Welcome Back to Pottersville

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Oh, Now Suddenly They're Pro Choice

Then, there are those who don't suffer from COVID but they do have irony deficiency.

Pottersville Digest

(Go ahead, kick a hornet's nest. They'll come out and thank you.)

Jon Stewart's video about the billionaire space race is dead-on, all the way down to Bezos' ridiculous cowboy hat.

Your Brad o' the day.

So, they want to talk about them, just without them. Just as a friendly reminder, this is the Show Me state.

Why aren't more of these lunatics ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluations?

Charlie McCarthy (R-Trump's lap) just jerked off all five of his picks for the Jan. 6th select subcommittee.

Another thing that a totally innocent guy would do.

“Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process and will instead pursue our own investigation of the facts.”

So the butt hurt Republican is threatening to hold his own sham hearings that'll be a thinly-veiled attempt to overturn the election.

"During the traffic stop, an individual obstructed the investigation and resisted arrest. They were taken into custody with the assistance of a police K-9."

The "assistance" consisted of an attack dog mauling an innocent kid for nearly 10 minutes and so completely lost its mind they had to tase the fucking dog.

You see, the "party of personal responsibility", while never taking personal responsibility for anything, says YOU need to take personal responsibility.

That's the typical sociopathic, right wing psychopathology at work here, perfectly delineated by MTG's cackle after being told that young, slender people are dying of COVID. A sheriff's deputy and his wife just lost their 5 year-old son, Wyatt, to COVID in Georgia. In her district, in fact.

I guess Greene thinks that's hilarious, too.

The CDC reports Americans lost a year and a half off their life expectancy in the last year and a half. Four more years of Trump would've set us back into the Dickensian East End of London.

Man who'd normalized rape at OSU accuses Democrats of normalizing anarchy. Film at 11

.Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached peak Idiocracy.

Your co-Brad o' the day: Massachusetts edition.

We're hearing far too many of these Road to Damascus stories from the unvaccinated.

Gee, they're adjusting and mutating... just like a virus.

Great Moments in Signage.

Because COVID-19 was never anything more or less than PR for Trump.

This is how you "trigger" and "own the cons".

Meanwhile, in liberal Massachusetts...

Madison Cawthorn (R-Eagle's Nest), the world's most famous Nazi tourist, thinks the House has the ability to criminally prosecute Dr. Facui or anyone his fascist cohorts don't like.

They didn't get vaccinated because they were still freaked out about the government's Tuskegee syphilis study from 90 years ago.

Your Karen o' the day.

Well, she's certainly got my vote for Mom of the Year.

It's only a matter of time before we start seeing the word, "entrapment".

"More than 1,000 people have so far signed up to the pro-Trump cryptocurrency magacoin, including conservative media personalities and Republican figures, the Guardian can reveal. The news comes after poor security configuration in a website associated with magacoin exposed the email addresses, passwords, cryptocurrency wallet addresses and IP addresses of users..."

IOW, there's a sucker born every minute. And finally...

No war on women, my ass.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

The Plutocrat Who Fell to Earth

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

There's been a bit of buzz, lately, on the intertubz, of what a prophet Carl Sagan was, especially in a certain passage of a book he'd published just before his untimely death. In The Demon-Haunted World, the star of Cosmos, the man who would share a rare position, that of being a physicist on a par with Stephen Hawking as the world's greatest living examples of the field, wrote,

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

Actually, that had begun making the horrified nostalgia rounds since 2017, when Trump made his way into the White House like viscous saliva oozing down a bathroom sink drain. And what Sagan supposedly prophesied was true. Actually, by 1994-5, when Dr. Sagan had written his final book, much of what he'd written was already coming true. Ironically, the year Sagan had delivered the manuscript to his literary agent to deliver to his publisher, Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie were driving from New York to Seattle to launch a little bookselling startup called Amazon.

Virtually everything Sagan had written in that oft-cherry-picked paragraph is true now and had already begun coming true. Humans are a silly, superstitious lot, always just a little less prone to accept science and more prone to read the tea leaves and throw the chicken bones. Do the Tarot cards say I should get the J&J vaccine or leave my fate in the hands of a sky wizard I've never seen? By 1995, billionaires already owned nearly the entire planet and everything on it and in it.

And they wanted more.

And into this sordid tale of misplaced and mistimed cynicism (which is the story of my life), briefly floats the little body of Jeff Bezos.

But I'm not done with Dr. Sagan, just yet. Far from it. Because while trends in Sagan's lifetime certainly held and were ossified into history, they hardly rise to the level of Nostradamusian prophecy. It's one thing to anticipate Hitler almost by name several centuries in the past. It's another thing entirely to extrapolate probable futures from existing trends. This is what Sagan did in The Demon-Haunted World.

Because what I think is a better example of Carl's clairvoyance was his anticipation of the aforementioned Jeff Bezos.

To Boldly Go Where 580 Have Gone Before

Richard Branson, of course, was number 580. He beat Jazzy Jeff to space by nine days. This resulted in a brief but still-puerile online pissing match between the battling billionaires' camps as to which standard actually defined the Kármán line. (Virtually every international space agency states 62 miles is the edge of the Kármán line, or the beginning of space, with the US being, typically, the world's holdout, claiming a mere 50 miles of elevation defines the edge of space. Both altitudes, however, result in zero g, or no gravity, so you be the judge.)

Branson went up about 53 miles. Bezos, about 62. Ho hum. 580 people had reached similar or higher altitudes and others, starting six decades ago when Yuri Gargarin became the first man launched into space in 1961. In 11 years, we'd sent scores of astronauts, 12 a half a million miles to and back from the moon and, during the long space shuttle project and the ISS, scores more. These billionaires' rocket jockeying only served to show, as the Shuttle missions had, that the more time goes by, the more reluctant we are to leave earth's orbit. Humans have become the middle aged son who went out on his own for a while, didn't like it, and now never leaves Mom's house, the unblossomed basement dwellers of the Milky Way.

Sending a couple of corporate cowboys proved absolutely nothing except confirm for the umpteenth time how much money they can blow in an astonishingly brief period of time with the least amount to show for it while a quarter of the human race has no access to potable water. But Branson, on his return, at least showed some humility and didn't make it a spectacle all about himself. Bezos, showing a smidgen of PR savvy if not that for optics, put on an ill-fitting cowboy hat and gave away $200,000,000 to prove he wasn't the plutocrat who fell to earth.

But give Dr. Sagan credit for one thing, if nothing else. And that was in anticipating in his only novel, Contact, a billionaire, played in the film version by the late John Hurt, spending his twilight years in outer space while still pulling strings from high above. Sagan called it all the way down to the bald-head.

The premise itself is fairly simple: Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jody Foster) and her fellow radio astronomers finally receive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. But the government lacks the funds, technology, guts and vision to send Ellie where she needs to go to get the answers she needs. Enter eccentric billionaire SR Hadden.

Perhaps without realizing it (or perhaps doing it on purpose), Sagan produces what is literally a deus et machina in the form of a super sophisticated space ship built by a guy who's also really really super rich. Like, Jeff Bezos rich. This trope, of the billionaire who swoops in out of nowhere to save the day and the hapless human race had been done to death since Batman then Green Arrow then Iron Man then... Well, you get it.

But the recent stunts by Branson and Bezos were just shameless chest piece wearing by a couple of senior citizens only timidly poking their noses into the very edge of the space already long since explored decades ago by far braver men and women who flew these vehicles that didn't benefit from 21st century aerospace technology and six decades of trial and error.

One thing on which we can fault the good Doctor Sagan: While Bezos was allowed to reenter earth (perhaps because he had three innocent souls with him) so he could then hastily rig a charitable event by giving away $200,000,000, which is probably half his annual scalp wax budget, to grab a few more minutes of limelight, SR Hadden at least had the courtesy to die in space.

Pottersville Digest

(I got a good use for that discarded F.)

It's long past time for us to stop making Haiti our red-headed stepchild.

"Do we have a house n***er in here?" Another reason why the South will never rise again.

Why isn't this crazy old fuck in a nursing home?

Your Brads o' the day: Moe, Larry and Curly edition.

My question is, why hasn't the judge ordered this lunatic to undergo a psychiatric evaluation?

Yes, McCarthy wants the criminals to take part in the investigation of their own crimes, including professional anarchist bomb thrower Gym Jordan.

The Lollipop Guild just got a little quieter.

Tom Brady trolls Trump over his election conspiracies. Trump responding by calling Brady "an over the hill has-been no one listens to" in 3, 2, 1...

There's nothing more disappointing to a Republican these days than a fellow right winger who's just not fascist enough.

Rand Paul finally got his long-awaited and well-deserved Fauci Ouchie.

Married Republican with three children accused of sexual harassment by a male staffer. No doubt he'll run for Congress on a family values platform while Village People music plays in the background.

Trump-loving COVID-19 truther dies of COVID-19 while Trump remains blithely unaware she ever existed, proving divine justice isn't totally dead.

Alien hostile to human life enters planet's atmosphere, humans rejoice.

Well, THAT could've gone better.

Another right wing scumbag bites the dust.

I think you're looking at Rudy's next boss.

This must have stung. Like, wicked hard. And finally...

Jeff fucking Bezos: All hat, no rocket.

Monday, July 19, 2021

Pottersville Digest

(Like Isaac Asimov said, "My ignorance is as good as your knowledge.")

Evangelicals abandoned Christianity, and Jesus is grateful.

You can always count on right wing executives to choose their brand over their customer base.

Meanwhile, in our nation's Capitol. during our national pastime...

My, my, they DO learn young, don't they?

Well, so much for that conspiracy theory.

I have to wonder if this is related to the shooting at Nat's ball park the same night.

Welcome back to the antebellum period. What kept you?

Toilet Paper USA cancels woman in same profession as Stormy Daniels.

Yeah, you know what? I agree with her- Fuck these Monday morning quarterbacks.

Joe Perry's not a big fan of Donald Trump these days. This is why.

One of the few saving graces of Republicans is that they're so fucking stupid and easy to punk.

"Split pea soup cleanup in aisle six..."

Sorry, Ron, you don't get to turn cruise ship passengers into diseased, rotting corpses.

Great, as if 2020 wasn't bad enough, now the solar system is conspiring to kill us.

Yes, this old grievance... AGAIN.

An obscure right wing podcaster gets his 15 minutes thanks to Tucker Carlson.

Yeah, we WILL blame you, motherfuckers, especially since you furtively refuse to turn over the data the White House has repeatedly asked for.

Oh, look. Another right wing liar running for Congress. Because that august body is running dangerously low on them.

The first Jan. 6th rioter was just sentenced and got an eight month slap on the wrist. White privilege triumphs again.

Elmer Fudd 2.0: Man of 1% of the people.

I guess no one ever told this hairy bag of cellulite about the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

Eight years-old and she's already a veteran of multiple mass shootings.

If we ever have another mass secession of southern states, here's a nifty name they can use- The Confederate States of COVID. You're welcome.

$2.4 billion as "president." Yet this bloated cocksucker's still running one grift after another on hucksters who can't make ends meet.

Three and a half years ago, Moscow Mitch McConnell had votes on a $2 trillion tax cut AND an ACA repeal that would have uninsured 20 million before anyone saw any bill. So sit this one out, comrade.

I can't argue with a single word she wrote.

Shorter Andy Biggs: "We Republicans are pro-COVID, pro-fentanyl and pro-Nazi rioters. Did I forget anyone?"

Shorter Donnie Dumbo: "Everyone let me down because I didn't get everything I ever wanted."

"Right-wingers are literally dying to own the libs. In the process they are ensuring that deadly variants will continue to circulate, endangering school reopenings and preventing a return to normalcy. This is madness. Stop making reasonable appeals to those who will not listen to reason."

Yeah. I say fuck this namby-pamby, sovereign citizen shit and start arresting and jabbing people. And finally...

Elsewhere in White Privilege News, this asshole threatened blow off Judge Emmet Sullivan's head. He got a year and a half in prison.

Meanwhile, Crystal Mason's still serving a five year stretch because a poll worker erroneously told her she could legally vote. Because, you know. black.

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Insurrection, My Fat Ass!

(By Cyril Blubberpuss, Conservative-American.)

If there were Republican dictionaries," I said to a homeless man on 5th Avenue just before I tore off his surgical mask, "I'd make owning and reading them mandatory!" You know, if I was a dictator like Hitler or Stalin. Which I don't want to be, so you liberal pinheads reading this septic tank of a left wing blog better not try to make hay out of that.

The point I'm trying to make is that we'd better reacquaint ourselves with the English language that we invented and was stolen by the English. That includes relearning the real definitions of the words "riot" and "insurrection".

First off, you can't have the word "riot" without patriot and vice versa. And we all know patriots, the real ones, anyway, don't riot. Riots and armed insurrection didn't win the day during the revolutionary war when we fought for the freedom to use the language invented by Jefferson and Ben Franklin and to throw tea into Boston Harbor.

If my old friend Rush Limbaugh were still alive, I'm sure he'd agree with me.

Why, the old pioneer for male, Republican, Caucasian civil rights (who once got a full-throated endorsement from the entire nation of Africa) would have been horrified to see the English language so misused. Thank God he lived just long enough to see crowds as large as those in Nuremberg in the 1930s massing in DC in support of our hallowed democracy!

It boggles the mind what he would've said on his radio show about that valiant act of mass patriotism if he wasn't in the process of turning into a rotting corpse and trying to figure out how to sneak in one last stogie inside his oxygen tent.

Anyway, there's a world of difference between insurrection and the outright hooliganism that we'd seen last summer in the streets of Minnesota and Oregon, two liberal states notable for its belligerent black militancy. Or do you think they, too, weren't trying to overthrow the established order of racial profiling and extrajudicial executions? They knew the power of the Butterfly Effect as they tried to overthrow the nation's Capitol from 2000 miles away!

Still from security footage of my baby brother Cecil applying for the position of physician of the men's US gymnastics team.

But protest, when it's principled, is a time-honored pursuit. Take my kid brother, Cecil, for instance.

Just before the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and right after getting paroled from Riker's Island for being the first person to set up the internet's first sex chat room (www.cecilsprays,com), Cecil became obsessed with becoming the official physician for the US Olympic men's gymnastics team. The fact that he hadn't attended a day in medical school let alone had a license to practice medicine never seems to have occurred to him.

Yet, in true Blubberpuss fashion, those formidable obstacles did not deter my intrepid baby brother from applying for the job. The first problem, as Cecil's sharp mind saw it, was in the very word "men's." He couldn't for the life of him understand why young boys 11-13 years old couldn't be as athletically developed and accomplished as their young female counterparts. So my kid brother felt, that as the official team doctor, he could begin to remedy that.

To no one's surprise, Cecil didn't get the job (To be fair, as the still from the security video shows, he was a tad underdressed for his impromptu interview). Well, his sparing wardrobe choice for that day plus a quick Yahoo search engine search revealed the once-enviable notoriety of www.cecilsprays.com and that was it for his fledgling medical career.

Still undeterred, however, Cecil boarded one of our private corporate jets and flew directly to the US Olympic trials to protest the injustice done to him. And, to further make his point, Cecil (In a rare libertine moment) decided to opt for even less clothing. Think of the Brooks Brothers protest (NOT a riot), only without a Brooks Brothers suit. Or underwear, for that matter.

What few videos that have remained of the 1996 trials do not feature my kid brother (In fact, Youtube had banned them immediately although one remains featuring my sibling's voice screaming in the distance, "Let 13 year-old boys flaunt it, you shameless ageists!"). Our sainted father, dear old Ambrose, was forced to use up every remaining political favor he had left to get Cecil out of that one.

As with Rush's never to be post-riot radio broadcast, it boggles the mind what trajectory Cecil's career would've taken if the close-minded gymnastics officials had hired him and supported his initiative to begin accepting prepubescent boys onto the team.

A few years later, Cecil mentioned this anecdote to our old friends Jeffery Epstein and President Donald Trump during one of Epstein's unofficial "cotillions" he often held at his Manhattan townhouse (in which all the girls seemed to wear braces) and my kid brother mentioned by way of illustration the lively social life of his wouldbe counterpart, Larry Nassar.

Donald and Jeffrey bit their knuckles until they bled.

Pottersville Digest

(How come there's no Diet Coke setting?)

Six decades is long enough. We need to end this shit. Yeah, Cuba was a failed Communist dictatorship but we're an ultimately-failed democratic Republic. So it doesn't make any sense to continue this ridiculous embargo. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

"I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me.”

Yes, he actually thinks he could've beaten a zombie, cross centennial ticket consisting of Washington and Lincoln.

He lost, bigly, to a guy who largely campaigned out of his basement in Delaware

Your Karen o' the day.

OK, so who's paying this gumshoe's fees? The people of Barry County?

Thanks, again, GOP. Assholes.

Meet the COVID Super Friends.

Just to recap:

51 Texas Democrats are in DC to deny Republican Nazis a quorum to prevent the passage of a voter suppression bill that would make Georgia's look like a walk in the park.

Meanwhile, Joe fucking Manchin of WV is busting a nut getting to Texas to accept bribes from Republicans who look as if they'd benefited from Operation Paperclip.

Let that sink in for a moment.

"I should have known better than to believe I could outwit the super-genius intelligence analysts of the Flynn family."

"Top o' the world, Ma!"

So, while Wilbur Ross was sleeping through 11 AM meetings, this was going on beneath him: "An obscure federal office operated for more than a decade as an 'unaccountable police force' inside the Commerce Department, using extreme and unauthorized tactics."

Which is to say, Trump and his ambulance chaser Rudy are under investigation in Arizona.

"O'Reilly threatened to sue Politico reporter Daniel Lippman over the article. 'You put one word in there that's not true, I'll sue your ass off and you can quote me on that,' he told Lippman. "You're just a hatchet man and that's what you are'."

I can think of one elderly rapist who just got triggered.

Learn how to read a room, dumbass.

The first mistake prosecutors ever made was in thinking they could try these childish idiots as adults.
(Another tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

I agree with everything this guy says except for, "Carlson is a professional demagogue. That does not mean he is dumb. He didn’t become the brightest star in the universe of misinformation by being dimwitted."

This is a guy who doesn't know how to pronounce "Ottawa."

Apparently, in Trumpworld the key to distinguishing yourself from your opponent is to plagiarize them.

"Days after the Capitol assault, Copeland—who once deserted the U.S. Army —lauded 'REVOLUTION' in messages to Rogers and fantasized about drinking Red Bulls, and grabbing his tactical gear and weapons, according to court documents. 'I’m fucking juiced!!!!!' he wrote. 'I’m bout to throw my gear on and drive around and punish sombitces'.”

We are now officially IDIOCRACY. And finally...

Say what you want about him but Carl Sagan was a genius and a visionary. (A third tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

Friday, July 16, 2021

Pottersville Digest

(Or a solar eclipse?)

"Slater could have faced 90 years in jail if he had been convicted on all charges. Under the plea deal, he faces a maximum of 10 years."

Because this is EXACTLY the type of man you want to put back on the streets as soon as humanly possible.

"Krauts"? For four years, our country was run by Archie Bunker.

I'll suspend judgement until this has been absolutely verified.

Qasem Soleimani was assassinated so Republicans wouldn't impeach him.

Trump has his OJ moment. Dumbest confession ever.

Insane deposed dictator rant #7.

And so the purge in Texas begins...

The NYPD, those intrepid subway warriors fighting a never-ending battle against non-existent fare evasion.

Two words of advice, Bobo: Fictional and cow. Here are two more: First and Amendment.

It infuriates me that this Jim Crow bullshit is still happening in 21st century America.

"There is a chilling reason why Trump and his followers are whitewashing a domestic terrorist — and the enslavers and segregationists of the distant past. It is the same reason all authoritarian movements rewrite history: They are creating myths to justify their seizure of power. Don’t be surprised if the next attack on our democracy — and there will be a next time — is accompanied by a stirring rendition of the (as yet unwritten) 'Ballad of Ashli Babbitt'.” Das Boot.

The "Freedom Phone" that promises to free people from Silicon Valley is Chinese made (and costs a fraction of the "Freedom phone") and uses an OS made by Google.

In other words, it's a $500 grift.

The family that riots together shares a jail cell together.

Your Brad o' the day.

I hope this racist gym gets shut down after this.

Like drowning rats in a sack these traitors are eating each other left and right.

"I want to blow up a Democrat building bad." Thank God these people are idiots. And finally...

Yes, this throws a monkey wrench in the 550 prosecutions the DOJ is pursuing but I respect Beryl Howell's decision. We shouldn't be using contractors in the first place, especially when they'd be sharing grand jury evidence with them.