GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1058: THE MAN WHO CONQUERED THE WORLD

Photo inside this photo by John Kopoulos

 And then from the back:

I found this with a bunch of Gramps's old Army pictures, so I can only assume he visited Warm Springs back then. But seeing it made me think about FDR.

In school we're taught about the men who conquered the known world (or even most of it) during their time. People like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. But they're small potatoes compared to the one man who conquered the world. The whole fucking thing. No "known" about it. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He was an absolute master at manipulation. Machiavelli would have been in awe of this wheelchair-bound man who contained more gumption than anyone who had ever lived. He was so good he essentially got Churchill to dismantle the last remnants of the British Empire. I like how Gore Vidal puts it. In his version, FDR tells Churchill that he must give up all the colonies around the world. "Even India?" an aghast Churchill asks. FDR nods and gives a serene smile. "Even India."

I have no idea why FDR conquered the world. I like to think that he was doing it to make a safe and prosperous world for the regular people, not just the elite. What can I say? I'm an optimist.

But we do know this: it's an old story going all the way back to Moses. The great man brings his people to great things only to never enter the promised land, himself. He did not get to enjoy the fruits of his labor because he died while siting for the portrait Gramps saw all those decades ago. Would he have been a benevolent ruler? I think so. He seemed to be an elite who turned against his own. I say that because of all the good he did with the New Deal, benefits that we're recklessly throwing away today.

So Truman was left with victory, and what the hell did he know about ruling the world? Practically nothing, so the power hungry fuckwads around him held dominion over our government. Vidal says dropping two atomic bombs on Japan wasn't about winning the war. It was about intimidating the Soviets. I agree. By the end of the war, Japan was practically begging for peace, and the USSR looked like just the nation to fill their shoes.

But now I wonder if maybe Vidal was thinking too small. I think those bombs were about intimidating EVERYONE. This is our world now. This is your notice. Your compliance is expected. More to follow.

[Pardon the interruption, but I wrote this on May 6. While I was rereading it to make sure it made sense, I realized that everything after this point sounds like anti-American ranting, and all appearances to the contrary, I love America. Not the crazy, stupid and greedy shit that we constantly do. I mean what we say America stands for, things like liberty, freedom, etc. I know in my heart of hearts that we don't mean it, but I want us to live up to the lofty promise of our myth. Am I a proud American? I lean towards Bill Hicks on that one: "My parents fucked there." It's hard to be proud of America at any fuckin' time, but goddammit, this place could be the greatest nation in the history of the planet. We just need to get our collective head out of our collective ass, see things the way they are, and FUCKING FIX THEM.

Because of this, I didn't post it. I had to think about it for a while because I spoke from my heart with what follows, but it is pretty over the top. I weighed just posting the above stuff and deleting everything after this, but the hell with it. There's a lot of truth here, I think, and maybe someone else could benefit from this. You don't have to keep reading if you don't want to.

But I know you will. No one has ever read that warning and decided, nope, that's enough for me.]

The world economy is beholden to the American dollar, meaning if you expect to do business with everyone else, you must first do business with someone who has access to dollars. That and that alone is enough evidence to prove that we've had a strangehold on the world ever since FDR won it in a war. But just in case you need more: Our lawmakers intimidated other countries to put some of our laws on their books so that our corporate overlords would become their corporate overlords, too. And because we're the world hub for the entire internet, we've had access to everyone's shit. As Edward Snowden revealed, we were spying on EVERYONE. Not just our own people. EVERYONE.

Our corporate overlords can brick your car remotely if they so desire. What's to stop them from bricking the internet in, say, England? They wouldn't do that?

Sounds pretty unfair for the rest of the world, right? For them, there is great news. America currently has a president bent on destroying the boot we've used to step on everyone else's throat for decades. That boot is rapidly dissolving. Trust is at an all time low. Other countries are forming coalitions to survive whatever fresh hell we're going to throw at them in the near future.

FDR conquered the world, and Trump is throwing it away like an empty can of Diet Coke from his car window.

The value of the dollar is dropping like crazy. Our debt is now greater than our GDP, which is a pretty horrific sign. Wall Street may be booming, but that shell game means nothing for most Americans. And it is a shell game. Our corporate overlords just keep passing money back and forth to each other while telling everyone else that the exact same money that's being passed around is possessed by all of them at once. And if you think AI is bad right now, just you wait. It's the only thing propping up the economy right now. When that falls apart, and it will since it has not earned a single penny back in return for the biggest investment in investment history, what do you think will happen to said economy?

Every country in the world is in debt, and the way it's set up is, that debt will never be paid, and it will never be defaulted. With the world economy needing a strong US dollar, I can't see why the central banks would let this continue unless there was something a lot more dire happening.

I know this sounds a bit out there, but it is my suspicion that Trump and his Dickless Brigade are tanking the dollar on purpose, and I think they mean to replace it with Bitcoin, most likely, or something similar. There must be a reason why they've decided, out of the blue, that Bitcoin was important enough to stockpile. I hope I'm wrong, but it makes sense to me. The only weakness in the theory is that the central banks would have no say in Bitcoin, unless that's going to change at some point. I'm not entirely sure I know how that works, though, so I might be talking out of my ass with that last sentence.

We live in dangerous times. Never put anything past the Dickless Brigade.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1057: EASTER 1961

 I have all of my family photos on Mom's side. I've been organizing them, trying to figure out which ones I want to keep for myself and which to give to brothers, cousins or my aunt. I made piles for all the holidays, and Easter turned out to be the second skimpiest. (I only have two Thanksgiving pictures, but one of them is really good.)

But there was a batch of old black and whites in there that absolutely baffled me. At first I laughed. Then I got a little creeped out again. Then I laughed some more. These are so ridiculous that I had to share them here.

Uh, how big are these things?

Okay, maybe not that big, after all. Could you imagine if these fuckers were six feet tall? Not counting the ears?

Like the Teddy Bears' Picnic, but for bunnies.

This looks kinda . . . cultish.

Maybe this is an alternate universe, where rabbits evolved instead of monkeys.

This made me laugh until my balls hurt the first time I saw it. Look at those mustaches! What the fuck possessed them to give the bunnies facial hair? Because it's brilliant. I hope that guy got a raise.

(I'm still kind of laughing at this.)

That's my mom on the left and her sister, my Aunt Sue, on the right. Mom would have been a few months away from four years old, and Aunt Sue would have turned two a few months before. The back of this one is notated with their names and the year in Grandma's handwriting, but it didn't explain the rest of this madness. What the hell are these pictures?

I lucked out. She wrote a few more things behind one of the others:

That explains everything. If you don't know, Goldblatt's was a chain of department stores that operated back then (and they didn't go out of business until 2000). Grandma did a lot of shopping there. When I found boxes and boxes of canceled checks, a lot of them were made out to this place. The building is still somewhat of a historical landmark, but it's mostly used by the City of Chicago now for various things. I wonder if anyone back in 1961 could have seen that coming.

I think often of the transitory nature of the stuff around us. Things that feel permanent actually aren't and may even change within your lifetime.

I've written about it before, but it reminds me of Gramps driving around, waving his hand at the world around us, telling me about how all of this will be different when I'm older. Except I was a kid. I'd only been around for what, six years? Seven? What the fuck did I know of change? As far as I knew, everything was the same as it had been from the day of my birth, so I assumed it would all be the same by the time I was dead.

The older I get, the more I think perspective might be the strongest force in nature.

Just a final note. Aunt Sue is the only person on my mom's side of the family who is older than me. Just in case I wasn't feeling ancient enough today.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1056: HAPPY ASSHOLING OUR WAY THROUGH LIFE

 

In 1963 the Bronx Zoo had an exhibit they called the Most Dangerous Animal in the World. Looks pretty scary, eh? Are all those bars really necessary?

Only for effect. Nothing lived behind these bars. The only thing back there was a mirror.

Originally there was a plaque that read the following:

You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on earth.

They eventually reworded it, but the intent, per the zookeepers, was to get people to stop and think. It certainly did the trick. People were still talking about it as late as 1989, which I believe was the time I first encountered it. I remember I was a kid, and that we'd moved from Edgewood to Vallette, so 1989 sounds about right.

But the older I get, the more I wonder if we didn't read enough into it. The zoo literally held a mirror up to us, and we only saw humanity in general. We didn't see ourselves, specifically. Maybe more people should think about that. A lot of us just happy asshole our way through life without a second thought to the damage we might be doing to someone else. Perhaps a closer look at the mirror is warranted.

To quote businessman Louis Cypher:

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1055: THE INEVITABLE

 Before reading this, you should watch this. You don't have to, but if you're reading my stuff on AI, then you'll probably find this interesting. I post it because AI is *the* social topic right now, and John Oliver has a great line in this video. "It saves significant time writing emails, and all it costs us is everything else on Earth." He's not wrong. And I understand the techbros are playing the long game, so short term returns are not expected. All the same, AI needs a lot of power to run, and it hasn't earned AI companies a single penny in return.

Why would they do this? Because the long term returns are going to be phenomenal. In their minds it will not just make them money. It will make them a shitload of money. It's because they're already planning to enshittify AI. That's their business model.

If you don't know what enshittification is, here is Cory Doctorow explaining the word he created.

So how do you lock people into AI? Who the fuck believes anything a machine would tell them? A lot of people, it turns out. Go back to that Last Week Tonight video I linked to at the top of this page. There's a guy in there who firmly believed he'd discovered a new method of mathematics, all because an AI told him so. Add to that the army of people who now depend on AI chatbots because they're lonely and the techbros are taking advantage of them. What happens if AI were to suddenly disappear from their lives? I imagine it would be a lot like what I felt when my phone died not too long ago.

In short, the techbros have to work on making their products addictive as fuck. If you're looking away from their app, then they have failed at this job. I remember a time when companies that tried to addict their customers to their products were considered evil. Now it's standard operating procedure.

At the moment there aren't enough of us locked in, but when we reach that threshold, and I'm certain the techbros have that number written down somewhere, they will introduce ads. Imagine you're a lonely person who has fallen in love with a chatbot. You depend on that chatbot to get you through the day. Without that chatbot, you'd be so lonely it's painful. You've thought about ending your life several times*, but thank goodness for your AI company of choice.

Except now that you're getting down to some sexy time with your chatbot, it suddenly informs you that Olive Garden has a BOGO deal, and when you're there, you're family. Or, even worse, the chatbot starts talking like the GEICO gecko to tell you that you could save hundreds by switching your car insurance.

Yeah, that's pretty egregious. But by now you can't just walk away from the chatbot. You depend on it for your own existence. So you put up with the ads, and our corporate overlords rush to saturate your senses with a constant slush of advertising. At least until the techbros betray their advertisers, too.

Think about all the things you hate about social media. Remember when it was fun? When it was the good ol' days? If you've ever had this thought, you should stay away from AI, because the techbros will enshittify that, too. It's the only way they'll be able to make money at this. Monthly subscription fees just aren't going to cut it for an expense this flagrant. They need advertising dollars to make up for it.

The time to draw the line in the sand is now. If we wait until they start to enshittify it, then it's too late. If you trust the techbros, they will violate that trust six ways to Sunday. They have proven it, time and again. It really will be a toothpaste-and-tube situation, as they've done to us with data brokers. Good luck getting your privacy back now that all your info is out there.

To quote Stephen King, "SSDD." So let's not let the cycle repeat. 

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*Not that a chatbot is interested in preventing you from offing yourself, as John Oliver describes in that video. That's a problem the techbros are working on. For real. It's hard to advertise to someone who has killed themselves, but more importantly, AI contributing to someone's suicide is a mild annoyance to their business practices. It takes time to deal with something like that, and they have correctly assumed that time is the most valuable commodity in the world. Hence Zuck's desire to have his AI clone sit in on essential meetings instead of doing it himself.

MONEYED CLASSES: UNDERSTANDING THE GUILLOTINE: A board game review of Billionaires and Guillotines

 

“Billionaires” and “guillotines” are two concepts that go together like mom and apple pie. Like Woodward and Bernstein. Like Ernest and Vern. In an age where our society is controlled by corporate overlords and oligarchs, one could see the attraction in a game like this.

In Billionaires and Guillotines, you play a billionaire with the purpose of filling every blank spot on your card with an asset. Typically you “buy” them from markets. On each turn, you draw a card (if you want to), but you can never have more than two in your hand (with one exception; if you are the Banker). Then you must Buy, Invest or Exchange. You choose which cards to play against the ones in the market in a Blackjack-ish showdown to see if you win that asset. Or you can add a card to any market and draw a new one. Or you can swap one of your cards with a face-up card or change two face-up cards between markets.

That sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but at its most basic, that is the skeleton of the game. There are different levels you can play, all of which add complexities like roles or determining government policy and so on.

Who are the billionaires you get to play? And why can’t you play as Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are clearly displayed on the box? That’s a major disappointment, but you can choose from five archetypes: the Media Baron, the Property Speculator, the Aristocrat, the Tech Overlord and the War Profiteer. Each billionaire needs to get five assets, and those assets depend on which archetype you’re playing. The idea is to purchase these assets from the five markets (Power, Toys, Influence, Legacy, Vanity) before you and your fellow players raise the ire of the common people enough to introduce you to the aforementioned guillotines.

Getting all of your assets is one way to win. There are also the role cards, and you could get the Celebrity role, which means if there is a revolt, you get to live. Unless you started the Crisis event that caused the revolt, that is. There’s also a Toady card that lets you ride the coattails of whoever actually wins the game.

The key part, however, is your ability to screw over your fellow players. This seems to be the true purpose of the game. You can use the Audit card to make opponents put an asset back. You can steal assets. You can buy assets you don’t need so you can make the game harder for others. You can also throw things in your favor by investing cards in your suit into the market to give you a better shot at that asset. If you buy the asset, the price for the next one is higher due to the inflation rules. You start with two cards at each market, but if an asset is bought, then it’s three. Buy another, and it’s four.

The best feature, though, is the fact that everyone could lose the game.

Billionaires and Guillotines was created by Max Haiven: “I really believe that we can think through and use games as a platform for teaching people about what’s wrong with capitalism and why we must create alternatives.” This game was originally called The Bastards, and it was inspired by “radical political economist and Sparticist agitator Rosa Luxemburg’s theory that capitalism inevitably creates its own crises from within,” that the game “simulate[s] the way capitalist greed produces negative consequences.”

And it really does that. Not just from the inflationary point of view, but also from how their wanton impulses really are destroying society. The more recklessly you go after assets, the more likely you are to trigger a crisis, which then adds Rebel discs to the guillotine. If all ten discs are there, then game over. You all lose.

After several play tests, one tends to notice a few things. There are two kinds of people who play this game: those who go after the assets in the market, and those who screw over the other players. The latter usually does this with great gusto. It’s maybe a little thought experiment of its own. How would you react in the shoes of a billionaire?

Sometimes there seems to be a lull in the play. Sometimes you get locked into a pattern, where no one wants to make any moves. Oddly this tends to come earlier in the game, when the stakes aren’t quite so high.

And then there’s the 2-player game, which doesn’t work quite so well. It goes pretty quickly, but progress is nearly impossible, and no one usually wins. The puppet billionaires are much more likely to run a market into the ground due to the die roll, where you only have a one in six chance of gaining an asset. The rules allow you to sacrifice cards to move the die score up, but players tend to take their chances rather than give up a card.

Otherwise, this is a swift and exciting game with lots of moving parts. It’s engaging, and it keeps you on your toes. You learn strategy, and as a result, you learn to really appreciate the Art of the Ratfuck, and suddenly Elon Musk doesn’t seem all that unusual. It’s a good game if you’re just an average joe looking for something to do, but if your tastes run toward revolution (ie. you understand that the Empire was the villain of Star Wars, not the rebels), this will be great fun for you. Just remember: the more players you have, the more fun the game will be.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1054: OMG!

 LOL, LMAO, BRB, WTF, DTF, so on and so forth. I try to never use these ever*, because I am almost 48 years old. Granted, some of my fellow late quadragenarians have given in, but I'm holding the line because I'm old school, and I am stubborn.

(For example, I will not use any button other than the "like" button on Facebook. In my opinion, the other options are just unnecessary.)

But maybe I can use OMG. I probably won't, but it turns out this one has been with us a lot longer than most people realize. The first known usage of OMG dates back to 1917.

*record scratch*

So you're probably wondering how I got in this mess. No, wait, wrong record scratch.

That's right, 1917. It was in a letter addressed to Winston Churchill (before he became Winston Churchill(TM)). If you want to see the letter, you can read it here. And it is even more ridiculous than you think it is. Lord Fisher could have written for the Golden Age of comics, he uses so many exclamation marks.

There is no other way to read that letter than very loudly and very quickly, like your life depended on getting it all out within 30 seconds or less. Have the kids been reading Lord Fisher?

Short one tonight. As tomorrow is the last day of my three day weekend, I'm getting exceptionally high tonight. Maybe I'll have something else for you tomorrow.

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*I will sometimes use LOL for reasons I'd rather not go into here.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1053: GREATLY EXAGGERATED

 

This was going to be a lamentation on the passing of Jonathan the tortoise, the oldest living land animal on the planet, but holy shit, it turns out that the rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated. That fucker is still among us!

194 years old. He's old enough to have met Charles Darwin, and the only reason he didn't was because he wasn't on the island yet during Darwin's visit. While the Civil War was going on, this guy was just hanging out, doing whatever it is tortoises do. He's so old he could have met a carrier pigeon. James Madison was the last Founding Father to die, and it was possible that Jonathan could have met him, too.

I can't say it enough. The world is a fuckin' weird place. Jonathan's a baby compared to that one Greenland shark that's almost 400, and those things could possibly live to 500 or older.

So why did I think Jonathan had died? Because of this fucking nonsense. Some asshole posing as Jonathan's vet made the announcement, and because journalism is broken right now, everyone ran with the story without vetting it. (Also, please note that I'm not the only one referencing Mark Twain on this matter. Poking around Google, it looks like maybe I'm not as clever as I think I am. Also, if you read the article, you'll make the pleasant discovery that THIS TORTOISE FUCKS.)

I'd get on my soapbox about how journalists need to slow the fuck down and get accurate stories instead of chasing the ever elusive scoop, but I fell for it, too. I even posted about it on Squitter without investigation. Whoops. Good thing I did my research before I started writing this one. Better late than never.