Ranked Preference

I've been on Bluesky since before it opened itself up to the general public. Yes, there was a time, boys and girls, when it was still an in-development project and you had to get yourself an invite code from someone who was already a user. Me, I found my code in the comment section over at Defector.com, a publishing collective by of a bunch of sports-oriented leftists borne out of something as sinister as LABOR ACTION, so you know Bluesky is already suspect in its associations. Defector even writes regularly about women's sports, that's how far OUT THERE it is compared to the mainstream normals who, as we all know, are frightened and confused by ladies being sportsy. I can't see it ever starting to feel like a natural thing to watch until we get the right number of women doing online sports betting, which we all agree is the true mark of social acceptance. If it can't get a FanDuel badge slapped on it, it's probably actually communism. You can't be too careful.

I've been at it on Bluesky for a while now, always reading, never posting (some of us are shy) but now I'm being told that it is Actually Maybe Bad? So like any self-reflective person who spends any time online at all, I had to immediately make the response to any slight criticism of something I might enjoy MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY for an unspecified period of time. Honestly, Reader, I have not been this upset since I was informed I was too old to like Fall Out Boy in like 2006. Come on, they're only like 10 years younger than me! It's not like I was doing that plastered-down swoopy bangs haircut or anything, I just like some bouncy emo anthem pop-rock. And it turns out they were the last mainstream act to hit it big AND play instruments. And there, NOW I sound like a proper old person.

The main criticism of Bluesky is that it's a bubble or an echo chamber or whatever, a place for lefties to silo themselves off from the world because they're TOO SENSITIVE to have their Bleeding Heart blood thrown right back in their faces in a REAL COMBAT PIT like X/twitter. Just because X/twitter is owned by (in the literal sense) the richest racialist ideologue since Henry Ford, I'm supposed to accept it as some sort of global public square neutral ground while he actively pledges to tweak the code of his bespoke AI chatbot to make it more amenably racist.

Like, OK, a Muslim guy won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor the other day. I don't subscribe to any mainstream news outlets anymore and I live about as far from NYC as is possible while still being within the contiguous 48, so I got the news about Mamdani defeating Andrew Cuomo from my Bluesky cohort and it seemed like... fine? Normal-to-good news, really right in that range. It took another half day or so for me to see/hear the teeth gnashed and hands wrung hard enough to cracking in the rest of the news media, but in that 12-24 hours, honestly, what did I miss? And further, what did I miss that I couldn't have 100% predicted? Fox News is so sorry to tell you he's a Muslim, very unfortunate, completely disqualified from American public office. And the New York Times wants you to know that actually this is bad news for Democrats, for sure. And everyone else is brought to you by Draft Kings, who are now going to be in the predicament of trying to get this "socialist" guy to accept a campaign donation check and see if he'll go on TV with a branded jacket.

Look, I'm very much of the opinion that even if you intend something in the range of good-to-benign, you should occasionally do a check to see who is traveling with you after you start. Like I don't think Joe Rogan is an openly racist white supremacist, but once the podcast got going and it was all edgelord incel listeners whose main animating personality feature is trying to say the N-word as often as possible in public spaces, maybe that was time to re-think the direction of the endeavor? But I look around where I am on Bluesky and it's smart people who seem to want the best for their neighbors and their country, even though there are steep disagreements in the Body Politic at large about the right way to go about those aims. Which, yeah, tracks as fine to me.

I recognize also that my Bluesky feed looks that way because I'm allowed to curate it directly instead of having it algorithmically fed to me by twitter. I realize being bombarded by bots and burner accounts is now the American Way and my patriotic duty, but I'm being social on social media in a way I'm comfortable, which I guess could be described as "socialist" now, but that's not even a bar for a major party nomination in America's largest city anymore, so I guess I'll live with it.

Haley Joel Osment

The thing about learning is that it happens whether you want it to or not. Earnest (read that as: boring, invasive, not particularly attentive) people will tell you to ALWAYS PAY ATTENTION because you never know when a "teachable moment" will occur. But look, you only really have to actively engage at that level if you have some kind of deficit in your sensory inputs. Learning is happening constantly, every second you take in stimuli and react in accordance with it. Hell, even if you don't react and go right ahead and ignore the brake lights in front of you, merging the front of your car violently with the back of the one you were trailing in traffic, that moment of passivity will very quickly pivot to an active lesson in physics involving velocity, mass and the respective tolerance extremes of your muscular and skeletal structures. A week after that, when you're a recovered enough to be coherent, and for the rest of your life, if anyone wonders what it feels like to have a punctured lung, you'll be able to raise a slightly misshapen hand and say honestly: I can help you with that.

Teachable moments have gotten a bad name in recent years, as they only really seem to be openly invoked when a celebrity or a politician gets caught on tape abusing a service worker, driving their Cadillac Escalade into the wall of a Denny's or lustily deploying the N-word in conversation. We know all the standard boilerplate in the ensuing definitely-not-crafted-by-a-PR-professional heartfelt apology... "horrified," "not who I am," "anyone who knows me will tell you...," "teachable moment," "seeking help," "step away from the spotlight," and the classic "inadvertently mixed a decent red wine with my mood stabilizer/back pain pills..." You know it's really serious when they invoke their children, the gross pinnacle of which is "as a father of daughters..." You also know in all those cases, that person is learning some stuff behind the scenes in the moment, mostly what it feels like to be yelled at by all the personal and professional women in their lives.

Recently at work I've been asked to actively learn some things, which I never really mind doing. It's a good idea to keep up with the state-of-the-art in whatever industry you're in, even if you're like me and your industry is basically "what do we do with all this stuff that definitely isn't state of the art?" Also it doesn't hurt to break up the routine of your day-to-day by taking some training modules, even if they're online click-and-play and not particularly compelling as a presentation. It's really down to the content to keep you locked in. Now, I just said I was asked to learn about the state-of-the-art in my industry, so I would wager that even though you have no idea what my industry is, you know exactly what the subject of the training is: that's right, it's fucking "AI."

I use the F-word adjective advisedly though, as the combination there with "AI" has/can now lead to some pretty shady shit on the interwebs, but in this case I just mean "accursed" or "bedeviling" and not any kind of sex act. That's the fastest way to have to issue a public apology at work.

I'm actively learning things about the background of AI (which I normally use in quotation marks, since nothing as it exists is actually "artificial intelligence," but I'm too lazy to do all the extra keystrokes to get two of the " going every time I use it) as a technology, which in itself is interesting, I suppose. I'm not really a bleeding-edge technology person. I'm an adamant opter-outer of a lot of it, like Siri or Alexa or whatever specifically. If anything, what I'm learning is that all my attempts to stay un-tracked as much as possible are pretty much a giant waste of time as "AI" has been around WAY longer than I think, and already ingested pretty much everything there is to know about me probably sometime during the second Obama administration.

Passively what I'm discovering--more of a dawning than a thing I learned--is that pretty much every instance where someone in any job is asked to "check out what AI has to offer" for the industry, you're being asked to begin a process that at the end of which involves you or a significant number of your colleagues getting fired and replaced by this thing that never actually does what it promises, even all these years after it's been actively deployed. The result is largely the enshittification of some things that once actually worked and the gleeful firing of whole banks of employees across industries justified in the name of "innovation," unsupported by any facts or results.

I'm realizing I'm being asked to figure out the best and fastest way to outsource my job to a difference engine. The mistake I've made is also following Ed Zitron on bluesky, probably the loudest and best-informed voice out there railing against the tech industry's internal self-talk about what "AI" is at the moment and the feasibility not only of the technology of the industry as a business proposition. So not only do I know I'm abetting my own demise, I'm also actively aware that it will be death by buzzword and bullshit.

I guess I can take some comfort in knowing that a machine will replace me, but it won't replace me competently for another several decades. And that it will be much more expensive in the long run to pay for the cyber-brain services of doing what I do at a poorer or less interesting level of output in both quality and quantity. But I do have a government job; that will just be business as usual.

Some Of Those That Work Forces

I confess, I wasn't really prepared, so I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with all my incoming freedom, which I'm by highly placed sources in the current administration will be secured imminently.

As far as I can tell, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem means to "liberate" myself and all the other people in California from the oversight of the duly elected governor of the state, whom I have voted for, twice. It's with embarrassment that I understand now that I have done so incorrectly, probably on both occasions I guess. I shouldn't be surprised to see the second Trump administration putting into action the longstanding Republican fundamental principles of hyper-active governmental commandeering of state functions, superseding all local and/or regional autonomy in favor of a vigorous, expensive and unasked-for response at the federal level. I'll confirm this for you as soon as I can secure response statements from the restless earthbound spirits of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. If this doesn't get them out of the ground, then fuck you, ghosts objectively do not exist, never bring them up again.

This is becoming a theme, though, Things Happening Where I Live I Have To Rely Upon The Executive Branch To Inform Me Of/Protect Me From. Gavin Newsom bad, OK, check, got it. I saw him do a bunch of podcast hits with white supremacist fuckheads recently trying to brush up his cross-aisle/edge-lord bona fides ahead of a certain run for president. So OK, we'll put the suspension and disregard of his legal authority as governor in the "For Consideration" category. Also, though, I'm being told that the place I live, the state and sub-region (though I'm not in LA city or county) is on fire and a constant riot zone. Just because the idea that urbanized areas where Not Red political thought congregates are hostile to "decent" people and inherently unsafe is straight out of a long-standing playbook of ratfucking media narratives created out of whole cloth, that doesn't mean it's necessarily not true in this case, right? Just because me nor anyone else I know has seen or been disrupted by (or even disapproves of the idea of) anti-ICE protests doesn't mean it's not a lawless hellscape on the verge of self-immolation. I mean, you saw the Waymo cars burning on literally every news outlet everywhere, it's safe then to extrapolate that media saturation of a single sensational image means the experience is ubiquitous, not that it's the most visually interesting thing to publish for for-profit enterprises reliant on click-through numbers for advertising purposes. No, that would be reckless and self-serving, two things it would irresponsible to accuse either the news media or the government (as currently composed) of being.

But to be fair, it's not just local Latino population being targeted, it's also the federally based elected representative Latino population getting it in the neck at the same time, so you'd have to call that at least "consistent." Honestly, Senator Alex Padilla walked into a press conference with Kristi Noem and a bunch of ICE agents, carrying the double whammy of being an American born to Mexican parents AND a highly educated Coastal Elite. In retrospect, it would have been newsworthy if they didn't try to tackle him in those conditions. I'm certain I'll be hearing in the next few days about all the ways he definitely had it coming. Has anyone even asked yet what he was wearing?

Oh wait, Jesus, what am I wearing? I think this calls for a trip to the Tactical Suburban Tough Guy store, not for any protection, just so all my ICE bros register me as one of their own and let me pass. Cosplay internet-based warrior bro is the safest thing to be right now. Oh, and white. That always helps.

The New Hour

Events, by their definition, happen. I will admit right up front that that is maybe my most pithy or profound pronouncement, but the contemplation of it if you're of a specific kind of anxious disposition can be, to put it in technical medical psychological terminology, kind of a lot.

If you're anxious, you don't want events. You don't want happenings or interruptions or, the worst possible outcome of all possible outcomes, fucking spontaneity. I gave myself a little bit of an attack of the bubblegut just typing it out. Like, I can barely tolerate live theater. First of all, is live theater part of my regular, non-spontaneous routine? Absolutely not, so we've immediately arrived at Problem Number One. And it's not just plays, it anything, like if you ask me if I want to do something, my immediate response is: fuck off, that is going to conflict with my sitting at home time. And I don't mean that in the precious sense, like "I prefer to be cozy" or something, I mean literally there are parts of each day that I have an expectation (not a schedule since I'm not one of those sociopaths with a schedule. If you keep an actual schedule but then miss something on it? Yikes. You're just setting yourself up for another, separate anxiety cascade by choice) that I will be able to sit uninterrupted and not be bothered. This was one of the reasons why I hesitated to get my cat, but once I learned that sitting and doing nothing was her primary modus vivendi, well, we started to get along just fine. If anything, I'm interrupting her.

All theater, to advance on to Problem Number Two, is all happening right now, right there in front of you, with human mouths saying human words that they're all just supposed to know in a very specific order and with knowable, interpretable narrative and emotional intent. Guys, that is SO MUCH. And you're very specifically told not to help them if they fuck up! You just have to sit there and take it as they risk disaster, over and over again, hundreds of times per minute. Would I know if they missed a mark or a cue or dropped a line? Of course I wouldn't, but it's the potential to do so that births the tension like a thousand toothy butterflies in the chest cavity of the Anxious Watcher.

I bet you're thinking: well, what about improv theater? No lines or marks to hit there, right? That's even worse! You have to be coherent and cooperative and interesting in the realest of real time, under the judgment of the watching audience? I showed up to watch some goofs and some spoofs, not to be the jury on someone's already deeply impractical career. Also, there's a chance they could go out into the audience and ask you something, which, I'd rather they just hit me in the face with a fireplace poker or have my chest cavity filled with a thousand toothy butterflies. And even then, I'd probably second-guess whatever reaction I had to that for the whole drive home.

So I don't want Events. I don't want things to be other than how they are, which is not to say I won't accept things getting better, it's just that growing up an anxious person with a lot of economic uncertainty, you become accustomed to the idea that, however fucked up things are in this double-wide you're sub-leasing and having to sometimes share with the landlady's in-recovery adult son, they could always be worse. Like whose to say next time you don't end up in a single-wide? Or the adult son is not in recovery?

That's the baseline for how I took the news that Marc Maron's podcast is going to be coming to a close this fall. Now, this is not a recommendation as I find podcast recommendations have by far the lowest hit rate for any other kind of media or activity. There's something deeply personal and soul-tailored about a podcast that they almost never, ever translate to another person's ears or context quite right. There's no worse social position to find yourself in in the year of our lord 2025 than to be sharing your favorite podcast with someone for the first time, watching their face to see if/when they "get it." Reader, they will not "get it," now or ever. And you will never, ever, if you live to be a thousand, understand the appeal of that shit they listen to about child murderers or the history of peppercorns or whatever. Their taste is so hyper-specific, it becomes objectively bad. And so is yours. And so is mine.

That's sort of belied by the fact that plenty of other people like the things you like and probably listen to the thing you listen to. And you can definitely point to some good things that most people find compelling on the outside. But I've already got people recommending replacements to me, which is the fastest way to ensure that I will NEVER listen to that thing they are recommending. Hell, the Dax Shepard podcast is probably the closest thing out there, and even openly acknowledges WTF as a direct inspiration, but this is all so personal, like I said. Like, I find Dax Shepard to be a weird phony. Which is 100% based on nothing and completely unfair, but he's not my real dad and you can't make me call him that.

I dunno what I'm gonna do, man, but I've got a few months to figure it out, I guess. That's the best an anxious person can ask for, a few months to sit in intensifying agitation and anticipation as the date of The Big Change You Didn't Ask For looms. I figure if I'm going to spiral anyway, might as well get a good wind-up going.

Part 8 of the Trilogy

 

Mission:Impossible-The Final Reckoning

starring Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Pom Klementieff, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Hannah Waddingham, Esai Morales, Tom Cruise, Tramell Tillman, Shea Briggs, Greg Tarzan Davis, Nick Offerman for some reason, Henry Czerny and Angela Basset

directed by Tom Cruise's Stunt Coordinator Christopher McQuarrie

---

YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW THIS MOVIE WILL GO BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT SEVEN, BUT THIS IS THE SPOILER WARNING ANYWAY

---

OK, let's get this right out of the way up front: this movie isn't very good. But is it a good Mission:Impossible movie? That's a separate, more complicated question. Now that these are purportedly over, we can take a step back and consider them in a fuller context, both one by one and in relation to each other.

1. Mission:Impossible: First, I'm not sure how to set this titles off from this list because they use all the punctuation, both colons and dashes, in all of them. You're just going to have to figure it out. Anyway, I remember this being fine. Emilio Estevez gets his face impaled by an elevator shaft that is somehow decorated with what looks to be a giant scimitar for some reason. A helicopter blows up in a train tunnel. Sets the tone: fucking goofy, but really going for it, maximum effort at all times. Basically a movie version of Tom Cruise as a personality.

2. Mission:Impossible 2: Really genuinely terrible. John Woo only makes one movie, the plot of which is irrelevant. I blame him for the recurring motorcycle thing in M:I (he loves motorcycles), though it's funny Tom didn't carry over the slo-mo pigeons and churches. Thandiwe Newton largely wasted, should have been brought back at some point, but no. They got the IT dork from the first movie back for this newest one, but not her, not once? Lame. Anyway, almost killed the franchise.

3. Mission:Impossible III: OK, J.J. Abrams kind of sucks, but he knows how to create mystery and tension, even if he's ABSOLUTELY FUCKING ALLERGIC to resolving any of those things. The secret here is he doesn't try. Focus on character (in this one, they actually tried to give Ethan Hunt character), with real emotional stakes AND get Philip Seymour Hoffman to sell these beats as something of a plot and Bob's your mother's brother. The one that set the formula. I can see now most of the rest of the entries relied on the goodwill this one established. It's legit good.

4. Mission:Impossible-Ghost Protocol: Yay, we lost the numbers in the titles, but being really honest, for these next several, I'm going to have to go back and figure out which one we're talking about because they get all super similar. I think this is the Jeremy Renner one where they do that building climb? That part was dope.

5. Mission:Impossible-Rogue Nation: Couldn't tell you the plot if you started shoving bamboo splinters under my toenails, but I'm pretty sure this is the first Rebecca Ferguson one, so automatic 10 out of 10.

6. Mission:Impossible-Fallout: Renner disappears, but we get Henry Cavill cocking his arms like they're a shotgun in a bathroom fight scene. Also Michelle Monaghan comes back as Ethan Hunt's wife from back in III when they tried to make him a person, which actually worked pretty well. I did a whole write up for this one already, but basically I liked it? "It's just some people throwing really interesting punches and breaking shit," I said at the time, which, hey, there's some high praise.

7. Mission:Impossible-Dead Reckoning: Again, total honesty, I forgot everything about this until I offered to rewatch it with my domestic partner lady so we could go see the new one this past weekend. She hadn't been to a movie theater since pre-COVID, so we prepped the night before and wowee, is this not great. Stunts are good, set-pieces are good (the one with the train at the end is pretty great actually), but the plot and the Esai Morales character, bless him for trying, is tacked on and so forgettable, they actually forgot to put in him like 95% of the next movie.

As far as Final Reckoning goes, yeah, that's about what you need to know about it. The franchise built itself to it's first real peak (III) on the scaly, pointy back of the Godzilla-sized talent of Philip Seymour Hoffman and his ability to make you hate his terrible guts, but what you get by Installment 8 is symptomatic of the slow whining hiss of the helium coming out of this balloon (and, to some degree, injected into Tom Cruise's very puffy face) over the course of 20 years. The "bad guy" is literally nobody, it's nothing, it's the idea of a bad guy in the form of a googly blue waveform thingy that sometimes gets an extreme closeup and arguably more screen time than Hannah Waddingham's American accent.

It's not novel or interesting to note that by now they think of the stunt set-pieces, which are of course still great, and then just plug in the rest of the "plot" to mark the time between them and call that a script. I can't tell you how they filmed that submarine sequence (rotating set I think), but the blend of CG and practical was really well done. It achieved what these films must achieve or fail entirely, making you feel tension in a situation where you know absolutely that the hero will survive in the end. As a result, even when these are new, they feel like prequels even in real-time because the end result is blatantly, obviously, graspably knowable. Nobody goes into it thinking "Oh, is this the one where the bad guy nukes the world and escapes after killing the hero/es?" No, you're thinking of Avengers: Infinity War. This is a Tom Cruise movie and Tom Cruise (the actual human, not the character) has more rigid rules for how he's depicted than Thor or Captain America.

What did the blue-eyed Entity do? It doesn't matter. What was Esai Morales' Gabriel's relationship to it? I dunno, it doesn't matter. There's an empty space left deliberately at the hole of this film that can only be filled by people talking about how Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt is the only person in the whole world who is pure enough to "do what needs to be done" and then just being OK at leaving it there, details-wise.

Does he get a weird distorted face from being FOR REALS on the outside of a plane flying at hundreds of miles an hour? Of course he does. Does he die and come back to life? Stop trippin', you know the traditions. And does he say to his group of homies that "the only people we can trust are in this room right now?" I don't think they'd be allowed to release it if he didn't. And, finally, does someone at the end who doubted him ALL ALONG say "He did it... the son of a bitch actually did it"? LITERALLY THE SON OF A BITCH ACTUALLY DOES.

Nothing about this film will let you down if you come looking for just those things. But did you think that, possibly, Hayley Atwell was brought in to set up a successor, to continue the story starting at her IMF origin in the last movie? Ha, gotcha, loser! Her big moment here is she gets to grab a thing real fast because of how good a pickpocket she is. She contributes zero plans, has zero agency (ha), reduced to serving as a setter-upper of things that Tom Cruise will finally arrive at and make worth it. She develops nothing; remember she was a pickpocket the first second we saw her in the last movie and she's still basically that at the end of this one. Basically she got the John Boyega treatment from all those Star Wars movies he was in: promising character setup shoved off to the side to make more room for the safest, most predictable bullshit. But that was JJ Abrams, and we've already established the he sucks. Maybe that's all you need to know going in to this one? It's like JJ Abrams made it, but Philip Seymour Hoffman was, in the most profound and existential of ways, unavailable.

Addicted to the Shindig

I understand the appeal of Donald Trump to the news media. The idea that they're all left-leaning and biased against Republicans or conservatism in general has never really been true, and it's actually pretty clearly the opposite in this current media era, after the advent and (one has to say) success of Fox News. The operating stance of all arms of media, old and new, is that conservative ideas and the actions of GOP politicians are, if not a default or correct (or at least self-evident) position, they are things for which journalists know the people speaking them are willing to go down swinging defending, even if they're know to be obvious and immediately disprovable lies. There's no point challenging something if it's going to be defended with crusader-like zeal and probably end with an anonymous death threat or two. On the other hand, anything spoken by a Democrat or even events that contradict the obvious and immediately disprovable lies already incanted into meat-space by some level of right-wing operative, must be covered with an immediate, sober scrutiny that none of us--not one!--should dare to be even the slightest bit hasty about lest we invoke the Spirit of Like I Dunno Maybe 1993 who will come and smite us. Then we'll be doomed to return to an era where the vise grip of commie-leaning journos skewing and butchering THE TRUTH so thoroughly and systematically, they had kept all Republicans out of any office for, like, a dozen generations or something, where they had never known power and never would again if the lying bozos in the press had their way.

But of course, Rupert Murdoch swooped in (first as farce, then as tragedy, putting a real Aussie spin on the idea) and saved us from an existence of perpetual knowing stuff in an information environment predicated on disputation of facts, reducible only as far as an irreducible root where actual truth existed. If you're not sure what I mean, just watch All the President's Men again and see press and power engage in a struggle of revelations and obfuscations until all the façades are at last pierced and the country's chief executive is checkmated into resigning in disgrace and fucking off to San Clemente. This outcome, of course, is not conceivable now, let alone possible, given that both sides have moved in such an eccentric yet tidally locked orbit they're practically circling an entirely different star. The Washington Post is fully industry captured and eagerly, pre-emptively capitulant and the executive branch has heroically become entirely inoculated against embarrassment, let alone actual shame. That's how you get a White House impervious to scandal AND an Oval Office decorated with bowling trophies. Both equally troubling when considered against the future of the republic.

So I get it, there's no space in this environment for media outlets to plant their feet and push back. There is no reward in it as a cash-making enterprise or in the culturo-intellectual headspace that has swapped out information for clout as a prime motivator. This isn't technically a media outlet (I don't have the money to hire an echo-chambered crypto-fascist dingus to write immediately outdated column pieces to spur negative engagement in the secondary micro-blogging marketspace, which is what I think you need to be considered print media these days), but still, even though the type of engagement might be cynical to the point of being bankrupt,* the one thing nobody is lacking in a Trump administration is content. You could really palp the strain on the whole system during the boring-ass Biden administration, trying to gin up some kind of heat from literally nothing. "The president is really old and kind of mumbles" doesn't have the same jet-fuel jump as "the president invited the president of South Africa over just to call him a murdering bitch in front of the press" if you're trying to draw eyeballs to the adverts you sold for joint cream and cash-for-old-jewelry schemes.

I can't really sustain it, though. If I tried to follow every outrage, I'd have to go back to writing every single day, which I've been over for a while now. Instead of that, I find it a lot more fruitful to generate "thoughtful" pieces where I talk around the issues of the day at one step removed, disguising my exploitation of the 24-hour news cycle as critique without ever having to actually be on the hook for saying anything. Wait a second, maybe this IS a media outlet...

---

*in most cases literally, that's how you end up with dipshit billionaire or dipshit hedge fund ownership in the first place.

Airplane Mode

It probably would't surprise anyone to learn that upon hearing about the proposed personal gift of a $400 million dollar jet to Donald Trump from Qatar, I had some concerns. Do I know what "emoluments" means? Reader, I do not. But the news had "Trump" in the headline, so as a proud sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course I FREAKED OUT TO 11 with all kinds of unreasonable responses like "there's no way Biden would have been able to do the exact same thing" and "isn't this exactly the sort of thing in keeping with the now-decades-old strategy of Middle Eastern petro-states converting their mineral wealth into soft power through sports-washing and outright bribery" or "this is specifically forbidden by Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States." It's embarrassing, but yeah, that's the kind of out-there, knee-jerk, unreasonable stuff this ole Trump so-and-so draws out of me.

But hey, maybe it isn't as obviously awful as it seems on the surface. He can't be all bad, right, I mean, he's already planning a super-fun parade for next month, coincidentally right around his birthday. Yes, I can see the demerits in the idea driving dozens of tanks along public streets not designed to support them or spending tens of millions of dollars to divert resources to support the disruption of basically all civic and municipal functions in the city that day. And yes, it can be argued that parades are objectively the worst form of "entertainment" that belong in the same archaic pre-industrial category as public executions and bear baiting, long since superseded by such riveting fare as a guy doing a ventriloquist act on the radio and 50-second moving pictures of a train passing a static camera. But still, you know, if you squint a bit and tilt your head sideways and say "THE TROOPS" loud enough, it can almost seem like a passable idea for a government that has been loudly squawking about "waste and fraud" for like four months, sure.

And as much as I'd like to learn to be more conciliatory, to be less burdened by the daily stress of the intentional chaos of an executive branch held hostage by pure brigandage, more open to the idea that maybe my fellow citizens who didn't think it was an act of self-immolation to vote so readily for the Box of Matches and A Drum of Gasoline candidate were only acting out of either delusion or idealogical spite, I turn around and learn that maybe Ted Cruz has some doubts about this Qatar plane thing too. Brakes squeal! Record scratch! Wilhelm scream!

Hold the underwear! Look, there's always going to be a ton of competition for the title of America's Worst Senator. That body is famously a repository for the self-identified presidential papabile to go sequester themselves off from any form of human outside of the "staffer" and "fundraiser" and "mistress" subspecies, where any useful or original thought they might have brought in with them is drowned out and inaccessible to them after six-months in that echo chamber of farts and shouted ambition enunciated in that smarm-laced dialect of prep-school-ese for the benefit of not one single person, including themselves. Senators, famously, don't get to be president directly. Only two have done it in the last 100 years, even though I think (and I've checked my notes on this, so I know it's correct, please don't follow up) 100% of them actively run.

But Ted Cruz is a special case, even among this bucket of fermenting eels. When your personality is so flatly and universally toxic, people are willing to cite a feral raccoon like Lindsey Graham as a reliable observer of his character, it's time to give pause and rethink, well, literally anything that might accidentally align. It's not an exaggeration to say Ted Cruz's only real function is as a bellwether of what not to do. Based on that evidence alone, I'm going to have to be a "wait and see" on the Trump Qatar jet very public bribery thing. If anyone would like to sway me to a final conclusion on the subject, I am open to offers, up to and including aircraft.