Sadly, No!

So I was reading the news recently and it turns out that Obama had been using the entire US security apparatus to spy on every single person in the US (or maybe beyond as well, who knows?). Which is of course truly shocking and apparently means that Obama is going to jail — for good measure restrained like Dr. Lecter. [Do they think Obama is a cannibal? Why am I even asking?]

Anyway — since President Youppi* has been in office for a year which has prompted many contributions to the Trump assessment genre that, like the President, is driven first and foremost by hyperbole so inane it makes it hard to keep a straight face when reading it. (And really impossible to know if the writer is deranged or thinks everyone else is). Brent Smith, the “Common Constitutionalist” and Walter from The Big Lebowski thus writes:

TRUMP GETS MORE DONE IN 1 YEAR THAN MOST DO IN 4

Which I guess is par for the course though I do wonder why they didn’t just publishing these columns earlier, as in

TRUMP GOT MORE DONE ON HIS FIRST DAY THAN ALL PRESIDENTS COMBINED!

Too late for that now, sadly. As for Brent, it turns out he’s very excited because it doesn’t matter how much you cut taxes on the wealthy, it’s only fun if you make life even more difficult for poor people:

And here we go again, with yet another example of conservative policy. With little fanfare, the Trump administration now will allow states to require able-bodied Medicaid recipients to work for their benefits.

Besides a tax cut and the North and South Korea getting along better (!), Brent doesn’t actually list other accomplishments so I was left rather disappointed and left with no other choice than googling Trump accomplishments for which the first result comes from TownHall** (because of course). And lo and behold the list of the 7 greatest accomplishments!

Moving The American Embassy To Jerusalem

Improving The Economy

Hurting NFL Attendance

Pulling Out Of The Trans-Pacific Partnership

Trump’s Tax Plan Delivered

Decimating ISIS

Nominating Judges

Hurting NFL attendance is a of President Youppi accomplishment? Do they know Colin Kaepernick isn’t playing anymore?

* I know — that’s what I’ve called Brent Bozell many times in the past but his hair is losing some of its orange so it’s time to pass the torch.
** Of course Google is liberal and thus bad, but the first result is TownHall, so it can’t be Google’s fault that the first result is garbage, can it?

Wow – a 4-month gap between posts is likely a new record for this humble blog. That is not going to be good for business. Indeed, that is not going to be good for anyone.

It would be quite an understatement to say that I care a great deal about this blog. Going by blogspot, the first post dates back to July 2003 — when I was but a young man (who didn’t know what he wanted to be). The times offered fertile grounds for the Sadly, No! variety of blogging, at a time when there wasn’t much of it (blogging that is — inane commentary predates this blog and the internet). Bush II was a terrible president, and those who supported him and were around in those days, whether they fancied themselves honest intellectuals (David Frum), always wrong timepieces (Bill Kristol), plain crazy alternate reality would-be economists (Donald Luskin), or those who decided that throwing away their reputation in the service of incompetent power (Colin Powell, Tony Blair), deserved every profanity-filled blog post ever written.

The army of court jesters that also appeared (Justin Darr and Amber Pawlik come to mind) was the icing on the cake. So from that day on, and thanks to a large number of extremely funny and great writers over the years, the blog continued. Eventually, as student life became working life, and as working life became married life, and married life became father of 1 and then father of 2 life, I had to, as we say at work, prioritize. So that over the last few years 99% of my contribution has been paying the bills. (Granted the traffic no longer requires much bandwidth, but a database that comprises over 800K comments and over 9,000 posts does limit low-cost options).

Fact checking Donald Trump is probably most like explaining gravity to a chicken. Neither one cares, and even if you did find the best way of explaining it ever, it wouldn’t make a difference. Some Republican officials may pretend to be shocked at Trump’s behavior, but corporations and rich folks can never have enough money so unless Trump starts pushing for an increase to the minimum wage he need not worry. As for the Fox News viewers contingent, I can’t decide if they believe everything Trump says, or if they are simply happy every one of his pronouncements is a big fat “fuck you” to people they don’t like (which is the overwhelming majority of Americans at this point). So as much as Trump and his enablers can never get enough ridicule, it’s been harder to find the time and energy to contribute.

A lot of really awesome blogs continue to be around — and while no one may care what I think, I don’t see how one gets by not reading LGM, No More Mister Nice Blog, or alicublog. Many of the blogs I read daily many moons ago are still around, though I often wonder why. When things have reached a point where your blog consists exclusively of open threads, daily reminders that self-driving cars are a stupid idea, and posts that would have been interesting had they gone on for more than 3 sentences rather than limiting themselves to Twitter-length (because why not I guess?), then why bother at all?

At various times over my years of Sadly, No! neglect I’ve come back to say I am back — only to disappear again. So my aim for this first 2018 post is simply to say hello. Let’s see what happens.

Which for all intents and purposes is an apology for the fact that I got nothing, and have been looking at that empty bucket for nigh on three weeks hoping that one morning I will awake and find within sustenance or inspiration, but each day has ended in a failure to see the worthiness in an attempt to find a gag writhing within the daily assault on the body politic, both currently occupying the same bag and being set upon by cloven hooved and cliven brained reprobates for whom an entire new lexicon is going to have to be established to deal accurately with the new norms that are being committed to the cultural asylum on a daily basis, so that some new, coarser, and more agregious ones can take their place on the morrow.

Simply keeping up with the Madness is nearly a full time job, and as I may have mentioned It is my belief that one of my favored vectors of humor is hanging by a thread which is all I will say about that for fear of contributing….

So in any event, tapping back into some Sadly Lore and to justify this exposition…It is now finished and if you so choose, you may now comment upon a thread about nothing…

It is not every damn week that one gets to witness a near total eclipse of the freaking sun and watch a storm be upgraded from tropical to category III hurricane headed straight for the Texas coast within the very same week, and the fact that some will get to experience both the totality of eclipse and eyewall of Hurricane from the safety of their own backyard is simply fascinating to me…I mean, what the fuck are the odds?

I am not a betting man per se, but I do appreciate probability, the confluence of unrelated events, the evangelical nuttiness of Texas, and cannot help but wonder a couple of things…I have had to wonder how quickly the Fundigelical Swiss accounts have been fattening during the first year of the Victory of the TurDumpo and any number of cynical promises he might fullfill for them, such as (for interest and shits@grins™) the second coming of jeebus xmas, the whole revelations endgame fantasy baseball shootin arn match™ among a holee effing hosts of other grifting opportunities all the while returning Amercia to her antebellum roots after draping his cock and balls fishing tackle upon every doornkob in the place, you know, because he can…I would apologize for sharing these thoughts brief though they are, but as a wise man once stated, misery loves company…

Anyway for those of you who might be in the path of harms way, I hope that you have battened down the hatches gotten the hell out of the way and are otherwise safe and secure, because shit is going to get real…And I will have to admit that I am just a bit jealous, because I am a weather nerd and would like to actually see one of those…I am always jealous of that one weatherchannel dude who films from the beach as the eye crosses overhead…

Anyhow, landfall has been made:
https://icons.wxug.com/data/weather-maps/radar/united-states/united-states-current-radar.gif

Stay safe gulf coast Texans…

In 22 days some of us in these United States will get to observe one of Natures most amazing displays, a total eclipse of the sun. Now the event itself happens with a surprising amount of frequency But they pop up in random parts of the world and are only visible in a narrow band along the path cut by the shadow of the moon as it crosses between planet and star…For those of us not within that narrow band we will be able to observe a partial eclipse, and those are very cool as well…but this one is as close as I been to one, and 94% of the sun blocked will be impressive but this being possibly the first thing I ever put on my bucket list, before I ever knew such a thing existed, compels me to conspire to make an attempt to make it to totality. And I would suggest that any of you reading this make  a similar attempt if you are able…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse

That is the adorableness that is the kitten, now, young lady cat that I rescued a few months ago, and I realized that I had not yet posted a shot online….At least not this morning…So here we go…

 

 

Ok so I thought I’d share the funniest thing I saw online in possibly the last six months…

And not only because I have recently resolved a personal kitten shortage, and have become reacquainted with all of the wonderful if annoying manifestations of the feline personality, that present themselves such as to guarantee that they are in the main, each one, their own being. As in “U-fucking-neek!” And as the little one is a bit too young for swearing, I’ll still have to figure out what the translation into words of some of her activities may end up being in time…

The water bowl not 20 minutes filled has been relocated at least 22 inches from its initial placement, and it is now as I write being relocated another 6 inches to the right…And this of course is directly in the way of a path to the door, as if placed to trip me, should I have not witnessed the change and changed the mental map as a result…

Now what this has to do with the world? nothing really, just a pleasant diversion from the increasing fantasy land of ‘Republican Governance,’ The Ryan Administration addition, and now that the dishes are done and the water for the potatoes a-boil we can continue…Where I once woke up with a start wrapped nicely in an are you effing me blanket, things have mellowed into a Yeah this is not in fact a dream, The withering peniled tiny fingered collossal Ass still bestrides the world like that mashup of every portrayal of horrible leadership ever turned into a work of art…From Plato to Shakespeare to Twain and beyond, an archetypal figure of a man well beyond his depth and defiantly ignorant of the fact…graced pages in story to provide structure, coherence, frustration and realism, with the intent to distract us a bit from our own troubles not to cause them, to prepare us for possibilities not necessarily demand response…

This is where the train stops today, because breakfast and coffee await, And I am still failing to get a proper night of rest…

Take care friends and sieze every bit of life out of today, And hopefully after shitting the dog and spending some time in good company and getting some cookie dough made, the muse will return restored!

XOXOX,
K

want a million places?!?;

 

We’re a troll society now, a kakistocracy. 2016 was months of people going “If you elect that woman, we are going to make the next four years HELL. Here’s a preview.” No wonder so many people retreated into A Pox on Both Their Houses. There was enough awful being thickly enough spread that it probably did seem like it was coming from everywhere.

And it did seem to work and the hows and whys have been something of a personal obsession of mine since that shit went down….And as I am currently blessed with an abundance of time with limited distraction the ciphering of this conundrum has become something of an obsession,and takes a bit of time….And aside from the usual bag of bullshit and lies from which our society has always been composed, pressures that have always been extant, it remains a fascination that I can’t shake loose of…. A constant that is in another sense, infinite. And in this sense it represents the universal… and is some senses the absolute…I, being a curious sort, have wondered what ancient was compelled to solve a problem and spent his time working out the relationship between a circle and its diameter, and while I vaguely remember that there was an old greek who was credited with its codification, there are other theories as well: Aliens, a Time Traveling Future Man™.*

In any event, that fascination has crept back into the foreground, In part I believe to serve as a distraction from the day to day completely frustrating obsession with making sense of the Trumpnominon™

And it occurred to me the last night as I was attempting to see how much of that number that I could claw back from memory, and now I know…

*given the amount of time I have spent attempting to memorize the number to 20 or more siginficant digits

An example of some stuff I missed while shitting the dog, that was transpiring on another blog in my absence title stolen from stream of commentary yakishness! I happen to have been well acquainted with a few of these goofs and this is something that not only am I upset to have missed in real time, with every likelihood of having torpedo’d the groove /Occam wont let me lie!

But that did not occur, and what transpired in a short period of time was brilliant…And I can almost be certain that it was not choreographed in any fashion, which if it had been would have been brilliant…

• Reply•Share ›
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Cole D’Biers • 2 hours ago
Derp of the mornin’ to y’all
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benjiku/- Cole D’Biers • 2 hours ago
Trump want throne and dancing now

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Gummo/- Cole D’Biers • 2 hours ago
Gee, I wonder why that is, moron.

Good morning, protesting people.

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Moe_Szyslak/- Cole D’Biers • 2 hours ago
When Saudi Arabia goes, and it will, it’ll make Syria look like a walk in the park.

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dmark/- Moe_Szyslak • 2 hours ago
$50 a barrel oil makes it all that much closer.

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SufferinSuccotash, Nut Job/- Moe_Szyslak • 2 hours ago
Lots of foreign workers in SA, many of whom are Shia.

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dmark/- SufferinSuccotash, Nut Job • 2 hours ago
“It’s Always Sunni In Saudi Arabia”
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SufferinSuccotash, Nut Job/- dmark • 2 hours ago
Until the Shi’ite hits the fan.

It is early in the AM at the hunkered down Midwestern Regional Offices™ for the once and hopefully future industrial-grade snark dispensary: Sadly,No! And I just got up. As in, (is there still coffee in the pot?) cool! Might as well get up, heat some up and listen to the sounds of a spring morning in a charming University town in Gilead in the state from which comes our once and future king Penceslas™!

On a morning like this, well most of them recently, to be perfectly honest, start this way…Heat up or make some effing coffee and catch up on any fresh hell that might have transpired while off the clock (my nickname for sleep, when she will have me, that is); which means getting on line and discovering that the Internet still works, the lights are still on; and if lucky: Finding the adolescent feline beast a-purr in bed next to me as happened to be the case a few some odd minutes ago. Following that a quick dash across the ‘trons is in order and a catchup and cleanup of previous threads in which I may have left traces or questions unanswered when I bounced.

That finished I decided to look in on Mr Edroso, as it had been a couple of days and whenever we happen to luck into his graces is a good day whether at the Voice or at his own Place. Which is where this morning started with a post titled: YOU THINK YOU CAN KILL ME EASY? Graced with a picture of Olivier from his turn in a movie that I believe is called the Marathon man, a mid seventies think piece and possibly one of the better films of the era and a veritable South African Diamond mine or Memetic Trope-ulon if you will for that late 20th century Cold War catch in our collective throat, that we thought we might clear out with a healthy cough that phlegmed out Reagan, and since that didn’t work and because we have gone round the bend once again we Try, once again Hacking and Wheezing and finally coughing up Trump.

So I manage to get to the front page, see the picture of Olivier and get this far before firing up this tab

Don’t get your hopes up. As I keep saying, he gives them the policies they want, and they let him grift; that’s the arrangement. Why would they blow the deal now?

I know, Pence; but the American people — or at least a near-plurality of them — didn’t vote for Barebones Feargod; most of them findsmall-smiling Mother-wived Bible creeps like him as repulsive as you do; if they didn’t, they’d have nominated Ted Cruz.

The whole thing is a well engineered delivery system for a finely…not gonna get that one to port sings! But this small-smiling Mother-wived bible creeps along with Barebones Feargod are two for the ages in one clause. They stopped me in my tracks and motivated me to pen this nonsense…So I should probably finish the piece, get back to sleep, give this one a look or walk through upon waking. I swear to dog, if that had been my only exposure to the wonder that is Roy, coming across a reminder would always bring a smile to my face….Thanks man!