Tag: Trump

Afterlife Afterthoughts

A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that Jim messaged me via Discord. He didn’t have much to say, only asking, “How’s it goin’?”

In the dream, I remember being confused, wondering if a friend or family member accessed his account, or if it was really him, either returned from the dead, or maybe he even faked his own death! Then I woke up…

Perhaps this was the ghost of Jim looking in on his old friend. Or perhaps it was just my subconscious replaying an old memory fragment in a misguided attempt to give me some closure. Or maybe I just missed my friend…

McPublicity Stunts

On a lighter note, the current McCEO of McDonald’s decided to make a video of himself pretending to eat a Big Arch Burger. It reminded me of the time McCEO Steve shot down the McWhopper collab; it turns out he was later fired for McSexting using his company’s McEmail address, and paying female employees for limey McDick suckings (probably) with McStock Options (I get a lot of mileage out of McJokes)…

A lot of people are shitting on the video, and for good reason…

His apparent inability to hold a hamburger properly
The awkward little bite
Declaring his intent to eat this burger for lunch (you’re not fooling anybody!)
His use of corpo-speak phrases like “beef notes” and referring to it as a “product” as opposed to, oh, I don’t know? Maybe…Burger…or Sandwich?

Now I’ve had my share of McDonald’s (and then some)… so I actually wanted to try this fucken thing and see what all the fuss is about. I was unimpressed, here’s why…

The reason the Big Arch is so fucken hard to hold is that it’s basically a Double Quarter Pounder, but with Big Mac fixins; the thousand island drenched onions and lettuce create a viscous barrier between the patties, causing them to slip, and makin’ a fucken mess all over the place.
The Big Mac solves this by including a middle bun for structural integrity. Seriously, look it up! They can’t do this with the Big Arch because the goddamn thing is already 1,100 calories, so you’re basically adding another 100 calories on top of that, not to mention the Mc Brick you’d excrete later…
While the Big Arch contains a slightly different lineup (i.e., white cheddar instead of American cheese, crispy onions, and a slightly more thousand-islandy McSauce – i.e., it has ketchup in it) than the Big Mac, I struggled to taste much of a difference, and still prefer the Big Mac or a Royale with Cheese (I learned that this was a real thing when I lived in Sand Land).

All in all, it’s just another out-of-touch, expensive McShitwich. These fads come and go (anybody remember the Clear Cola Craze© of the early 90s?). But once was enough to learn my lesson :).

FPS Fuckery

Last month, I decided to prematurely upgrade the PC I had built about 3.5 years ago. I’ve been going 4-5+ years between upgrade cycles, and truth be told, didn’t quite get as much PC as I wanted for the money I spent.

It started with an RTX 5080 GPU, and followed by a new motherboard (mine only supported DDR4, even though DDR5 had been out for a couple of years prior), and hell, why not go all in and get a current-gen CPU while we’re at it?

I’ve typically been team Intel, but with the price of RAM being through the roof ($885 for 64GB of DDR5-6000 CL36), I got lucky with a NewEgg bundle, only paying $939 for an AMD 9800X3D (arguably the best gaming CPU on the market at the time of writing this), a mid-range motherboard, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. They also threw in a free mid-tower ATX case and an AIO!

So I took freebies and built a second PC out of my old spare parts, picking up an Intel B580 GPU (slightly better than the one that came with the PC I bought for Jim).

“I’ll bet those golden tickets make the chocolate taste terrible.”
– Charlie Bucket

I cranked every graphics setting to 11 and could still eke out 240+ FPS (albeit with 4x frame gen), but what I didn’t count on was how distracting all the bloom, volumetric fog, and the like would be. Charlie Bucket once speculated that the golden tickets would make the chocolate taste terrible, and I think I finally understand what he meant.

The game is most enjoyable when stripped down to its purest core – the window dressing isn’t just superfluous, I’d argue that it’s a net negative. FPS is a big fucken lie – what really matters is local latency, and with the frame gen overhead, I was pushing 55-65ms whereas ‘good’ is somewhere in the 25-45 range… Perhaps I’m just jaded?

The Really Real World

“Cinco De Mayo,
Fed Up With Politicians,
They are All Liars.”
– A Haiku by Joe Jim, 5/05/2026

I’m not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican. The last presidential election seemed like the difference between hot dogs made from lips and assholes, or ones made from foreskin and gallbladders. Neither party has my best interests in mind. So the question becomes, “Which one am I likely to survive with most of my freedoms intact?”

My Blue-Blooded Blue No Matter Who™ friend seems to suffer from a brand of TDS, characterized by Tourette-like ticks where he must explain his disgust whenever any right-wing associated figure (or Catholic) appears on screen – or at least that’s how it appeared to me at first. Having gotten to know him better, I think what he’s exhibiting is more of a Pavlovian stimulus as always seems to look to me for a reaction, which I fail to give, partly because I just don’t care that much, and partly because I’ve come to accept a simple truth; Left or Right, it’s all the same, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

I only go into the office a couple of times per week, so I don’t need to fill the tank more than once a month. The last time I did, I noticed the price of gas was the highest I’d ever seen it here by about a dollar/gallon. It’s funny what it takes to manifest an abstract concept, a war being fought 7,150 miles away into reality. Only then did it become ‘real’ to me.

“Y’know, the world’s gone crazy, and it ain’t safe on the streets.”
– Cheeseburger, Comin’ Home, 2008

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post lamenting the pointless fatalities during the mostly peaceful rioting. This year, we’re seeing more of the same, and once again, stupid people are learning the hard way that if you go looking for death, you’re sure to find it.

“…life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
– George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, 1970

Parallels: Sovereign Citizens and Mostly Peaceful Rioters

My YouTube feed has been sending me a lot of sovereign citizen arrest videos, and I find them as fascinating as they are formulaic. Essentially, “john doe” [sic]. A “natural man” representing the corporate entity known as “JOHN DOE” gets pulled over for an easily avoidable traffic violation (i.e., displaying a bogus license plate), then exacerbates the situation by refusing to identify himself or comply with lawful orders. Invariably, the officer reaches a point where he’s had enough of the SC’s shit and gets him (or her) out of the vehicle, in cuffs, and off to jail they go…

Watching these interactions through the lens of the officer’s bodycam, I can’t help but marvel at the SC’s surprise. What did he think would happen? Whether they, in their stupidity, earnestly believed what they were doing was right and just, or they were just another antisocial fuck trying to game the system, is irrelevant; the result is the same…

What Did You Think Would Happen?

When I hear about the coordinated mobs of people blocking streets, harassing fellow citizens after mistaking them for ICE (even after it was established that they weren’t), and stalking, doxing, threatening, obstructing, and attacking federal agents, I can’t help but be reminded of those sovereign citizens. I ask again, “What did you think would happen?”

I have no love for cops, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m afraid of them. It’s within their lawful authority to detain, search, arrest, and use (and sometimes abuse) deadly force. Yes, there are rules and standards, but most hinge on the officer’s reasonable belief; they must be able to act decisively in uncertain situations, and sometimes mistakes happen…

Their response to a given situation is contextual. On one side of the spectrum, you have Smokey the Bear, benign and preventative. On the other end is a man-eating grizzly. Depending on the circumstances, things can quickly escalate from Smokey to Cocaine Bear. Do not poke the bear!

In situations like this, I ask myself, what compelled a mother of three to intentionally prevent ICE agents from conducting a lawful investigation? Why did an ICU nurse vandalize a federal vehicle, resist arrest, and obstruct law enforcement? Did they earnestly believe that they were revolutionaries protecting their communities from jack-booted thugs, kidnapping innocent people off the streets? Or were they antisocial miscreants looking for trouble?

Did You Think This Was a Game?

“We don’t rise to our expectations. We fall to our level of training.”
– Archilochus, 645 BC (possibly)

The partner of the young mother who was shot in the head when she attempted to flee from federal agents is alleged to have shouted, “Why did you have real bullets?”

I find this statement to be quite telling, and she isn’t alone in her (mis)understanding of how the world works. In a later conversation I had with a friend, he expressed similar childish naivety. We got to talking about the shootings, and he mentioned a video he’d seen where the crowd managed to snatch someone who was being arrested back, and another where a community of people came out of the woodwork and chased off those nasty ICE people. It sounded like he was describing how to play ‘Red Rover’. At one point, I interrupted him to ask, “Do you think this is a game?”

The partner also said in the aftermath, “I made her come down here; she didn’t want to come; it’s my fault.”

Some of the worst trouble [with the law] I’ve ever been in, and certainly the closest I ever came to losing my liberty, was the result of being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong people. I suppose I was lucky, as all it cost me was 3 hours in jail – but I learned my lesson! These two weren’t so fortunate…

From all accounts, they were good people, but fell in with the wrong crowd, followed bad advice (e.g.,”…put your body on the line”), and paid for it with their lives.

Here Endeth the Lesson

At first, I pitied them… but then I think about the criminals ICE is trying to remove, and their victims… Victims like Victoria Eileen Harwell. She was a mother, too! No one wants to talk about her. No one is protesting for her. No one is giving speeches about her. Do black lives stop mattering when they’re politically inconvenient?

There’s a section up on the DHS website, forty-one pages there by now, probably more. I do wish these people would go out and count them sometime, maybe they’d learn a lesson. No, probably not.

Epilogue

“If it doesn’t matter in 20 years, it doesn’t matter.”
– Dave, the Guy on the Couch, 1998

There’s a lot to suggest that some of these agitators were [Minnesota] state-sponsored, and possibly even used as fodder to distract from widespread fraud. It wouldn’t surprise me either way, and I’m no longer bothered by it…

###

When I was a kid, just starting out on my own, I lived in a flophouse with Jungle George, a pot dealer and Capoeira enthusiast, and his old friend Dave, ‘the guy on the couch’.

Dave had a hard life and desperately clung to whatever dignity he had left, despite being well beyond caring about what anyone thought of him. His most redeeming quality was that he viciously stood up to anyone who challenged his friends, and was always there to offer helpful advice to us young, dumb, hormone-fuelled idiots.

In an effort to comfort me through a bad breakup, Dave relayed a little piece of wisdom allegedly passed down to him by an old Mafioso: “If it doesn’t matter in 20 years, it doesn’t matter.”

This made me feel better, but more importantly, he was right! It’s a shame more people don’t think this way… perhaps the world would be a better place.