Tag Archives: stupid

Trump is Stupid, and Putin Loves him for it.

Posted on by
1

Like you, I am watching the destruction of our nation happen in real time. Trump could simply put stupid people in charge of our government, but he has to go one further and put stupid people uniquely antagonistic toward their mission in charge of our government.

RFK Jr is a spineless idiot whose only contribution to humanity is the death of 83 people. Actually, that’s just one campaign, it’s pretty clear he has killed many more.

And that’s only the start. We have a QAnon queen in charge of Intelligence. Even the name of the department should disqualify her! She is a puppet of Russia and if I were an intelligence asset in that country I’d be grabbing my go-bag about now. Boebert is so goddam stupid it makes my head hurt.

Oh, and hey, let’s put a sexual predator (and Trump sexual predation enabler) in charge of the department of justice! Why the fuck not? You know this guy will put the law first.

Donald Trump is a stupid man. Really fucking stupid. He honestly doesn’t understand how important his job is. Sure he knows that it makes him a really big deal, but he has no idea at all that there is responsibility that goes with that.

Meanwhile, over in Mother Russia, Vladimir Putin is laughing his ass off. Ukraine is now his. His right to poison dissidents will not be questioned. And all he had to give up were a few flattering words to a little toadstool.

Thanks!

Vegetable Science

Posted on by
3

I am Vine. That means retailers on Amazon can offer me stuff in exchange for a product review. The theory is that Vine members can provide impartial reviews and drown out the paid shills. There are Vine members who don’t understand this, and there are retailers using Vine to dump inventory.

But as a part of this program, I explore categories I would never look at otherwise. It’s fun; I’ve learned about tools I never knew existed, and seen many, many useless things.

One of the categories I can explore is “Professional Medical Supplies”. And in categories like that, there are items that are obviously for one purpose, but can only be sold for another purpose. Syringes with hypodermic needles is an obvious example.

CLEARLY, these items are not meant to inject stuff into humans. They are for injecting stuff into… maybe… vegetables?

Perhaps you are a neatly-bearded scientist who needs to inject blue stuff into a zucchini. Have we got the tool for you! Or maybe it’s broccoli anchored to a chemical stand, with a needle up its butt, and you need to inject some red liquid:

I have to give props where due. Most sellers would not have bothered taking the above photos. The shallow depth of field in the top photo suggests that an actual photographer was involved. With lights and everything.

The entire effort is to support a fiction: that this product is for injecting colored liquids into vegetables, and not human beings. It’s a respectable amount of work to support a transparent lie that everyone knows from the get-go is a lie.

But now I wonder now how a floret of broccoli clamped in the air with a needle up its ass will respond to red fluid.

4

Thanks!

twiliight

Posted on by
2

It seems the Twilight series is out on a new print run, with a new covers. The covers are striking and pretentious and silly, and I am here to mock them. You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.

I had not planned on going to the trouble to find an actual image of this thing, relying instead on my near-mystical abilities of description, but let’s face it, images get the clicks. Here’s the cover:

They did this on purpose

Full disclosure here; I have never read twiliight (apparently) and it’s pretty unlikely I ever will. I have read and enjoyed many things similar to this, even written for a similar demographic, but this whole thing seems pretty awful.

BUT! You will find millions of readers who disagree with me, and the last time I wrote something millions of people liked was never. So my hat is off to the writer of this yarn.

Who is that again?

STEPHENIE MEYER
AUTHOR OF THE #1 BESTSELLING TWILIGHT SAGA

In other words, “Author of the book you are holding in your hands right now.” Which… I figure is kind of implied already. If you decide to read twiliight because it’s written by the person who wrote Twilight— you know what? You’re perfect for this story.

6

Thanks!

Hope It Floats

Posted on by
Reply

Today I rode Stevens Creek Trail for the first time, and it’s pretty cool: a tiny jungle wedged between a freeway and suburbs, with lots of engineering to overcome highways and the occasional railroad. As I approached the south end of the bay I passed Moffet field and the NASA Ames Research center. Just past that there was a pair of fancy new buildings going up.

“Huh.” I thought to myself, “I’d have thought that NASA people would know better than to create grand new structures at sea level.”

Ames Research Center and something Big and New

The hue of the image is due to smoke; this is the “new normal”, as the kids say. So – two big buildings with Major Architecture going up (only one pictured here), on land that is almost certain to be under water within the intended lifespan of the buildings.

I wondered how NASA could be so short-sighted, but it turns out they’ve worked a pretty good scam. After I got home I did some research.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to one of Google’s new flagship sites. I imagine the NASA people who leased Google the land are cackling at the prospect of getting anything at all for that doomed real estate. And maybe if Google is there, they will spend their billions to protect their investment, constructing dikes and pumping stations that not only will prolong the agony for Google but also give NASA a few more years in their own facilities next door.

The people who paid for that new fancy building must know that the ocean will soon be taking ownership of that land, right? They must know that clever geothermal piles (which sound pretty cool) will not alter the simple fact that the ocean is rising, and cares not how many dollars you have sunk into your new building.

I have many unflattering things to say about Google, but stupid was not one of them. But if the shoe fits…

2

Thanks!

You may be Hating Trump for the Wrong Reason Today

Posted on by
1

So on Thursday, Trump invited the head of science for the Department of Homeland Security to join his coronavirus press conference. Mr. Bryan said some things that were interesting, giving valuable information that could be used to slow the spread of the virus. And he did mention that yes, sunlight has been shown to kill the virus on surfaces.

That’s not really a surprise, UV light has been used to disinfect surfaces for a long time now. But the effectiveness of UV against this particular virus was encouraging, and supported Trump’s “this will all go away in the summer and I’ll take credit for thinking of it” plan.

After Mr. Bryan, himself not a scientist — he holds a masters degree in strategic intelligence — sat down, an obviously pumped president returned to the lectern. There were things that could kill the virus! He probably already understood that at some level before, but now he was really seeing it! All we needed to do was take the things that killed the virus outside a human body… and put them inside.

So he turned and said to his pet non-scientist from Homeland Security that Mr. Bryan should look into using light inside coronavirus patients. But why stop there? Disinfectants also kill the virus! Perhaps we should look into using those inside the body as well! Trump was, at that moment, spit-balling ideas with someone modestly more qualified than he was to figure that shit out.

Had they been alone in a quiet room, Mr. Bryan might have been able to say, “Good idea, Mr. President, but those things kill indiscriminately. The challenge is to find something that will kill the virus without killing the host, or to strengthen the host’s innate ability to fight the virus itself.” And Trump would be pissed, but probably not enough to fire the guy, and life would go on.

But that’s not what happened, because it was not a quiet room. It was a press conference, going live to the entire nation. Trump suggested investigating shooting up disinfectants.

Trump does not think before he speaks. If he did, it might occur to him that this is not the first virus humanity has encountered, and that perhaps there were reasons we don’t try to apply chemicals that kill indiscriminately inside our bodies. The closest we get (as far as I know) is chemotherapy, where the drugs are really nasty, but even then they target the bad cells more than the good cells.

Trump didn’t think, because he had a Great Idea.

What Trump thought would happen: His science pal would say, “That’s a great idea! We’ll get right on that!” Probably, in the short time of the press conference, The Donald didn’t even have time to get to the part of his fantasy where the world lionizes him for single-handedly solving the crisis. That came later in the shower.

What actually happened: The world went ape-shit because his incredibly stupid ideas were spoken in front of the whole damn country, and a lot of people instantly conflated “Tide Pod eater” with “Trump Supporter.”

Sure, people have already died from Trump’s medical advice, and some of the deaths have a Tide Pod glow to them, but not very many. Not very many deaths by stupidity can be directly attributed to Trump, anyway. We’ll never know the death toll from liberating Michigan. Might be zero, might be a thousand or more when all is over, but we’ll never know. However many people he does kill by supporting those protests, a disproportionate percentage of them will be first responders and health care professionals, and more than a few working poor.

His tweets about “liberating” certain states (he did not congratulate protesters in states with Republican governors, although the policies and the arguments were the same) are ultimately far more harmful than a few dumb-ass remarks that may get a handful of fucking idiots killed. Trump’s “cross your fingers and hope that sunshine saves us” strategy (I bet Australia can’t wait for… oh, wait, never mind) is much more dangerous to our nation as a whole than suggesting people should shove blacklights up their butts.

(Donald didn’t actually suggest that, just as he didn’t suggest people do I.V. drips of Lysol.)

I’d guess that Trump’s idiot musing on Thursday will kill ten people, tops. Ten stupid people. Probably fewer. And while I’m as big a fan as anyone at pointing out how goddam moronic our president is, we need to remember where he’s doing the most harm and who is being harmed. While the man-child president grasps for a miracle cure to get him (not us) out of this pickle, the rest of us have to keep pushing ahead.

This is the calculus we have come to, weighing the relative harm of Trump’s stupid-ass statements. But as long as we’re here, let’s keep a little perspective. More people will die from his evisceration of the EPA than will inject Lysol into their blood.

I look forward to things returning to normal so we can go back to trying to find all those children ICE misplaced.

1

Thanks!

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Scientific Survey

Posted on by
1

Pharaoh heard that in his prisons there lived a man who could interpret dreams. He called for Joseph, and his soldiers brought the young man before him.

“I have had a dream,” Pharaoh said. “In my dream there are seven fat cows, and seven thin cows. The thin cows eat the fat cows but they remain thin. What does it mean?”

Joseph pondered, and quietly asked God for guidance, and said, “it means that there will be seven years of plenty, and Egypt will prosper like never before. But there will follow seven years of hardship, and unless Egypt prepares now, by saving as much of the plenty as this great nation can, there will be great suffering.”

Pharaoh nodded, seeing the wisdom of Joseph’s words. It only made sense to prepare for hard times while things were going well, even if the precision of Joseph’s prediction was questionable.

“Um… Pharaoh,” said the trusted advisor on his left, the chief architect of the pyramid project about to launch, “Seven years of plenty! That’s great! If you ignore this man’s advice, I can make the monument to you even more magnificent.”

On his right, another adviser spoke. “If bad times follow the good, it is the will of the gods. WE will survive, OUR families will not starve, even if millions of the working class who just finished your pyramid die. That, too, is the will of the gods. The workers will die happily, knowing they contributed to your eternal might.”

Joseph listened to this discourse and said, “No, seriously, It’s going to be bad. I’m 99.9% sure it’s going to be really really bad.”

“Aha!” cried the architect. “So you’re not certain!“

Pharaoh looked from his advisors to Joseph and back. “Make the monument bigger,” he said.

2

Thanks!

That Carbon Dioxide Tipping Point

Posted on by
2

I file this under politics because it is politics that is blinding us.

The oil industry* and their paid shills (known as deniers)** made a few waves recently when, in a carefully-worded survey of climate scientists, fewer than half were willing to single out carbon dioxide as the single greatest contributor to global warming.

“Half of all Scientists disagree with climate change!” was the nonsensical conclusion. A slightly-less-nonsensical conclusion was “Humans create carbon dioxide; if that’s not the primary driver of global warming, then warming is not because of humans.”

But let’s look at that for a moment. There’s another conclusion, and while it’s much more reasonable, it’s also much more scary: Carbon Dioxide isn’t the the primary driver of global warming any more. We’ve crossed a tipping point.

Meet Methane, and the point of no return.

While CO2 was the problem, there was something we could do about it: produce less CO2. Let the algae and the rain forests (whoops!) absorb the surplus back, and let our planet return to its previous equilibrium. We dithered, and denied, and the tundra began to thaw. Now the tundra is burping up enormous amounts of methane.

As a greenhouse gas, methane makes CO2 look like a punk kid with missing teeth.

So if many scientists don’t think Carbon Dioxide is the biggest contributor any more, that doesn’t mean they don’t believe the surface of our planet is getting hotter, it means that the game has changed. It means things have moved to a stage that we cannot reverse just by suddenly not being so selfish and short-sighted. It means there is nothing we can do to stop the change, and the sooner we turn our efforts to dealing with it, the less it will hurt.

But man, it’s gonna hurt.

___
* shorthand for all carbon-based energy companies
** almost all the publicized climate-change deniers are on the energy company payrolls. I say “almost” only because there are probably a few who are just stupid.

Thanks!

Stupid Friday

Posted on by
7

When I moved out to California to leverage my Physics degree into a career in fast food, I lamented with my roommates that we just weren’t as stupid as we had been in our carefree college days. Back in the good ol’ days, we had thought nothing of the consequences of staying up all night, our eyeballs exploding from the mixture of caffeine and alcohol we ingested, peeing off sheer cliffs of crumbling rock, numbering the stars and toooooasting life, wearing 12-pack cartons as hats.

Now we were living in a city, and many nights we had to keep in mind the r-r-responsibilities of the coming day. Still, reluctant to let go of the golden days of youth, we came up with a plan. A simple, elegant plan called Stupid Friday.

It was a Friday, for instance, when I shaved the top of my head to go with the monk costume I wore to a Halloween party. On another Friday we got several liters of Mountain Dew, went to a local park, and played chip-chip hula hoop tennis ball golf long into the night. (One of our number was a master at building a fun game out of a pile of toys. A recreational MacGyver.)

Stupid Fridays were a resounding success, so it was not long before we expanded the franchise. Dumb Wednesday became a feature of our calendar, and then things really took off:

  • Moronic Monday
  • Futile Tuesday
  • Dumb Wednesday
  • ??? Thursday
  • Stupid Friday

I can’t for the life of me remember what we named Thursday, but it was one of the earlier additions to our calendar, as it was only slightly more stupid than Friday. Dumb Wednesday’s name was inspired at least in part by the movie Big Wednesday, which I remember fondly and wonder now how I’d like it. Futile Tuesday has a nice ring to it, and Moronic Monday is what it is. Maybe another alumnus of the EmmaDome can remember Thursday’s moniker.

I still invoke Stupid Friday now and again, and even Dumb Wednesday. Life is too short to be r-r-responsible all the time.

3

Thanks!