Category: Uncategorized

Among the dire warnings about sea level rise and permafrost thawing due to increasing global temperatures in the new “State of The Cryosphere 2024” report that dropped on Tuesday from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative is one extremely unwelcome side effect that will no doubt actually help perpetuate climate change denialism given its counterintuitive nature.

The “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may be en route to collapse due to a combination of ice sheet and sea ice melt and warmer waters. Once at the point of collapse, the AMOC would likely not recover for thousands of years. AMOC collapse would have far-reaching and dramatic impacts, including rapid cooling of Northern Europe by more than 3°C per decade, with no realistic means of adaptation. As a result of growing evidence of such collapse, a group of 40 leading ocean and climate scientists warned leaders of the urgent need to cut emissions,” and yeah you don’t need a crystal ball to foresee how the weather in Europe abruptly – the report elsewhere says the collapse is likely already underway and take as little as a decade – turning colder would be received by the MAGA kids who claim every blizzard means global warming is a hoax.

However, as this is the plot of the 2004 disaster film The Day After Tomorrow the fanboys might actually be more accepting of the idea, even if the timeline of the rapid cooling event is obviously compressed in the movie. Can’t hurt that lead Dennis Quaid is now MAGA, having starred in that Reagan biopic and endorsed their Orange God Emperor at that rally in Coachella last month.

A government tribunal in Bangladesh on Tuesday asked international police organization Interpol to issue a warrant for the arrest of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina over the deaths of hundreds of protesters during the August mass uprising that saw her ouster, the AP reports.

You really have to wonder where the fuck this idiot (that’s bootleg Trump merch on his head, by the way, they sell those in Chinatown) got the idea that “family-oriented” illegal members of his community would somehow be exempted from the MAGA Reich’s very plainly stated goals of deporting 15 to 20 million undocumented non-citizens. It’d be one thing if he somehow made it up on the fly while being grilled on CNN but the phrasing seems almost a little too specific and crafted for that, as though some Spanish-language campaign ad he heard on the radio a few weeks ago used that exact verbiage to tell the community that it’s okay to vote for Trump, your undocumented neighbor or relative won’t have to worry about getting dragged out of their homes, all the while the white nativists on Team Orange are telling their much larger Caucasian base “Yes, we abso-fucking-lutely are going to try to round up every illegal and their citizen kids too,” every day for the past year.

The reporter should’ve asked the guy what he thinks “family-oriented” means and who’s tasked with making the determination in these no doubt grimly Kafka-esque summary hearings next year.

“In his future policies, including those on the Russian track US President-elect Donald Trump will rely on the commitments to the forces that brought him to power, rather than on election pledges, Russian presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev told the daily Kommersant in an interview. ‘The election campaign is over,’ Patrushev noted. ‘To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them,'” says an actual Kremlin press release via state media outlet TASS.

“He agreed that Trump, when he was still a candidate, ‘made many statements critical of the destructive foreign and domestic policies pursued by the current administration.’ ‘But very often election pledges in the United States can diverge from subsequent actions,’ he recalled.”

In a story headlined “Minnesota dad who ranted against Trump election gunned down wife, ex-girlfriend and his 2 kids in murder-suicide,” the New York Post does not say why 46 year-old Duluth, Minnesota lib Anthony Nephew murdered his ex-girlfriend and their 15 year-old son, then his wife and their 7 year-old son before turning the gun on himself in a Friday rampage, they just imply he snapped because the convicted felon former president is on his way back to the White House.

“Implying” is doing a lot of work here. “Before his rampage, Anthony Nephew had been sharing left-wing and anti-Trump posts on his Facebook account. ‘My mental health and the world can no longer peacefully coexist, and a lot of the reason is religion,’ Anthony Nephew wrote in July,” says the Post in their article, seemingly trying to will into existence a direct connection between the asshole’s politics and that he murdered his current and former partners and both of his sons.

“Nephew shared other political posts, including an image of former president Barack Obama, Trump, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The word ‘hate’ sits under Trump’s face, while the words ‘hope,’ ‘heal’ and ‘grow’ correspond with the Democratic politicians,” the Post continues, making it obvious they don’t have anything else to make politics relevant to the tragedy.

Packaging for new Mattel Barbie dolls for the Glenda the Good Witch and Wicked Witch of the West characters in the upcoming Wizard of Oz musical prequel film Wicked bear not the correct URL for the film on the back but instead a pornography site of the same name, Kotaku reports. The toy company over the weekend quickly pulled the two products from shelves at major retailers for what we assume would be a rapid repackaging job in order to capitalize on this month’s hotly-anticipated debut of the film adaptation of the hit Broadway show without the embarrassing porn asterisk.

Kotaku’s article cites a tweet with pics of the boxes and the URL “Wicked.com” on the back – where it should have said “WickedMovie.com” – raising interesting questions about how the graphic designer’s fuckup was discovered. Nowhere in the reporting or in the tweet does anyone say “MY LITTLE GIRL IS SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS MOVIE AND WANTED TO SEE THE WEBSITE! SHE TYPED IT IN AND IMMEDIATELY SHE CLICKED ‘YES I AM 18 OR OLDER’ AND SAW A GANGBANG!”

Meaning that, irrespective of whether or not the graphic designer did this as a troll – and we’re going to guess probably not – it’s very likely that nobody actually went to Wicked.com thinking they were about to check out a trailer and stills from the movie only to be met with graphic video of sexual intercourse. Instead it’s quite possible someone along the line here had to have said “Oh shit, that’s a porn site and they printed it on the box of a kids’ toy! Oh wait… I mean, my friend said he has a monthly membership at Wicked.com and recommended it to me on several occasions but since I do not ever look at internet porn ever I do not know any further specifics about that site’s content beyond that it is indeed pornographic in nature and this is very bad that Mattel accidentally printed the incorrect URL for the Wicked movie,” or similar, without ever specifying the name of the friend.

Share prices for private prison companies Geo Group and CoreCivic jumped nearly 4 and 8 percent, respectively in pre-market trading on Monday after convicted felon President-Elect Trump announced he would name far right extremist former acting ICE Director Tom Homan as his “border czar,” CNBC reports on a pretty obvious indicator of where things are going for undocumented folks.

In related news, several day laborers outside of a Home Depot in Texas on Wednesday told the Austin American-Statesman they were “optimistic” that Trump’s return to power will create more work for them. “More investment. If things get moving, that creates work,” said a man identified only as Danilo, adding “Trump wants to deport those who do bad things… I haven’t broken any laws.”

Several other men who said they’re also undocumented nodded along in agreement with Danilo.

Above is a screenshot of a tweet by Tristan Tate, brother of sex trafficker/bro-influencer Andrew Tate, as retweeted by Neo-Nazi MAGA shitbag Nick Fuentes, whose home address was doxxed a few days ago when he posted “Your body, my choice” to the obvious and understandable consternation of women furious over rapist misogynist convicted felon former President Donald Trump returning to power after suckering enough low-info dumbasses into voting for him.

Convicted felon President-Elect Trump will nominate shrill scumbag upstate New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations, CNN reports.

America’s communist neighbor just can’t catch a break as eastern Cuba has been hit with a 6.8 magnitude earthquake on Sunday, four days after Category 3 Hurricane Rafael tore into the island and weeks after its electrical grid collapsed due to lack of fuel, the Associated Press reports.

There were no immediate information on major damage or injuries available, though folks in Santiago, Cuba’s second largest city, told the AP they had heard screams and saw masonry cracking during the lengthy initial rumble that was followed by at least two strong aftershocks.

One of the 43 rhesus monkeys that escaped from a lab in South Carolina was taken back into custody on Saturday, ABC News reports. “She is well and having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” said Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard in a statement about the unnamed monkey.

Officials in the town of Yemasee said that “a significant number” of the escaped primates were located in a facility near where the rescued animal was found and were “jumping back and forth over the facility’s fence… Alpha Genesis management and staff are on-site, actively feeding and monitoring the animals, and they will continue these efforts throughout the weekend. The primates continue to interact with their companions inside the facility, which is a positive sign” that authorities and the testing company can spank this mass escape problem once and for all.

A Friday Daily Wire story headlined “EXCLUSIVE: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs” quotes from a “whistleblower” who says “it’s almost unbelievable to think that somebody in the federal government would think that’s okay” for the federal disaster relief agency to order its employees to do exactly that in one town struck by Hurricane Milton last month.

The highly popular right wing propaganda site writes that they obtained a screenshot of a Microsoft Teams group chat in which a supervisor wrote that “it would be ‘best practice’ to ‘avoid homes advertising Trump,’ according to photos of the messages viewed by The Daily Wire. No explanation was given for this guidance, which included other recommendations like telling the workers to ‘practice de-escalation and preventative measures,’ and to ‘avoid high salt diets and coffee.'”

President Joe Biden and President-Elect Trump will sit for what’s sure to be a pretty fucking awkward meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports.

What the fuck is this? Why does a Wendy’s Junior Bacon Cheeseburger still cost $3.99 at the location in Lower Manhattan? We were to understand that prices would immediately plummet on everyday items after a certain candidate won the 2024 presidential election this week.

We thought that the companies who have been overcharging customers for the last four years would right away slash prices because they weren’t afraid of the current president, who is too feckless and weak to punish them for bringing economic suffering on Americans like this. A Wendy’s Jr Bacon Cheeseburger used to cost a dollar in 2002 and now it’s up to four dollars. Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring that price back – it’s been four days now and Wendy’s is defying the president-elect. Basically mocking him to his face even after he swore to take action against them.

Okay, sure. We’ll give it some time, but if by January 21st the Jr Bacon Cheeseburger is still $3.99 at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal Wendy’s then we will immediately be declaring the second Trump Administration a failure. We’re not going to be accepting any excuses or nerd talk about how economics and fast food franchising or any of that shit works. This will be on President-Elect Trump.

A brush fire tore through a hilly, wooded section of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Friday night, burning a likely small but indeterminate amount of acreage in New York City’s other main Frederick Law Olmsted-designed urban sanctuary after Manhattan’s Central Park, NBC News reports.

The inferno was just the latest in an outbreak of wildfires across a region that hasn’t seen substantial rain since September coupled with unseasonably warm temperatures often above 80 degrees. “The fire’s under control, and there are some hotter spots,” FDNY Commissioner Robert S Tucker said Friday, adding that they’ll investigate Saturday. “Daylight will help us figure out the cause and origin of this fire,” Tucker continued, as if they’re going to be able to track down the dickhead who probably simply dropped the butt of a joint on some dry leaves.

• It appears we’re going to need more synonyms for “orange.”
• I gave serious consideration to renaming this week’s log “Dreadful thoughts Friday” after Tuesday’s election because my thoughts have been anything but random lately.
• My favorite roller coaster (that still exists) is the old wooden ride at Knoeble’s in the middle of Pennsylvania.  It’s not super complicated, but the sound of the metal running along the wooden frame, hanging onto the 1950’s-style cars as they speed among the branches of huge trees that grew throughout it, was quite a ride.  
• It is not a coincidence that this is happening as last of The Greatest Generation die off.  
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume CXCIX”

“The day before the election, | was notified by the Margate Police Department, located in my Congressional District, about a potential plot on my life,” Florida Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz posted online.  “The individual in question was arrested not far from my home; he is a former felon who was in possession of a rifle, a suppressor, and body armor. Found with him was a manifesto that, among other things, included antisemitic rhetoric and only my name on the ‘target’ list. There are many other details that | will not disclose as I do not want to interfere with an ongoing investigation.

“I want to thank local law enforcement, the US Marshalls, the FBI, the US Capitol Police, and the US Attorney’s office. As someone who was appointed to the Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, I understand the failures and importance of fixing the protection of our current and future Commander-In-Chief and Vice President. At the same time, I am deeply worried about Congressional member security and the significant lack thereof when we are in the district. Regardless of our political affiliations or differences, we all have families we want to keep safe.”

“As of noon today, we would like to provide an update regarding the escaped primates. They have not yet been re-captured and returned to their enclosures. Current observations show the primates playfully exploring the perimeter fence of the facility, engaging with those still inside by cooing to them. Alpha Genesis is keeping a close watch on the situation while maintaining a safe distance at this time. The primates are exhibiting calm and playful behavior, which is a positive indication.”

“We kindly urge the public to stay clear of this area as Alpha Genesis works diligently to safely recover these animals and return them to their habitats unharmed. According to previous communications from Alpha Genesis, there is currently no threat to public health. We sincerely appreciate the community’s overwhelming support and concern as we work towards a positive resolution. We will provide further updates as more information becomes available,” says the Yemassee, South Carolina Police Department in an update on the monkey situation.

TLDR: They seem to be just hoping that all 43 monkeys go back to the lab on their own.

The Biden Administration on Friday lifted a “de facto” ban on US military contractors from working in Ukraine, CNN reports on what sounds like a way of fucking up convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s “peace plan” by making it too lucrative for the military-industrial complex to give up.

“In order to help Ukraine repair and maintain military equipment provided by the US and its allies, DoD is soliciting bids for a small number of contractors who will help Ukraine maintain the assistance we’ve already provided,” an official told CNN. “These contractors will be located far from the front lines and they will not be fighting Russian forces. They will help Ukrainian Armed Forces rapidly repair and maintain US provided equipment as needed so it can be quickly returned to the front.”

Yeah so we’re thinking that unless they stop saying this shit by like early January at the latest so their base can forget it ever was promised to them, we’re going to have to operate under the assumption that they really mean to round people up and ship them out of the country.