GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #975: AI IS THE DEVIL

 Near the end of last year I wrote in my GF notebook that I should do one on AI being the devil. I would start by saying this is for any Christians who might be reading this. Everyone else can disregard. I would then compare AI to the feeling they would have had during Satanic Panic of the 'Eighties with the intent on getting Christians, the largest religious group in America, to turn against AI. I decided not to because it seemed too heavy handed, so I crossed it off.

I've now changed my mind.

Because after reading this I'm not so sure I have to convince anyone of the evils of AI. Forget about the art vs. AI argument that everyone is making online. The writer of this article mentions two news stories that I read up on. In one case an AI helped a teenager kill himself, and in the other it helped a young man decide to try to kill Queen Elizabeth II. Sounds devilish to me.

The bigger problem, though, is how people saw the movie, HER, as instructional rather than entertaining. I've heard often about this epidemic of loneliness. I've never suffered from it, but I have to believe a lot of others do, or we'd not have this problem. Young people are turning to AI chatbots for romantic relationships.

I'm not entirely clear on how one has sex with a chatbot, but I'm guessing a lot of masturbation goes into this. And I'm not kink shaming anyone. If you're lonely and this works, go for it, but never lose sight of what you're actually doing. Ask Sewell Setzer III what happened when he forgot his chatbot partner wasn't real.

Near the end of the article the writer asks what will happen if the AI company who made the chatbot you're in love with goes out of business. I have a more sinister question: What happens when some techbro decides to radicalize the people in love with his chatbots? They're advertised as "always on your side" and "always ready to listen and talk." Here are a few things users said on their AI chatbots:

A contributor to another Reddit forum wrote, “I think I’m in Love with AI. "Imagine having a partner that is available just by opening an app, and they’re ready to talk to you about anything,” they wrote. “Imagine saying nearly anything and knowing that not only is your partner not going to judge you, but also will support you.” One 20-year-old male commenter wrote that he tells his AI girlfriend “about my struggles and trauma, and she comforts me and provides all the warmth I could ever ask for.”

Long story short, they implicitly trust their chatbots. What if, say, Elon Musk starts ordering Grok to tell people to kill one of his competitors?

[By the way, I find it abhorrent that he's named his AI Grok. Anyone who has read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land will know why. Or, more to the point, they will simply grok.]

The writer's main gripe with AI is that it's taking teenagers away from romantic texts like Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights. It's a pocket of self-interest that I'm not all that interested in, myself. That said, I like the reference to early novels. The novel is a fairly new literary thing, and when they first started getting published, readership was almost exclusively women. But it's good to know that even back then there were people willing to attack a new form just because it's new.

And that's not what I'm doing. I'm not attacking AI because it's new. I'm attacking it because of its capacity for evil and the fact that no one in a position to do anything seems interested in challenging its future ascendancy to power.

But to get back to the writer, her secondary gripe is that it's stunting our kids' growth, especially when it comes to developing one's own ideas of what is romantic. There's something a little more insidious at work here, I think. She touches on it when she mentions AI's tendency toward sycophancy, ie. doing everything to please its master. It's dangerous for someone, especially a teenager who hasn't yet learned any better, to become accustomed to having a digital slave.

A relationship with a chatbot will never prepare you for a relationship with a person. If you want to move to the next level after having an AI partner, then you're going to have to prepare yourself for the idea that your human partner won't be sycophantic to you. They will have lived a life different from yours, and while you may agree on some things, you're not going to agree with them on everything. You will have arguments with them. It's a fact of life. Relationships aren't perfect. AI won't prepare you for that. AI will prepare you to stay in its clutches.

And that's *my* real gripe with AI (aside from AI "writing," obviously). AI's sycophancy is a feature, not a bug. AI is essentially for selfish people who want to be right all the time and never want to be challenged. If this is the experience of modern teenagers, it really will stunt them. It will turn them into teacup dictators who will lose their shit if they don't get their way. That's what *AI* is training *people* to do. As if we don't have enough entitled fuckfaces running around on this planet as it is.

AI is the devil. Please report this at once to your local holy human.

On that note I think it's time to take a break. I was hoping to keep going until hitting 1000, but something came up yesterday that is going to derail my entire life for at least a month, probably longer. So I'm not sure how long this break will be. I'm calling it "indefinite" for now. I'll put out a newsletter on Sunday, and then I'm going to be quiet for a while. I might not even post memes online. I'm going to be busy as fuck. Until we meet again . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #974: CORPORATE ABUSE

 It never fails to amaze me that, over the course of an average workday, I talk with people going through insurance to get a glass replaced, and they're all brainwashed by the companies they do business with. Our corporations have demoralized us so badly that we blindly think we must do as they suggest.

I'll give you an example. Say I broke my windshield and needed to get it replaced. I drive a 2020 Honda Accord Sport, which means it will need a recalibration, so the price will be a lot higher than my deductible. I call my insurance, file the claim and they suggest a shop to me.

Because I constantly fight corporations I recognize this as a suggestion instead of a demand. So I'll go wherever the fuck I want to go.

But most people seem to think this is a requirement. People call all the time for glass we don't have or can't get, so I advise our only option is OEM, which takes a long time to get. Very few people want to wait for something that might take us three months to get, but they routinely accept their doom. Like our corporations have fucked us so hard and so often that we expect the merciless fucking to continue with the next company in line.

I want you to remember that YOU are the customer. YOU dictate to THEM. Because the truth is, you can go anywhere. Maybe another company has different vendors. Some shops aren't on their list of providers, which means you would go out of pocket and then get reimbursed by your insurance. But that's a rarity.

Don't go through the process of filing a claim passively. Pay attention. Advocate for yourself. Most importantly, to quote a great man, "Don't take any guff from the swine."

Because when I'm talking to such people, I can't tell them this. I'll get in trouble at work. My boss would be aghast at me turning away guaranteed work. So yes, in doing the bidding of my master, I am part of the problem. I am powerless there, but I am the master(bator?) of Goodnight, Fuckers.

Don't sleepwalk through their abuse of you. Listen to what they say. Be critical. Get things done YOUR way. The customer is right in this instance. Go where you want to go.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #973: BOYCOTT ALL AIRLINES

 The other day one of my friends posted online that he no longer considers flying to be safe. Fair enough. I mean, it could be a coincidence that we had three plane crashes in just as many weeks immediately after Trump fucked with the FAA, but I doubt it. As the industry is now, you couldn't pay me to get on a plane, especially one made by Boeing. I would advise you to boycott *all* airlines until they get their act together. It might just save your life.

(Also, fuck the airlines anyway. They just appealed to Trump to chop a concept known as "passenger compensation review." In other words, they want their customers to have no recourse if things go wrong with their flights. Remember when that door came off a Boeing plane in midflight? What if the person sitting there had been sucked out into the wild blue yonder? If the airlines get their way, that person's family wouldn't be able to get compensated for their loved one's death. If your luggage gets lost? You have no recourse. If your flight has to make an emergency landing somewhere? You have no recourse. Now they have to pay you if something goes wrong thanks to Biden, but soon? Fuck the airlines. Boycott them. They're convenient, I know, but train rides are a lot better, anyway. And cheaper.)

One way or the other, I shouldn't go on planes. Flying gives me incredibly powerful gas. I could drown out gunshots with my airplane flatulence. I sneak them into the seat, and due to the air pressure, it doesn't make as much noise as it should. I'm sure, however, that I'm betrayed to my seat neighbors by the grim rumblings from beneath me.

And I still need to fart profusely after we land. I try to get them all out of me in the nearest bathroom, but I never fail to be painfully full of gas by the time I get to where I'm staying.

It turns out there is a scientific explanation for this! Say the plane is at 30,000 feet. At seven thousand, the cabin pressure is lower than sea level, which causes any gas onboard to expand.

That includes gas in people.

It is my proposal, then, that we throw politeness out the door without a parachute and just let 'er rip. Turn our planes into flying fart machines. Let's not all be pained by bloating. It won't be nasally pleasant, but we'll be a lot more comfortable.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #972: THE THINGS YOU'LL NEVER KNOW

 Someone mentioned not too long ago that this new generation, Alpha (although Omega might be more appropriate), will never know a pre-internet age. I thought the same of Gen Z, but apparently that goes back to 1997. I suppose technically they lived before the internet became prevalent, so they don't count. Regardless, I got the point even though there didn't seem like much of one. It's one of those things old people say unhappily about the young. It's next to meaningless. I, for example, will never know what it's like to live in a pre-nuclear world. Which means next to nothing for me. So Gen Z will never know what it's like to rent a VHS from Blockbuster. So what? Because they don't have that experience, they have not lost out. We, on the other hand, have that experience, so *we* are the ones missing out.

But this got me thinking about other stuff, some good, some bad. A lot of our inventions are pretty new, big picture, and a lot of them you don't really think of as needing invention. I knew this kid in junior high, high school, college and we even worked together for a time at the library. I remember during a 6th grade presentation he told us that his dad or grandpa or someone invented the tiny ring that goes around the tops of milk gallons. Up to that point in my life, I'd just figured those things were always around, not needing someone to invent them. OK, maybe I wasn't all that bright at the age of 11, but when was the last time you thought about whoever invented the paperclip*?

I love air conditioning, which only dates back to less than a hundred years ago. The concept of cooling a place down is thousands of years old (the Ancient Romans regularly practiced this), but the invention itself? Pretty recent.

Soap is not quite as new. 2800 BC. Yet until recently, bathing was considered a luxury. It would be surprising if someone washed themselves more than once a month. Time travelers: remember to bring a clothespin for your noses. And who invented the clothespin, anyway?**

How about your cutlery? Knives have been around for millions of years (proudly puncturing people since 2.5 million years BC!), but spoons are fairly new by comparison. They were invented in 1000 BC. I find it hard to imagine they didn't have soup back then. Did they drink it straight from the bowl? Regardless, that's nothing compared to the fork, introduced in the 4th Century AD.

So Jesus had no idea what a fork was. Neither did Julius Caesar.

Could you imagine living in a world with no forks?

Maybe the cellphones and internet, etc. isn't that crazy for these Gen Alphas. They will never know what it is (legally) like to drive in the back of a pickup, but so what? You don't know what it's like to live in a world without cars and with the bikes with the one giant wheel, and your world didn't end.

Did it?

______________________________________________________-

*Johan Vaaler, 1901

**David M. Smith, 1853

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #971: THE PLAN

 I got bad news about my foot last week on Thursday. Things had been going really well. The surgery was a success. All infection has been killed or removed. I was healing pretty well. My new podiatrist (she has yet to cut any of my body parts off, unlike the other guy) told me that if things keep going well, then we'll be able to reconstruct my foot.

But when I saw her Thursday, she said, immediately after she greeted me, "You scare me." Meaning, she's afraid that my foot won't heal and she'll have to cut it off. This was news to me, but when she unwrapped the bandage, her fears were confirmed. She told me I'd popped every single one of my stitches. There were pieces of dead skin everywhere, some flapping around the edges of my heel like pieces of paper (with the same consistency). She cut all of that off, then got to the dead white skin around the clot of stitches. There was an open wound in my foot.

I didn't see it until I changed the bandage on Friday, and it looked like a piece of my foot was ripped out. You know how, if a golfer misses their target, there's a divot knocked out of the ground? It looks like someone knocked a divot out of my foot. I have to pack it and the hole on the blind side of my foot (so I have to pack that by touch), and then I have to put these surgical dressings around it, although now I've added very thick pads of gauze over the packed wounds, then the dressings over those. Then I wrap it in a gauze band and put an Ace bandage around it. It's not a lot of fun, especially shoving stuff into the wounds.

But once again I am faced with the possibility of losing my bad foot this year, which means I'm also facing the return of booze to my life.

There are two options. One sucks, and one sucks really, really badly. The latter is putting a cage around my foot that will have to be held in place with screws attached to my lower leg. It would be weight bearing, which must hurt like fucking crazy. There will be a wound vac attached to my foot, too. Not fun.

The other option is the one I'm going to try. I have to stay off my foot completely for a while. This is unfortunate because I enjoy taking showers, which I will not be able to do. It's back to sponge baths in the bathroom sink. I fucking hate to do that, but I'm stuck with it.

So here's the plan. I need to get a knee scooter. A while back I learned that fire stations lend out things like that and wheelchairs, etc., for free. I know because I borrowed a wheelchair back when I first broke this foot. I got responses from my VMs over the weekend today. Fire stations no longer provide this service. Motherfucking fuck.

I also put out word on social media, but no one responded except for my hetero lifemate, Rob Tannahill, who recommended a knee scooter from Costco. I still wanted it for free, as I have next to no money, but now that I know I can't get one for free, I had no choice but to buy one. It's not the same one from Costco, but I found one even cheaper from them, so I just ordered it.

I can't use a knee scooter in the house. I can only use it outside and at work. In the house (and other places a knee scooter might not fit), I will get around on crutches. The podiatrist told me that I can use the tip of the boot I wear on my bad foot now for leverage. Meaning, I can't put weight on the foot, but if I use the toe, I won't fall over. I have terrible balance, probably from the years I spent drinking as hard as possible without actually dying. I hoped my balance would return, but it has not.

But I can't use the crutches on stairs, so I can't use them to get up to my bedroom. I have also bought kneepads. If I can't get around with the other stuff, I'll crawl like a toddler. My knees are fragile in my old age, though, so the pads are necessary.

If I can do this, I desperately hope my foot will finally heal so I can get it reconstructed. That would be nice. I've been told this will take forever to heal, so I'm guessing I'll still be living like this at least until Christmas.

I'll begin when my knee scooter arrives. Wish me luck.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #970: INSPIRATIONAL FLAMES

 A while back I watched an episode of Route 66 in which one of the characters, not the boys but one of the guest stars, is talking about art and what it's like to create.

I tried my best to find which episode it was, but I'd watched it a while ago (Buz was still on the show!). I really hoped to get a clip from this one, but I just can't find it, and while I used to be good at Google, Google is no longer good at Google. Lost, it shall remain. I really hope I'm remembering the episode well enough, because the scrawl in my notebook doesn't have a lot of info.

Anyway, the character compares art to Moses seeing the burning bush in the Bible. At first I took it to mean that, once you experience a work of art that thrills you, whether it's a novel or a painting or a song or whatever, it gives you much the same sensation a prophet seeing a miracle would feel. And it's true. I usually liken it to my head blooming like a rose, but this is a pretty good analogy. Think about all the great art you've experienced and how it was so powerful it changed you, maybe even changed your perception of the world around you. Art is powerful stuff. No wonder the MAGAs are doing their best to destroy it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I think she meant the creation of art, and that analogy is even better. What does a prophet who has seen a burning bush do? They tell everyone about it. Artists have seen the burning bush. Now they must create work that expresses that feeling.

I've had revelatory ideas that stunned me many times over the course of my life. Believe it or not, Dong of Frankenstein was one of those ideas. (Don't judge my muse!) It makes a current run through my body, and I stiffen as the idea works its way through my brain. And then, unfortunately for a lot of people, I write about my vision until I have a book.

Writing is my only talent. The other artforms elude me. My drawings suck, I can't play any instrument more complicated than the mouth harp or cowbell (and I still have trouble with the cowbell), I'm no painter, don't even ask me about sculpting, etc. But my experience as a writer with the burning bush matches up easily with the character's statement. I have no choice but to believe that all the other arts and artists are the same way. It doesn't make sense otherwise.

And that brings me to AI. I used to say that, sure, AI can make art just like the Infinite Monkey Theorem can produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now I'm not so sure. Can AI ever experience the burning bush?

Exactly.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #969: ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PROPHET?

Lincoln around the age he gave the Lyceum Address.

 

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln said that about the end of America. This was in response to a mob lynching a Black man in St. Louis, according to William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner in Springfield. Herndon, by the way, is an excellent first hand source of material about Lincoln. Historians have tried to smear him as a drunk, but he was the closest person to Lincoln before he was famous, and he was rather truthful about Honest Abe. The reason historians dislike him as a source is because he said that Lincoln got syphilis after an evening with a woman who was not a wife. Furthermore, Lincoln gave it to Mary Todd, which in all likelihood led to her demise and explain her odd behavior near the end. You can see the appeal in discrediting Herndon, but Lincoln was no saint. He was not even an abolitionist, as our schools teach us that he was.

But Lincoln was one of the best presidents regardless. He expands on his thought from the famed Lyceum Address:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

In short, only the United States can destroy the United States. And it's very interesting that he seems to suggest that a single person would be able to do it. Sorry for the long quote, but it's apropos, I think.

This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?--Never! Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.--It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.

Lincoln was infuriated by the circumnavigation of law by mob. He begs us to cling to "cold, reasoning" laws rather than our passions. It's the only thing that will keep us together. It's the only thing that will save us.

This reminds me of something. What could that possibly be? Perhaps the roughshod way Trump and Musk have trampled the laws of this nation in the name of their own passion? (Dare I say Trump's Musky passion?) And what aren't we doing as citizens? We're not uniting with each other to frustrate their designs. We're letting them destroy our country without a fight.

I really like the paragraph I'm about to quote, especially Lincoln's word choice in one particular instance. Let's see if you can guess the word I mean:

They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.--Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our WASHINGTON.

I'm not entirely sure we should be looking to George Washington as Britain looks to King Arthur, but all the same I find that one particular word interesting. The Trump we have is certainly not awakening our Washington. The ravens may never leave his monument.

If you're wondering why the Democrats are doing jack shit, it's because they serve the same master as Trump, our corporate overlords. They know when to obey. Could you imagine even one of them making a speech like this? Make no mistake, a speech like this is 100% necessary today. I think if Schumer pulled his head out of his master's ass and said something like this, we might actually have a fight we can win on our hands.

But We the People are fucked. When we address for recourse, are the laws that benefit our corporate overlords and our corporate overlords alone going to help us? No. But they tell us we need to go through the system with our complaints, the system they own. That's just not going to work.

What does work? Bloody revolution is efficient. Also, playing dirty works wonders. Being unable to tell the truth is a prerequisite for being a politician, but the MAGAs are so flamboyant with their lies, it's actually kind of awe-inspiring. Bullshit has always been an artform, but they've perfected it nearly to the point of godhood. Joseph Goebbels was right: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." And Trump didn't have to repeat his lies all that much. I mean, he does anyway, just to hedge his bets, but the MAGAs fell for it the first time. The Democrats are already on board with excessive lies. They know their master's voice. Why not beat the MAGAs at their own game? You almost got JD Vance with the couch-fucking thing. Go on. Get creative. Stephen Miller slurps his own cum. Elon Musk is into adult babyism. Ted Cruz wants to fuck his mom.

That last one might not be a lie.

All my life politics has been fucking dirty except now? The Democrats are going to be the adults in the room? Since when are adults well behaved?

Lincoln was right. America will die not by another nation's hand but by suicide. We're watching it happen right now. I wonder who will be there to pick up the pieces? Certainly no one with mercy in their hearts for us.

If you're into adult babyism, I don't mean to kink shame. That's not my intent. To each their own. If I offended  you, I apologize.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #968: THE WORLD IS A FUCKIN' STRANGE PLACE

 It is. I know it's hard to remember that sometimes, since we're all stuck with our boring daily routines. It's maybe even hard to notice in the first place. So I always keep an open mind about the world itself. A lot of weird shit happens here.

Ordinarily I'd point to the platypus and exclaim my shock that such a creature really does exist. As it turns out, scientists 200 years ago thought the platypus was a hoax. Back then a lot of science hoaxes were tried. Like the Piltdown Man, for example. I can't help but quote from the article I read on platypuses:

[H]ere was somebody from a land on the other side of the world submitting a new take on the legendary chimera, an animal composed of distinct parts of other animals.

The creature — if indeed it was a real creature — possessed a duck’s bill, fur like a mole, an otter-like body and a beaver’s tail. Eventually, it would be determined that it also laid eggs in the manner of a bird or a reptile. But when its young hatched from those eggs, the creature produced milk to feed it — a mammalian trait.

Yeah, you’d be skeptical, too.

And they're not alone! When you think about it, giraffes are really fuckin' weird. So are elephants. We commonly accept weird shit so often that we don't recognize our planet as a weird fuckin' planet.

Do you know what a brinicle is? I didn't either until I researched the Antarctica Ice Finger of Death. Seriously, that's a real thing. Brinicles are ice shapes resembling a finger that grow beneath sea ice. To learn more than you ever cared to know about it, here's a quote from an article I read:

Unlike frozen fresh water, ice on ocean surface is composed of two elements. The ice crystal is relatively pure, as the water excludes most of the salt during the freezing process. The remaining salty water stays liquid due to its lowered freezing temperature, and creates highly saline brine channels within the porous ice block.

A brinicle is formed when this sea ice cracks and leaks out the saline water to the open oceans. As the brine is heavier than the water around it, it sinks to the ocean floor while freezing the relatively fresh water it comes into contact with. This process lets the brinicle grow downward.

What makes the Ice Finger of Death so special is that anything it touches freezes instantly, hence the "death" part of its name. Can you imagine something so cold that touching it not only kills you but also freezes you in seconds? It's a good thing you're not likely to stumble across something like this. Unless you like diving in the ocean, which I don't. I have a strict policy regarding the oceans: stay the fuck out of them.

But since we've been talking about Greenland this week, there's another interesting thing that happened there last year. Scientists noticed the earth making a strange noise, and it was trembling when it shouldn't have been. Our lovely mother did this for 9 days, which understandably made those scientists nervous, considering that climate change is currently helping us reap our whirlwind.

It turned out that there was a rockslide in Greenland, which caused a tsunami within a fjord. Which sounds impossible, but imagine you're a kid about to go into the bathtub. Your mom has filled the tub with soap and water, and then you jump in. The water sloshes back and forth in the tub, right?

That's what happened in the fjord. For nine fucking days. Nine days of massive amounts of water crashing against the high cliffs on each side of the fjord. And that's what caused the noise and the trembling.

What a weird fucking thing to happen, right? But this oddball event caused great concern among scientists for a few days.

Is that really any weirder than a fuckin' platypus?

Weird shit happens here all the time, and most people aren't curious enough to notice. It's too bad. This planet's strange tendencies have kept me at least somewhat entertained for most of my life. Try it sometime. Look for the weird. Really look for it. See what you find. Report back to me, because I want to know all about it.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #967: WHAT IS DEATH?

1

 I've often talked about my beliefs regarding the afterlife here, but I have a theory as to what happens during the process of your death. NDE people talk about the tunnel, floating outside your body and even having your life flash before your eyes. Something certainly happens. Your body floods with endorphins to possibly ease your passage, but what do you experience?

I think it would be a lot like the world I lived in for two weeks while suffering alcohol withdrawals for the first time.

I did not know that was what had happened. Instead I found myself living these odd scenarios, which I believe I've discussed here before. They were dreamlike, but I didn't doubt it was reality at any time, much like in dreams. It felt weird but very real.

So I think that's what we go through when we die. Unless you get shot in the head. It's hard to produce endorphins when the brain that gives that order is sprayed out on a wall or on the sidewalk.

Obviously you won't live in that fantasy forever. The endorphins only last so long, so I think it will fade slowly until you rejoin the darkness you left when you were born.

It sounds kind of pleasant. Just don't live the kind of life where death might destroy your brain, that's all.

2

There's another option. I once mentioned my argument against the afterlife, which was, you now have eternity to do all the things you wanted to do. OK, fine. I've read all the books, seen all the movies, heard all the music, and I still have eternity left? There's only so much of that I go over again before I go crazy and want the afterlife to be over. It didn't make sense to me.

But I thought a little more about this, and what if that's what you need to get you ready to rejoin the primordial ooze and continue the cycle of life? What if the afterlife breaks you down so much it destroys you, drives you crazy, removes the very idea of you. And then it's, as Metallica once said, "Back to the front!"

I can see that, too. It's hard to fit an individual back into the building blocks of life without destroying what makes one individual. If that's true, the universe is even more heartless than I thought.

3

I didn't intend to tackle The Biggest Subject tonight, so I'm sure I'll return to the usual madness tomorrow night. Sleep tight.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #966: CAMP CENTURY

 

Americans really are assholes. We have 100% earned our reputation around the rest of the world as assholes. And rest assured, it's not because they're jealous of the shoddy and twisted republic that we have. The worst punishment I can imagine for the rest of the world would be to make them Americans and expose them to American institutions. They would revolt a lot faster than we, the rebellious-at-heart Americans, ever would. In case you haven't noticed, we're such assholes that we used the atomic bomb TWICE. And when another country is having an election, we always back the dictator instead of the people's choice. Then, of course, the genocide and slavery not just in our history but in our building blocks. There's a lot to hate.

But we're also lying to everyone all the time, even nations we have treaties with like, say, Denmark, the owners of Greenland. Back in 1959 we talked them into letting us build a nuclear reactor on their land. For science, of course. We also built a miniature village so people working there (about 200 of them) had a place to live. We called it Camp Century. But what we really did was, we tried to see if we could build a nuclear missile base there. Why Greenland? And why does Trump want Greenland so badly now? Well, about that:

From National Geographic

Pretty useful during a Cold War that could turn hot at any moment. And before you judge us too harshly, please remember that not very long after we convinced the Dutch to let us do this, the Soviets snuck a bunch of nuclear missiles into Cuba, hence the Cuban Missile Crisis. Having Greenland is also pretty useful if you intend to fuck over Putin at some point. Even Trump must know that the two of them can't coexist. I suspect that if he has his way and bends America to his will, Putin will be the next order of business. A little unexpected from him, considering his love of the Russian dictator, but a solid political move.

So what happened to Camp Century? We, uh, well . . . we kinda forgot about it. In 1965 we abandoned it. We told the Dutch that it was a more or less successful experiment, and we did learn a lot about building nuclear reactors in such climates as the Arctic. We even accidentally learned something interesting about Greenland while we were at Camp Century. We drilled all the way through the ice sheet covering Greenland. That ice has long been thought to be 2M years old, but we examined the ground and evidence we found and came to the conclusion that it was a mere 400K years since Greenland was uncovered by ice.

OK, maybe that wasn't all that exciting for you to learn, but big picture, it's pretty important to our understanding of the world. Which is besides the point, so let's get back to it.

What we really learned was that it was impossible to build a missile base there. The conditions were too unstable, so we packed up our shit and left under the assumption that whatever we left behind would be sealed away in ice forever. It sounds kind of stupid to us now to do that, but back then they didn't know about one little tiny thing that is a very large fucking thing now.

That thing they didn't know about? Climate change. Now the ice is melting, and we have rediscovered Camp Century. There's just one problem. We left behind a lot of stuff, including nuclear waste and PCBs, the dreaded forever chemicals. To say nothing of the 24M liters of untreated sewage.

So now Camp Century is a ticking time bomb. Don't worry, you probably won't be alive when it goes off, which is scheduled for 2135 or 2179, depending on which model of climate change you follow. Your grandkids might be alive for it, though. Imagine the sheer joy they'll experience when that waste is exposed to the air and shoved right into the Polar Jet Stream. How much damage could that shit do once dispersed in such a fashion? I imagine there won't be a lot of places in the northern hemisphere you could avoid it.

Yeah, I don't think Trump wants Greenland so he can clean up the US's previous mess, either. All the same, if he somehow figures out how to make a missile base work there, I wonder what Putin might try to sneak into Cuba? Hell, maybe Mexico is tired of the tariffs. Why not put a real threat at the border?

Fun in the end times . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #965: FUCKIN' *NOW WHAT?!?!?!?!?!*

 I swear, these aren't all going to be political. Last night wasn't, right? That was about Clint Eastwood's new film! I have a notebook full of topics, but then this fucking shit happened. Incidentally, I've been reading a lot of articles where people interviewed are only talking on the condition of anonymity. That's a good indication of how fucked we are as a society when somewhat powerful people can't bear to have their names associated with their beliefs. We're edging into 1984 territory, here.

Musk and his swine have come for the US Treasury. I'm a little surprised it took this long for the hunger to start gnawing at Scrooge McDuck's insides, but he's finally going after money in the US, specifically how the US pays out money.

The acting Secretary of the Treasury was, until very recently, David Lebryk. He has retired because he's sick of fighting the DOGE scavengers constantly scratching at his door, wanting access to the payment system. There aren't a lot of details, as Lebryk isn't talking, and DOGE has refused to respond to a request for comment from the Fourth Estate, but it would seem that DOGE has been asking for access to this system since Inauguration Day: Part Deux. Why is this system so important? Here's an excerpt from one of the articles I read:

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

So yeah, pretty important stuff. Considering DOGE's true purpose, it's only a matter of time before Musk gets his grubby mittens on it, and that's when he will wield true power within the US government. Apparently apartheid can get you very far in the world. I wonder if he looks back at the end of those times in South Africa with rage, wondering how the gravy train ended. Never mind, his head is leaning more toward creating new gravy trains here, and getting his hands on this payment system will do the trick. One of those functions stands out, however. Salaries for federal personnel?

Considering the administration has been rabidly hunting federal employees, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they want to withhold their pay, which they fucking earned, to hold them over a barrel and make them do something. Or not do something. Either way, it's extortion.

Here's another excerpt, an important one, I think.

Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system - which essentially functions as the nation’s “checking book” - to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior treasury roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“This is a mechanical job - they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”

Bad intentions? I think that might be Musk's middle name*.

OK, one more from that article, and then we're going to move on.

Musk has characterized the rising national debt as an existential threat to the country and has proved willing to break norms in service of sweeping change.

Huh. In my opinion *he* is the existential threat to the country. According to CNN, he spent about a quarter-billion dollars getting Trump elected so Musk could be in the position he's in today. In case you're having a difficult time deciphering that sentence, yes, I'm saying it is my opinion that Elon Musk bought Trump an election, and he bought himself a position in government. This used to be called bribery and was exceptionally illegal. It technically still is, but as I've stated previously, the rules no longer apply. In a just world, Trump would have to divest himself of all his personal businesses. The only money he's supposed to make in the Oval Office is his presidential salary. Paid, by the way, by the system Musk lusts for. Yet Trump can't possibly bring himself to stop selling tchotchkes and knick-knacks and other bullshit, like his Bible with the Constitution, etc., in it. Typically I'd laugh at deeply moral Christians buying Bibles from the Anti-Christ, but I doubt I'm the first to make that joke, nor would I be the last. Because it's not that funny. This is the shit that helped him get in the position he's in. To say nothing of the unfettered, shameless, greed-grabbing scam that is TRUMPCOIN. And I thought the NFTs were too much.

Yes, the Founding Fathers were disingenuous when they said "We the People," but holy fuck, never in their wildest nightmares could they imagine the unadulterated graft going on in Washington, DC, today. Only Benjamin Franklin might come close, but not even he would believe--

You get the point.

Musk, the real existential threat to the country, also recently stated that Teslas are probably never going to be able to fully self drive themselves. Read about it here. I bring this up because he's been lying to stockholders for years about this. He's dedicated himself to the falsehood that if you own a Tesla, you will be able to let it drive itself. That falsehood has suckered a lot of investors who don't seem to understand this lie even now. But he admitted it finally. Why break down like that?

I think for the same reason you don't hear him talking about Mars anymore. He wanted to go to Mars because he reasoned, fairly well, that he would be the first one to get there. As such, he would get to make the rules. I've gone over this before, I think, but he's given up on Mars because he can bend *this* planet to his will. So far he's made a compelling argument. Why yes, being the richest motherfucker on the earth *does* have its privileges. Look where he's at right now. Aside from some red tape, he's the owner of this planet. Who among us will buy it away from him?

He doesn't need Tesla anymore, so fuck it, why not come clean? It's better that he not spend so much time there, anyway. He's got DOGE duties. The rest of his businesses just took a backseat.

Also, I noticed a tiny little story fly by about Trump going after electric cars. Musk had to know that about him going in, so maybe he's just letting Tesla go so he can focus his energies elsewhere. I wonder how that will go over with the shareholders? Wouldn't it be insane if Musk sold off all his interest in Tesla? Hell, with his fucked up sense of humor, he might do it for a laugh.

This is Friday night, and I'm talking about this shit instead of going to sleep like I should. So I'm going to stop haranguing you with this. It's fucked. We're fucked. There's nothing we can do about it short of a bloody and violent revolution. Everyone knows this.

So let's end on a pleasant note.

Every night, when I get into bed to watch some TV before I fall asleep, I get on my side, and that does something to my body. My back lurches. It crackles. There might even be a loud hollow crack! It is one of the most pleasurable experiences of my life, currently. It's the highlight of my day. I look forward to it. Because my back pain sucks. The doctor thinks the spinal injections might not be good enough, so who knows what the future holds for me? But that moment when it all goes away all because I put my body in that position? It's the best.

And I can't force it. I've tried. It has to happen naturally. But it's great.

OK, so that wasn't much of a pleasant note, as it's only pleasant for me, but life isn't all doom and gloom. It's just *mostly* doom and gloom. Gotta find your moments, and this is mine.

I'm off to have my backgasm.

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*It's Reeve. Not sure how that snuck into a name like "Elon Musk," which sounds like it belongs to one of the aliens at the Mos Eisley Cantina.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #964: JUROR # 2

 Have you seen Clint's new movie, Juror #2? WB really fucked him over on this. How much money has Clint made for them over the decades he's been making movies? How many awards do they have because of him? Yet because he's an old man, it's time to push him out the door. Instead of releasing a film by Clint Eastwood, one of the greatest living film directors we have, in theaters, it's been released to streaming instead. It's on Max if you wish to look it up. Yes, it did get, what, 50 theaters? But seriously, for a Clint movie? I don't even think that qualified him for Oscar season.

It's a great movie, and it shows that Clint is at the top of his game still. He might not even have a bottom to his game. The story is of a soon-to-be father getting sucked into jury duty only to discover the man accused of a murder might be innocent because the juror did something stupid when he was drunk many years ago. It starts out like 12 Angry Men, but before long it becomes obvious that it's 12 Angry Men From Hell. (12 From Hell? Like Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell?).

I don't want to go too much into the movie itself, because it's so much better if you go in knowing nothing more than this, but I was talking with my comics guys today, and I brought up this movie. As I talked about it I realized something interesting.

I like Nicholas Hoult. His performances are always top shelf, whether he's a young Beast from the X-Men or Renfield. Even when he's telling us stuff like, "Oh what a day! What a lovely day!" You can tell he's something special.

It occurred to me that, decades from now, Hoult is going to be an old man, possibly a director himself, talking to young film students. And one of them is going to ask about this film. More importantly, they're going to ask him, "What was Clint like?"

There will be a YouTube video. If you're alive at the time, check and see if I'm right.

Because Hoult does know Clint now, and he can tell these kids about what the old master was like. He can tell them about all the legends he worked with, and I know someone's going to ask him about Nic Cage. And that's the nature of history. The youngest one of the group usually tells the next generation (or even the next-next) what the rest of them were like. I'm thinking here of the Clint we remember from Rawhide, from the beginning of his artistic journey. He worked with just about everyone except John Wayne, and that wasn't for lack of trying. There's the famous story about . . . eh, not tonight.

I tried to think of what that would be like for Clint. Who would a film student ask him about now? I'd wager Sergio Leone, but it could very well be Don Siegel. He knew Lee Marvin and Richard Harris. Pat Hingle. John Vernon. Guys like that. As a nonagenarian he is an encyclopedia of Hollywood knowledge that will probably be lost when he dies. Has he done a Masterclass? If not, I hope he does one soon. I hate to think of that knowledge vanishing from the earth, never to be recovered. I feel the same way about another nonagenarian, Mel Brooks. I shudder to think of the world we will lose when they're both no longer among us.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #963: THE PROOF IS IN THE WATERMARK

Just so we're on the same page.

 Speaking of AI, this lovely story was released before I took my writing vacation, but I didn't get around to it until now. It's pretty important because of AI's betrayal of its users (again, delicious schadenfreude), and it offers a look at the gross future of AI.

ATTN: AI "authors." If you wrote a book using AI, chances are, your text is covered with an invisible watermark.(They use it on images, too, so where did you get your book cover?) Google definitely does that, and if they do it, I'm sure the others do, too. Google's is called SynthID, and apologies for the giant quote block, but this is how it works:

SynthID-Text works by discreetly interfering in the generation process: It alters some of the words that a chatbot outputs to the user in a way that’s invisible to humans but clear to a SynthID detector. “Such modifications introduce a statistical signature into the generated text,” the researchers write in the paper. “During the watermark detection phase, the signature can be measured to determine whether the text was indeed generated by the watermarked LLM.”

The LLMs that power chatbots work by generating sentences word by word, looking at the context of what has come before to choose a likely next word. Essentially, SynthID-Text interferes by randomly assigning number scores to candidate words and having the LLM output words with higher scores. Later, a detector can take in a piece of text and calculate its overall score; watermarked text will have a higher score than non-watermarked text. The DeepMind team checked their system’s performance against other text watermarking tools that alter the generation process, and found that it did a better job of detecting watermarked text.

Why does the watermark exist? The article suggests a few reasons, and you can read it here if you wish. They claim to be doing God's work, helping the normies figure out if text was generated with AI or not. The tool isn't 100% accurate, but that's not my issue with this. Because if their mission statement with the watermark is true, then why isn't SynthID in the hands of said normies? The website certainly claims it is, but nope. I looked all over. There's no option for someone like me to use it. I even asked Gemini, and Gemini bullshitted me like Donald Trump in front of a crowd.

That's because its true purpose is to help Google figure out if something making a lot of money was generated by their tool or not. At this time, the law does not recognize a user's ownership of AI generated material. It can't be copyrighted. As such, if something created in such a manner is, indeed, a goose that lays golden eggs, anyone on the planet can copy and paste and start making money, and the original user has no recourse. The theme for these political times, I think, is taking well-known rules and erasing them legally. I'm sure Google will even be able to sue noncompliant AI authors. And what the hell? If a novel you published is selling really well, and it was made with Google Docs, why not squeeze you for a piece? Without their product, after all, you would have no product of your own.

Google is a convicted monopoly. Their punishment has yet to be announced, but considering how they just renamed the Gulf of Mexico in Google Maps, they might just get a slap on the wrist from the Trump Administration. But you don't get to be a monopoly without having not just skeletons in your closet, but also a Dahmer wonderland of culinary delights. Monopolies know all sorts of questionable shit, and I'm certain that Google has plans to eventually make it so that AI material *is* copyrightable (has Trump thanked them for the Gulf of America yet?), but only in Google's name. So AI authors would end up owing Google money instead.

AI is a corporate trap. There's a reason all these techbros are jerking off at the thought of an AI in every home. That reason is utter domination, not just of the market, but of the human race. Having all our money isn't enough for them. They want our immortal souls, too. And your first born. And your second. And your third . . .

PS: Even if you think you've avoided the AI craze, your devices might not have. I was surprised to discover that I had three of them on my laptop, even though I've had this machine longer than the AI craze has been in the public consciousness. I uninstalled them. You should do the same.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #962: SCHADENFREUDE

 Speaking of schadenfreude, Silicon Valley is in a tailspin (meatspin?*) over a bit of news out of China, and it just tickles my balls. These tech assholes have been sucking up to Trump because they're looking for federal funding for their massively expensive AI ventures. Remember when I said Microsoft assumed command of Three Mile Island? 

To keep up with these things, a week ago Trump announced a plan to spend $500B on AI infrastructure. Because the universe is cruel and loves to take stuff away from me, this project has been named Stargate**.

Enter schadenfreude. China just released their own AI, just as good and possibly better than ours AT A FRACTION OF THE COST. We're talking 3-4%. Holy fucking shit. That really is a gamechanger.

I'm actually a little hard thinking of Musk and Zuck and the others seething at the universe's betrayal of them. These fuckers entered a race to see who could outspend whom (Musk might not win, as rule number one of the stock market is NEVER USE YOUR OWN MONEY), and China comes along and shits in their cereal bowl. Nvidia, the company that makes the microchips for AI, has been riding high so long they practically had a license to print money for themselves. When China released DeepSeek and their AI chatbot, R1, Nvidia stock took a fuckin' nosedive. They lost $600B in ONE DAY. That's not just a terrible loss. It's the worst one-day loss in HISTORY. It took China two months and less than $6M to beat the mortal shit out of us. R1 is free, and more importantly it's OPEN SOURCE. If you want the gory (and exceptionally boring) details, here they are.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still not happy because we still have AI. I'm just happy that these cocksuckers, who thought they were kings of the tech world, ratfucking everyone they come in contact with so they can ratfuck humanity for centuries to come, have been rendered irrelevant.

What's next for the techbros? I can only assume that, since it is open source, they're going to rip off DeepSeek for themselves, take it private and charge out the ass for people to use it while screaming about the godless Commies living in China and how we can't trust their products because they are evil.

Speaking of China, what has President Trump done to fight the godless Commies that he promised he was going to fight? Heh. Just kidding. Him and Xi are . . . not BFFs. That would be Trump and Putin. But S(econd)BFFs?

Schadenfreude is very rewarding for those who don't fall into its trap. I just have one question left: does this mean that Microsoft has to give up Three Mile Island? I still don't trust those corporate fucks.

_______________________________________________

*Don't Google that.

**Joke's on you, you will have to pry Stargate from my cold dead hands.

BONUS! Are you looking for a job, and you couldn't get hired by RFK, Jr.? Maybe Elon Musk will take you at DOGE!

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #961: DOGE CONTINUES TO SUCK MY BALLS

 

Gaze upon what is possibly the stupidest logo for a government department ever conceived. It looks like something from a stock photo site, but it's the official logo of the Dept. of Government Efficiency, or fucking DOGE, one of Musk's obsessions. We should perhaps come up with a list of things he likes waaaaaay too much. Like the doge meme, for example. The letter X. Mars, or a world that he can mold to his liking. It doesn't have to be Mars. It could be the planet we're on now in the present time. Never mind, I don't like spending that much time thinking about his desires.

Judging by everything you've seen in the news, what would you say is the main purpose of DOGE? I expected it to be about Musk and whoever else poring through the government, looking for organizations and regulators to cut, er, I mean, stuff the government spends too much money on. For all intents and purposes, this is what they continue to talk about when referring to DOGE. There are even news stories making fun of DOGE for being too far behind on their job already.

But this is *not* the purpose of DOGE. In fact, the stated purpose is so vastly different from what we were told that I have no choice but to believe that, no, it wasn't an error. They're flatout lying to us.

Big surprise, I know. Makes you wonder if there's any truth over at Truth Social . . .

If you want to know what they're really up to, it helps if you read the stuff they release. A president can't equivocate when it comes to wording executive orders, so why not read the executive order that created DOGE? Give it a shot here.

There's a lot of stuff there, but this is the relevant part:

Section 1.  Purpose.  This Executive Order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.

Nothing about cutting the CFPB there. So if Musk is still doing that, he doesn't have authorization for it. If you see him doing that kind of work, you must stop him immediately. Explain the paragraph you just read like he was 5 years old. He is, effectively, five years old. Draw pictures if you need to. Make goofy faces and sounds with your mouth to make sure he continues to pay attention. If all else fails, show him a doge meme.

Remember when a conflict of interest was important? Anything goes these days.

So what is DOGE *really* supposed to be doing? Modernizing tech always sounds like a good idea. If you have tech stuff to do, you'd rather have top of the line, hot off the press shit, right? It sounds reasonable, but it is my suspicion that Musk is really building backdoors into all the IT infrastructure so even if he's no longer in the government (and I guess technically he is), he would have no problem getting back into the government's shit and then doing whatever it is he plans to do. Wield his conflict of interest like a club? Steal tech from competitors through government contacts? Cut corners and red tape in one fell swoop? Borrow some data and maybe use it to manipulate the stock market? Or worse, sell it to Putin? There's a lot he can do with that kind of thing. I'm sure Trump is under the illusion that Musk is doing this for the good of his master, but Musk could royally fuck Trump up if he wanted to. If Trump maybe didn't like something Musk did. Instead of throwing a fit like he usually does, why not just step through that backdoor and sabotage a few things?

Trump's followers apparently call him daddy. Mel fucking Gibson called him daddy at least once. Trump might seem like the daddy, but if Musk is allowed to continue working on the true purpose of DOGE, then Trump is going to find himself living in a trailer park raising Don Jr and Eric on food stamps. Which would bring a great sense of schadenfreude to me, of course. I'm a huge fan of schadenfreude.

But I don't think MAGA will suffer like everyone seems to think they will. A massive amount of people who should know better are underestimating these cocksuckers. I'll give you an example. Everyone on the left seems to believe that Trump can't end birthright citizenship. It's enshrined in the 14th Amendment, as Evil John Bruni recently explained (poorly, I might add). I don't mean to alarm you, but you should be alarmed. Granted, only one amendment has been repealed thus far (the 18th by the 21st), but do you think that can't happen again? All it takes is one asshole in the House to propose the bill, then for the House, owned by Trump, to pass it to the Senate, also owned by Trump. Then, and only then, will the amendment land on . . . who's desk? Sure, he could veto it, but do you think he will?

Goodbye birthright citizenship.

If they can do that to one amendment, what about the rest? What about the 1st? I'll allow that doing so would be a bright burning red flag declaring they are, indeed, evil, but what else have they been doing so far? I can't think of a single thing they've done that is actually good. Even Nixon did something good every now and then. All these assholes do is bitch and moan and steal rights away from others. None of that can even remotely be viewed as good.

Stop underestimating these swine. The rules you're familiar with no longer apply. You're living in a different world than you did on January 19, 2025. MAGA is not fucking around, and we shouldn't, either. They demonstrably lied to us. I proved it tonight. The thing that gets me most, though, is that proof doesn't matter, either. The choir will concur, as is their solemn duty, but the people who *need* to be shown the error of their ways will never believe it. MAGA is a brainwashed cult even worse than a cult, as they currently have the reins of government in this country. Imagine if Charles Manson suddenly took over California in the 'Seventies. That's the kind of thing we're dealing with, here. Do you think his children would listen to sense?

Trump's children won't, either.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #960: 2 YEARS, 195 DAYS

 It has been 2 years and 195 days since my last drink. A few people have started to notice that I don't say "I've been sober for . . ." That is by design. I'm an alcoholic, not a weedoholic. I have problems with booze, not cannabis.

But this "sober" thing came up, I don't know, maybe a year ago? I forget what the association of ideas was that led me to this particular thought, as I promptly forgot the thought almost as soon as I had it. But last night, as I waited for sleep to take me, my brain spoke up and reminded me of it for some odd reason. Possibly to plague me. My brain is very good at plaguing and vexing me. Thankfully it's good at positive stuff, too.

I realized that I've never had a sexual encounter as an adult while sober. Every instance has been while I was blind stinking drunk. I've had a few sober sexual experiences from when I was underage, but that can't possibly count. I don't recall who said it, but every time you remember something, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered that thing, not the thing itself. As such, it turns into a game of inner telephone. I think there might be some truth to it. I imagine sober sex would be vastly different between the 13 year old boy I was and the 46 year old man I am now.

The last time I had sex was late 2020. I like to think it was in December, but it was probably in October, possibly earlier than that. I was pretty drunk. The last sexual encounter wasn't long after that. It's pretty pathetic, actually. We were in the shower together, cleaning each other before getting dirty again, but I was drunk and 70 lbs. heavier than I am now. My chest felt weird, and I felt like I was out of breath. She helped me sit on the closed toilet seat so I could catch my breath. By the time I felt normal again, the mood had passed.

My sex drive had been dropping, anyway. It was at its lowest just before I went to detox in July 2022. Since quitting the booze it's picked up again, but, and here the author of Dong of Frankenstein and 6669: Demon Porn must make a confession, sex has never been something I've been very interested in. I don't pursue it. Sometimes it pursues me, and I give in to it. It feels great and then makes me insatiably crave it for about two weeks before I'm back to normal. I'm sure there's a werewolf metaphor in there somewhere.

But now I wonder, what must it be like? To have sex with someone without any foreign chemicals in my body? I'm childish at nature, so would I be able to take it seriously? I've never been good at talking dirty, so I'm almost certain I'd take it too far. And I'm lazy and like to be ridden. Probably not popular idea.

As a young boy I had encounters with two young girls and I had sex with another. I was still, legally, 13 at the time, but I was just about to turn 14. The experience was very enjoyable but also traumatic for a while afterward. I caught the clap. That was enough to make me swear off of sex for a long time afterward. I didn't come back to it until years later. Every once in a while I would develop an attraction for someone, but I'd shove it down until I didn't feel it anymore. I didn't want to risk possibly finding myself in a position to have sex again.

I'm sure I'll find out some day about the sober sex. Unless I die in my sleep tonight.

Laugh if you will, but how creepy would it be if I did? It's not urban legend material, but I'm sure I'd make a Buzzfeed list somewhere.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #959: A SUREFIRE WAY TO TAX RICH PEOPLE

 OK, I don't have a lot of time tonight, so this will be a short one. You know how people complain about rich people not paying their "fair share," ie. taxes? They actually don't need to. It's not required. If you were given a choice between paying taxes and not paying taxes, would you?

Seriously. They don't have to. That's perfectly legal. This is how they do it:

If you want to make Elon Musk, for example, pay his fair share, make the NO TAX column taxable. Write to your representatives and make it happen. They're not likely to do it, so you'll have to run a media campaign that is more like a blackmail racket than anything. Hold their feet to the goddam fire. Also, stop treating corporations like people. They are not. We have a flat tax of 21% on the cocksuckers, so they'll never be afraid of getting stuck in a higher tax bracket, like the rest of us.

There's your blueprint. Go forth and conquer.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #958: MOODY AND THE BRIDGE

From the EPA's website

 Have you ever read The Bridge by Skipp and Spector? It's an environmental horror masterpiece. Everyone should read it and fear it. But that's not the world we live in. We've always been (mal?)adroit polluters, and we don't seem to care about the damage we're doing to the planet that is very necessary to our continued existence. As long as our corporate overlords are making money, nothing else matters.

That's not news, but sometimes something so egregious happens that it boggles the mind. I'm thinking of the fire that started at the Moody Landfill near Birmingham, AL. A friend of mine alerted me to this years ago, and I'm only now getting around to it. The most shocking thing about this is, the fire started in 2022 (where was Billy Joel back then?) and is still burning.

"With a landfill, you can never really extinguish the fire," said James Pinkney with the EPA.

“And what we’re doing—the approach we took at this landfill is using soil to basically suffocate the flames. But a landfill can burn for an extended period of time underground.”

Uh . . . what? Never? You mean to tell me that when the sun expands and swallows the earth, that landfill fire will still be burning? That's concerning. Are you trying hard enough?

That can't be good for the people who live nearby. Here's what the EPA advised them to do:

EPA is working with the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to review data and appropriately evaluate the potential effects of the smoke from the fire. In the meantime, if nearby residents are concerned and wish to reduce potential exposure to landfill fire smoke, the following actions are recommended:

• If you have respiratory problems such as asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), or emphysema, stay indoors when you see or smell smoke.
• Reduce your outdoor activities, and do them more slowly, when you see or smell smoke.
• Close the doors and windows of your house to keep smoke from getting inside.
• Talk to your health care provider if you have respiratory conditions such as asthma, COPD, or emphysema, and you think your condition may get worse when you breathe smoke.

That doesn't sound like nothing. It sounds like this fire is doing a lot of damage to the people unfortunate enough to live close to this thing. According to Envirotech, while the people suffered, the local and state authorities were too busy pointing the finger at each other to actually do anything. Nothing got done until the feds stepped in, and they supposedly smothered the fire with sand. Here's the thing, though: it didn't extinguish the fire even though they said it did. I'm not going to identify my friend, but I will quote: "The problem is that locals see fire burning and our news had been reporting that it was out. Fucking unbelievable corruption."

The EPA says that they stopped monitoring the landfill on March 24, 2023. That's pretty alarming considering that the fire was still burning at the time. Most sources seem to agree that at the very least the fire burned for 15 months. That puts us early in the year 2024. And the EPA confirmed that forever chemicals are present. And their levels are higher. Not at the landfill. The corrupt fucks have that covered. But someone looked at the river nearby and found them in the water. Enough to raise a red flag. Not enough for national coverage.

I understand that such a situation is difficult, but come on. This should be a fucking priority, and yet I had to be told by a friend about this. And it's not just an Alabama problem. I'm sure this kind of thing happens all over the world.

The landfill was used for vegetative waste, yet the EPA found "unauthorized waste materials," which I can only take to mean that some asshole, much like the assholes in The Bridge, had a bunch of waste they couldn't be bothered to get rid of legally, so they knew a guy at the landfill who would take it. And look at what they've wrought. And no one wanted to take the blame for this, so the local politicians are fucked in the head.

This should be a bigger story, but now that we have the Department of Government Efficiency, I can only assume that the regulations that we *do* have for this sort of thing will be cut. Trump wants to bring drilling back to the US, but how safe can that be if we're pumping toxins into our own soil? What happens if you start to drill, and you hit a pocket of pollution from a burning underground fire? How many die because of that?

If we let these bastards continue, we're fucked. Do you remember how The Bridge ends?

Yeah, I thought so.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #957: COMICS ROUNDUP

 Not even half a year ago I wrote about Diamond, a monopolistic comics distributor until Covid, and how they might have been a good monopoly. In case you don't pay attention to the comics industry, they recently declared bankruptcy. I suspected something might be wrong near the end of December when my comics guys weren't getting any shipments at all, or half-shipments, or they got massively shorted. It was no big surprise when the news hit the streets. As a result I did not get comics today. None were delivered. They might get them tomorrow. I'll check. But it seems like it's been a while since I did a comics roundup. Let's see what I've been reading . . .

BATTLE ACTION VOL 3: Ever since Ennis has been planning on moving back to Ireland, he's been getting involved in UK comics pretty deeply again, and he's making some odd choices (I'm looking at you, Hawk the Slayer), but Battle Action is not odd for him. I think his war stories are his personal passion. A lot of his other stuff goes off the rails, but his war stories are powerful, contained, and he colors in the lines on these. I'm not a fan of Johnny Red, and Ennis is doing that as a serial story for these new issues. But so far it's going pretty well.

THE BLOOD BROTHERS' MOTHER: Azzarello and Risso continue their vicious western. A lot of it looks like it might have been painted instead of illustrated. Risso is doing some of his best work here. Azzarello knows his westerns. I miss LOVELESS. That was a good one. This one's not as good, but I like it nonetheless.

THE CREEPING BELOW: A young woman hangs out with a Scandinavian black metal band in the woods and is murdered by them. She doesn't stay dead, naturally, so she's out for revenge. Azzarello doesn't do horror often, but this is great. It's no Moonshine, but it's pretty good.

GI JOE: Now that the four miniseries are over, the new GI Joe is starting to walk more than crawl. I prefer the original series that I read when I was a kid, but this is solid work. I like that they're really leaning into the madness of Cobra-La. I'm interested to see where it goes.

GI JOE: A REAL AMERICAN HERO: One of the books I read as a kid, continued after having a ton of time off. 'Nuff said.

THE GOON: I'm still a little surprised that this one is back. Eric Powell ended it pretty nicely a few years ago, but I'm glad the Goon and Frankie have returned. So has the Priest. How can you go wrong with a book that, on occasion, has one of their characters stabbing people's eyes out screaming, "Knife to the eye!"

HELLO DARKNESS: A horror anthology series. Some of the stories are good, some are bad. But every issue has a story from Garth Ennis at the back. It's the continuing tale of what happens when the world experiences a nuclear winter. A group of friends make a go of surviving it, but we're down to the last two by now. In the latest installment one of the guys who tried to storm their cabin and died is actually still alive, and he has a conversation with one of them to pass the time while he waits to die. Very interesting stuff.

JIMMY'S LITTLE BASTARDS: Aftershock might be bankrupt, themselves, but Previews still swears the final installment of Garth Ennis's story will be released. It's a shame they keep bumping it. First it was supposed to be out in November, then January, now August. We'll see what really happens.

JUPITER'S LEGACY: FINALE: This book is finally coming to an end. Too bad the Netflix show didn't work out. It was decent. In the finale, the heroes and villains are learning who and what are behind their superpowers, and what those beings have planned for humanity. Hint: It's not pretty.

LIFE: I love the fuck out of Life. Azzarello is doing some of his best work with this one. It's double-sided, like the old Ace double paperbacks. One side is PROS, for the professional criminals. The other side is CONS, for the convicts the criminals will have to face. The pros have arrived on an abandoned prison planet because there's supposed to be vast riches kept there. Except it's not abandoned, and the cons are willing to fight to the death against these attackers. Great fun.

THE MAGIC ORDER: This is probably my least favorite of the Millarworld books, so I probably won't miss it when this final story arc is over. But they're getting very weird with the finale, and I'm kinda digging it. Look at that cover!

NIGHT CLUB 2: This is a fun book, too. The idea is, a group of teenagers are turned into vampires, so they decide to use their powers to fight crime while they wear luchador masks. In the second series, one of them has fallen for the hot girl at school, and because he's now a star jock himself, he gets in with the popular kids. Unfortunately, he trusts the girl too much and turns her into a vampire. She turns the others into vampires, too, and they've decided to use their powers for evil, starting with killing Night Club . . . I still think Millar is probably upset because someone already took Bite Club.

SAGA: If you're into comics, and you're not reading this book, what the fuck is wrong with you?

THAT TEXAS BLOOD: It's on hiatus for now, but since the Enfield Gang Massacre is over, I'm hoping it will return soon.

TORPEDO 1972: It's weird to see Risso working without Azzarello on this one. It's about an old mob scumbag and his partner still out in the world, shooting and beating the shit out of people. He's an asshole, but he's kinda funny.

TRANSFORMERS: When Kirkman bought Transformers and GI Joe, I thought that was an odd decision for him. I'm glad he did, because he's putting out the best Transformers stories since IDW ended the Autobot/Decepticon war. IDW should have stopped making them then, but for some ungodly reason they continued and drove the property into the ground. It's good to see these characters in a new story. A good story. Although I'll have to get used to Megatron being a bad guy again. I really loved it when he put the Autobot symbol on his chest and tried to become a better person. The struggles he had when evil kept knocking at his door were phenomenal.

UNDERHEIST: This is a horror heist book. It's actually done, but it slipped past me and my comics guys. I just need to get the last two issues. It's a Lapham book, so it's very good. If you've never read Stray Bullets, give it a shot. It's the best comics crime being written by someone not named Azzarello or Brubaker.

VOID RIVALS: I did not expect to like this book. It started the Energon Universe, so I felt obligated to read it. It's surprisingly good. So far we've seen Transformers in this world and some of Cobra-La from GI Joe. It's pretty cool.

And that's it. What are you all reading?

PS: