in "all foreign engagements that concern energy policy"; orders to "rescind, revoke, revise, amend, defer, or grant exemptions from any and all regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and any other similar agency actions" regarding the exploitation of oil and other resources in Alaska and to ensure that the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is open for drilling and destruction in the name of fossil fuels; and the rescission of all Biden EOs that reversed or mitigated pro-climate-crisis actions of the 45 administration. (In fact, all Biden EOs were rescinded, regardless of their content. I submit that the reason for this was more sheer pettiness than any policy aims.)
• Reinstatement of and draconian instruction regarding the Federal death penalty. The 45 administration executed more prisoners than all prior administrations put together, so this is no surprise. The language of the EO includes gems like this: "The Attorney General shall ... pursue Federal jurisdiction and seek the death penalty regardless of other factors for every federal capital crime involving the murder of a law-enforcement officer or a capital crime committed by an alien illegally present in this country." Just an added bit of race-baiting and immigrant-terrorizing to put a cherry on top of the cruelty.
• And the worst of the worst: All of the pardons. POTUS47 pardoned everyone who took part in the January 6, 2021 attack regardless of the offense they were convicted of or actions they took. I believe this was done for one reason only—to ensure that he has a loyal mob of domestic terrorists who will work for him in the coming days, weeks, months, and years; who will go after people he publicly demonizes but can't legitimately prosecute. Innumerable people are already living in fear for their lives now that these criminals have been released. (Surprisingly, and somewhat encouragingly, one—and to my knowledge only one—January 6th rioter rejected her pardon. "Accepting a pardon would only insult the Capitol police officers, rule of law and, of course, our nation," said rioter Pamela Hemphill. "I pleaded guilty because I was guilty, and accepting a pardon also would serve to contribute to their gaslighting and false narrative. We were wrong that day, we broke the law [, and] there should be no pardons.") He also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, an online drug-dealer and money-launderer; I suspect this one was at the behest of Elon as Ulbricht is revered in cryptocurrency circles since he developed and promoted crypto as a tool of his narcotic crimes. For good(?) measure he also pardoned two DC cops who were convicted of murder, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice. I extrapolate from the above graph and this item that in 45/47’s world it's a capital offense to murder a cop, but if a cop murders it's hunky-dory.

I'm not even including the attack on diversity and equity policy, the revocation of any and all acknowledgment let alone protection of minorities in the Federal government; that's reprehensible, but survivable. The real harm that does is to legitimize racism and misogyny to those Americans who want to feel freer to wear their white-supremacist attitudes openly and beat down on anyone else. It's awful but can be dealt with socially as well as by policy. Also, the whole "Department of Government Efficiency" garbage; it's a real thing now, although advisory. I don't think he made it cabinet-level, but that probably doesn't matter. It's still basically toothless as Congress controls spending; all it can do is recommend. Not included here is the withdrawal from the World Health Organization because we've already lived through a pandemic under this idiot and know he'd ignore anything related to the WHO anyway. Also, I didn't include the EO that was the most blatant betrayal of his oath of office, the attempt to declare and end to birthright citizenship to anyone not born of American parents—that's unconscionable, but so clearly unconstitutional that even this illegitimate and corrupt Supreme Court would have to bend itself into a pretzel to come up with a way to justify ruling that a President can amend the Constitution with an executive order. It'll be challenged very soon and if John Roberts allows a ruling like that he will have destroyed any remaining trust in the Court's validity.

Also this week we had Elon Musk enthusiastically give sieg heil salutes to a cheering MAGA crowd, white supremacists marching in DC in celebration, and the Bishop of Washington calmly implored 45/47, to his face, to be compassionate and merciful and respectful—basically, to be more of a Christian and less of an asshole—and in response the president(!) posted on social media that the Bishop "was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater" and that "she and her church owe the public an apology!"

The cruelty is the point. That and the grift.

Soon enough the rubes that voted for the first convicted-felon President will see that he won't do a damn thing for their bank accounts (despite the EO deceptively titled "Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost of Living Crisis" that actually says nothing of any substance) and nothing in their lives is better for having him in office except that they feel better about using the N word, R word, and various other slurs in public and feel freer to beat on their wives and girlfriends. Or, more likely, they won't see it even though it'll be obviously staring them in the face because, as noted, they're easily gaslit.

So they have to be told. Repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms: The President lied to you. He thinks you're stupid. To him you are merely a mark for his con game. Your groceries are more expensive, not less; your freedoms are more curtailed, not greater; crime is up, not down; the country is less respected, not more, yet he is telling you otherwise. The President is a stochastic terrorist (look it up) that lies to you to make you afraid of people he doesn't like and pretends he's your friend while he robs you blind. The trick is going to be to find a way to do it that actually gets through.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on January 22, 2025 at 8:25PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Mental lapse of the week

Hi. We're back. You may not have noticed we were gone, but for a while tonight StarshipTim.com was dead in space.

It was, of course, related to my upgrade endeavors, and likely because I had expected there to be some kind of problem or other, it took a long time to solve the issue because it was an unbelievably simple matter, which is to say, nothing was wrong.

I had uploaded the new guts, upgraded the PHP on the site, transferred the database, and yet, nothing but error messages. Now, I could blame the error messages for being way too vague, but I was befuddled enough that I did what no coder likes to do: ask for help from tech support. And tech support at the server farm fixed things by...doing the thing that I had just forgotten to do after loading the database, which was to flush the cache from the old database.

It's something I did literally dozens of times while building the new guts. I just forgot to do it when I tried to take it live.

Which, fine, we all forget things, but it's embarrassing to have gone to tech support and then have them come back with the PHP/MySql equivalent of "you need to turn it off and turn it back on again." The voice of Chris O'Dowd is mocking me in my head repeatedly.

That said, now that it's been done, I think all is working and we're on PHP 8.1.

One bit that I haven't yet conquered is the functionality of emailing me when someone posts a new comment, but I decided that doesn't matter because it's redundant to the comments RSS feed and I can just email subscribe to that feed.

Seriously, RSS feeds are massively undervalued by Internet users everywhere. The oligarchs (get used to that word, folks) don't like them because they allow the end user too much control and allow for easy ways to get the content you want to see without bothering with their platforms that they rely on to datamine the shit out of everyone in the world (also, because they can be structured to serve you an entire article without showing the advertising on a website, but really it's the datamining).

Tagged Site issues   |   Posted on January 22, 2025 at 3:43AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Technical difficulties

So, the reconstruction referenced yesterday didn't happen; I discovered some other minor problems before uploading and am having to address those first. Also, I've been spending a lot of time cybershopping because my TV is failing, and I need my TV. I mean, not really, I could live without it and could watch most of what I watch on a computer or even my phone, but how could I have my Trek Night parties or baseball gatherings if all I have is a 14" PC monitor?

So I'm shelling out for a new set. I could repair this one myself if I want to get adventurous, but even that would cost me money for parts and I don't really have the room to disassemble a 55" flatscreen and keep all the parts organized and free of cat hair and (if in the garage) sawdust. Paying someone else to replace the LEDs, which is the failing component, would cost about as much as I paid to buy the thing in the first place. So, new one it is.

Initially, I figured as long as I'm getting a new one I might as well go up a size since I have room, but it's $100 more for the bigger one unless I get a lesser quality model, so the decision came down to what do I want more, a better screen or a bigger screen? Better won. So, same size Roku Plus model is on the way from Best Buy. Even if the current one was still watchable for a while I figured better to buy this now before the tariffs kick in, because our new POTUS is a fucking idiot that still thinks tariffs are magic money that comes from Chinese genies or something and not effectively additional sales taxes.

Anyway, all of which is to say that the site update is still to come. Hopefully in the next couple of days. Unless things go awry yet again.

Now I'm off to umpire in the frigid cold again.

Tagged Site issues, TV, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on January 20, 2025 at 5:43PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Reconstruction

My project to update the guts of starshiptim.com is near completion, all that's left to do is take this version down and replace it with the new guts. And, inevitably, things will go wrong, so I'm not going to undertake that until after my umpiring shift tonight. Meaning that tomorrow morning things might be broken here, and if so, it's 99% certainly because of problems with the transition from old site guts to new site guts, not the transition from the United States to Trumpistan 2.0.

Though that latter transition will also break things. Many, many things.

Tagged Site issues   |   Posted on January 19, 2025 at 4:54PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

The clown cabinet and the phantom infield

Pete Hegseth does not care that he is in no way qualified for the job he's been nominated to

I've been busier than usual the last few days, so stuff has happened and I've yet to catch up on it all. But some thoughts on a couple of things I have been following:

• Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing for Secretary of Defense began today in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and, rather predictably, it sucked. Hegseth himself was a bloviating fount of machismo and bullshit—talk of "restoring lethality" to the military (has the army been using stun guns all this time? Are Navy missiles somehow designed to deliver fungal mushrooms and not mushroom clouds?) and "patriotic," "America-first" goals—who avoided answering any question of substance while making sure to get all the boot-licking talking points in to show his would-be boss, the once-and-future (gag) President VonClownstick, that he'd be an obedient and obsequious toady.

  Democratic Senators tried to hold Hegseth's feet to the fire to a degree, but thanks to the limitations on their time and an apparently coordinated effort from the Republican majority (gag) to dismiss every point brought up by a Democratic questioner, their efforts basically failed to move the needle. Still, Mark Kelly and Tammy Duckworth each refused to accept a non-answer to their questions but it mattered not since Hegseth talked over them and essentially filibustered them until time ran out. Republican Senators made excuses for Hegseth's disqualifying behavior and incompetent background. The committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) kicked things off with an invitation for Hegseth to bullshit his way through dismissing the reports of his awfulness. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma by way of system 892) channeled his MMA performer persona and equated Hegseth's drunkenness and infidelity to behavior of Senators in the room in a weird attempt to negate the troubles associated with a potential Secretary of Defense showing up to work drunk off his ass.

  Every Republican on the committee revealed themselves to be one or more of the following:

  • Themselves unqualified to hold their own job
  • Uninterested in the function of the role of Secretary of Defense
  • Obsessed with "wokeness" as a barely-concealed avenue to promote their own racism and misogyny
  • Spineless cowards who bend the knee to Trump over all else

  The Democrats all said good things and made as much as they could out of Hegseth's myriad negative qualities, but nothing put the former Fox "News" anchor on his heels, nothing made a lick of difference to any of the Republicans, and in some cases the questioning was too cordial. Duckworth was not, her time was well spent and appropriately aggressive, but Jack Reed's genial "I do not believe you are qualified for the overwhelming demands of this job," while substantively on point, conveyed no sense of scale. Jean Shaheen and Kirsten Gillibrand took Hegseth to task for his misogyny, Gillibrand doing the better job, and Hegseth simply did not care. Tim Kaine (D-Virgina) brought up his spousal abuse and womanizing, but Kaine did it all with kind of a smile, which is usual for him and not special here, and wasn't able to hold his own. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) took on Hegseth's about-face on his sexist remarks after being nominated, and thankfully wouldn't tolerate his attempt to filibuster her, but again did not get any suitable answers. Hegseth wouldn't even answer a question about whether he would abide by the pledge he wants every general to make to not work for the defense industry after leaving the service.

  Duckworth was the star of the hearing, among other reasons for pointing out Hegseth's financial improprieties and noting that "our adversaries watch closely at time of transition, and any sense that the Department of Defense is being steered by someone who is wholly unprepared for the job puts America at risk." But even that made no difference to the Republicans.

  As Tom Nichols put it in a piece covering the hearing for The Atlantic, "America's allies should be deeply concerned; America's enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune."

• Item two is far less important: the Seattle Mariners' offseason. After having a conversation the night before with a friend about what the actual hell the Mariners' front office is even trying to do to address their many needs before Spring Training begins next month (from what we can tell from the outside, nothing; though surely things are being attempted that have flopped, unsurprisingly given how stringent the budgetary decree from above is), I had an umpiring shift that included a game with a player that works for Mariner de-facto GM Jerry Dipoto's department of baseball operations. I asked him when we were going to hear anything regarding the gaping black holes around the Mariner infield and he suggested that, while his official answer was "no comment," perhaps something was imminent. Now, I don't know how high up the chain this guy is in the baseball ops office, he might know a lot or he might know next to nothing, but he does seem to know more than I do, so I was keeping an eye out and sure enough, the Mariners made two player acquisitions in the days that followed. Sadly, they both mean very little and neither fills a need for regular players at first, second, or third base.

  First of these moves was the signing of free agent Donovan Solano, late of the San Diego Padres and Minnesota Twins. Solano has played third, second, and first base, put up pretty good on-base numbers, and looks like an excellent guy to have on your bench. But he's 37, has never been an everyday player, and while a useful pickup appears at best to be a platoon partner for Luke Raley at first base. At least he comes cheap.

  Next was Tuesday's purchase of Miles Mastrobuoni's contract from the Cubs. Mastrobuoni had been DFA'd, meaning the Cubs had no use for him, and in nine years as a pro he's managed three uninspired partial seasons in the Majors as a utiltyman. He did have a few good Triple-A years, or partial years, but the ceiling for him seems to be a replacement for the more interesting and more versatile Sam Haggerty, who the M's sadly let go earlier in the offseason.

  Way to get my hopes up, anonymous softball player. Psych! (Not really, I remained skeptical throughout.)

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on January 15, 2025 at 12:02AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

This metaphor is a little too on the nose

I'd been away from the news today, mostly, and had only been tangentially aware of another round of California wildfires happening. Checking in with things, I now know that one of the most devastated areas is a part of Los Angeles I know fairly well.

Pacific Palisades is where my grandfather lived for most of my life, and probably about half of his, in two different stints. I've not had reason to go there since Grandpa passed away in 2014, but I visited countless times over the years and spent many an hour in his neighborhood, walking the wealthy streets of the Palisades and driving the canyon roads to and from the ocean and eating at pizza joints and ethnic restaurants along Sunset Boulevard.

Grandpa's house was near the southeasternmost part of the fire zone, as it stands here on Wednesday night. That house had already been sold and demolished to make way for someone else's new McMansion, but whatever is there now is likely either already burned or not long for the world.

The bounds of the Palisades fire as of about 10:30pm January 8th.
In the blowup map below I put a little yellow dot where Grandpa's house was.

I saw video footage of the nearby Gelson's market consumed by flames; the former drug store where I once bought comic books is a smoking ruin; the grounds around the high school my mom went to were blazing.

Adam West's old house, where Grandpa took me once in 1977 to meet TV's Batman, is likely gone. The charming little Mexican restaurant that was Grandpa's favorite—and that made some of the best salsa ever created—was, I think, already out of business, but that whole block may now be nothing but embers. The Post Office where Grandpa had a couple of encounters with Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully may still be standing, but as charred bricks. Reports are that Will Rogers State Park, where I think we had a couple of events with extended family, if I remember correctly, has been pretty thoroughly wiped out.

 Things change, nothing is constant, and the world turns on. The people that live in the Palisades are generally wealthy, so it will rebound and new structures will replace the old. But I find I feel its loss a little bit. Grandpa's been gone a while, I've gotten used to his absence though I of course miss him, but even though I might not have ever gone back to his old neighborhood I am sad that it's now mostly destroyed.

As a metaphor for our new year to come, it lacks subtlety.

Posted on January 9, 2025 at 12:10AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

The more you overtake the plumbing...

I've been spending some time this week upgrading this here website's under-the-hood guts. Or, more accurately, I've been putting together new guts with an eye toward moving the database making up all of my posts and such from these old guts into the new guts. But it may be more trouble than it's worth.

StarshipTim.com has been in this basic configuration for many years now, and over that time I've made modifications to so many different elements of its core infrastructure that whenever I think I'm about ready to make the switch I realize another of my custom mods is missing from the new guts. The latest is in the commenting system—I need to have some form of spam filtering or else I just get inundated with bot comments (that's one reason I was even contemplating a guts upgrade), and I can't seem to get my foil-bots-with-math thing to function in the new guts. That may end up being an easy fix, but in the meantime I've spent all afternoon/evening on this and though I realize it's good "exercise," as it were, to bring things up to PHP conventions that are less outdated, it won't really affect anything that anyone will see. Unless I inadvertently break things. Which seems likely at this point.

The upgrading is only going to be useful to me on the back end of things, and really it functions just fine now; I just know that eventually servers will insist on running more modern PHP code and while I have a slow week it seemed like a time to get ahead of that. But right now I'm just cursing the march of progress and am abandoning the effort for the evening while I raid my fridge for dinner.

This has been a Pointless Blog Entry™.

Tagged Site issues   |   Posted on January 8, 2025 at 10:17PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

2025 as film

I only have a few minutes before I need to head out to an umpiring shift (ah, winter league...so far it's been pretty mild weather, but tonight will be in the 30s), so just a quick post today and one I largely lift from someone else.

Once again, that someone else is Craig Calcaterra, who in his Cup of Coffee newsletter today recounts a social media prompt that read "The movie that was number one at the box office on your tenth birthday is how your 2025 will turn out for you." Craig turned 10 in the spring of 1983, when the third (or sixth, depending on your particular thinking) Star Wars movie premiered. Here is his response:

In a time of rising fascism and authoritarianism I'd like my 2025 to turn out the way "Return of the Jedi" did. If we're being literal about it that means that (a) my adorable little friends will defeat my enemies after which they will roast and eat them while I will, personally, with the help of some barely-controlled rage, beat the crap out of either J.D. Vance or Elon Musk at which point they will switch to my side of things, throw Trump down a bottomless shaft, and then themselves die. That's a scenario that is pretty unlikely to actually transpire but, as they say, rebellions are built on hope. 

...

[But if we] go with the number one film immediately after my tenth birthday, it'd be the "Saturday Night Fever" sequel, "Staying Alive." That movie is horrible in conception and execution and is basically unwatchable, but the title sets what is at least a moderately realistic goal for me in 2025, and I feel far more comfortable with that. 

As usual, Craig, we reach.

For the record, the number-one film on my tenth birthday was Superman—The Movie, which while not as on-target as Return of the Jedi is for Craig, still works in that, like Superman, I would also like to fly fast enough to go back in time and save Lois Lane (or someone) before delivering the egomaniacal greed-obsessed real estate con artist to prison.

Tagged Star Wars, Craig Calcaterra   |   Posted on January 6, 2025 at 5:41PM   |   Permalink   |     |