Monthly Archives: August 2019

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why should the Amazon not burn?

I remember hearing about how important the Amazon is when I was a schoolkid, how important it was to save it. I don’t remember them talking about the rest of the planet’s forests though. I certainly never got taught about how my ancestors clear cut most of their trees. When I go visit my great-grandfather’s house, it’s important for me to remember that almost every tree in that area is about post the year 1900. Local residents and lumberjack companies took the rest of the forest in the hundreds of years before that time. I’m sure my family did it all with glorious abandon, they were in America from the 1600’s.  Parts of the area that are now unspeakably, beautiful forest must have looked like desert moonscapes a 150 years ago.

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So the planet now points the finger at Brazil? Okay, got it. But as the BBC points out, what about the Amazon in Bolivia?

What about the forest fires in Indonesia and Malaysia to start palm oil plantations that literally blot out the Sun in Singapore each year?

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Or here’s a shot from The Economist which shows forest fires globally right now. Seems the real problem is in Africa more so than Brazil.

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I’m not saying I want the Amazon to burn. It’d be nice if it didn’t. But there are no easy answers. When you look at it, everybody in human history has burned or chopped down their forests at some point.

The G7 wants to give Brazil $22M to stop. Or, in terms of scale for international monetary efforts, about $4. What a joke, if I was Brazilian I’d be pissed too at the contemptuous, cheap way people are talking about my country.

The answers are much harder. Throwing money at the problem isn’t the answer. Careful, considered, engagement is. But it has to be global. It’s not about the Amazon. It’s about the whole planet.

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nuke everything

So a twelve year old has recently suggested we nuke hurricanes. The news outlets of course went to reason and logic to countermand something that’s probably just best ignored. But we at TAP contain within insanity that knows no bounds:

1) Even if nuking hurricanes doesn’t work, why not just do it anyways, just to give it a shot? It’s only ocean out there, most of the ocean’s biomass is near the shores anyways, so let’s give it ago. What could go wrong?

2) Even if nuking hurricanes doesn’t work, why not battle weather where we can? If a hurricane can take a nuke and keep going, I bet you a big tornado can’t. Lots of room on all those plains to take a nuke blast.

3) And take the burning Amazon, it’s perfectly reasonable to get mad and preachy at Brazil for doing what Western nations did for most of the 19th Century, but putting out fires is easy. You just nuke the forest to remove the trees which fuel the flames. The forest firefighter doctrinal term is a ‘controlled burn’, only this time with a nuclear weapon.

4) The positive effects of lethal radiation are underrated.

5) Nuke work. Come on, you know you want to.

6) Nuke the Moon. Don’t get mad at me, the Moon started it, it’s time we finish things for good.

7) I don’t get why the zombie apocalypse thing is a thing. In reality, the war would be over in eight seconds because we have nuclear weapons whereas the zombies can’t use tools our ancestors wielded 30K years ago.

8) It would probably greatly benefit humanity to gather all celebrities and politicians onto a big boat, tow it out to sea, and then nuke it. Twice.

9) In all these stupid superhero movies, nuclear weapons give them super powers. I should go out into the desert with my own backpack nuke and give this a shot. What could go wrong?

10) I think if aliens are watching us they’d be baffled at how we’ve somehow managed to not use a nuke in nearly 75 years. Maybe we don’t all collectively suck as much as we think we do.

11) Did they ever nuke Godzilla? If so, did it work? I’m not 100% familiar with these films so I’m not sure. I’m sure they did, and that it didn’t work, which is dumb. After all, dude’s not immortal.

12) We have a garbage / plastic waste problem throughout the planet. Let’s just dig a huge ditch in the Australian outback and use that as the planet’s only landfill. And we just nuke it from time to time to clean it out.

13) Let’s face it, some countries probably should be completely annihilated with nuclear weapons. I’m looking at you Andorra, Isle of Man, Albania, Middle Earth, Belgium, Westeros, Bhutan, whatever.

14) And lastly don’t forget aliens. We’ll need to nuke aliens when they come for our beer supply. Granted, their ability to travel between planets likely means our nukes are completely ineffective and they’ll laugh at us from their bridge while they bat way our shitty technology, but it’d be a real cool blast for a few minutes. You know, before they began their assault. Bow and arrows, anybody?

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What fun! Fireworks!

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two Rus pilots get free vodka for all time

It’s amazing that catastrophic bird strikes don’t happen more often.  I know most major airports employ various forms of anti-bird action, but birds are, like, everywhere.  Anyways, here’s a Ural Airlines Airbus 321 belly down in a field.

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Everybody walked away.  Take a gander at this map.

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So many different bad ways this could have gone.  So many areas of concrete to avoid.  Less than a mile down from the runway, mere seconds to act.  Fortunately, there was a nice smooth cornfield to set down in.

Even so, this is an insane feat.  These pilots deserve every bit of credit they’ll get.

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is there a global leader who’s not a closet felon?

From Trump to Clinton to British royalty to [insert any elite person here] it seems there wasn’t anybody in power or money who didn’t deliberately fall into the spider web woven by Jeffery Epstein and his no doubt very large army of enablers and flunkies. Remember folks, these are the people who make decisions for you, and generally speaking, are supposed to be improving your lives. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work, but no longer does.

What makes all this even more comical is that Epstein got the chance to off himself in a federal prison. Forget the conspiracy theories where a gaggle of coked out drunk alien assassins were hired by the illuminati to do him in. Dude literally hung himself with a bedsheet while a government contractor making minimum wage was in the loo browsing a dating app on his smartphone and wondering when the fuck his watch was supposed to end.

In an era where all our elite leaders are too deeply in the flesh trade to actually govern, it’s no wonder why the most junior of all government employees is so bad at their job they can’t prevent a grown man from hanging himself in a high security federal prison. It’s a true metaphor for failure from top to bottom.

And the best part is, none of this was a secret. Just like how apparently all of Hollywood knew what that Harvey guy was doing, so everybody seems to have known what Epstein was doing. It was just the way things were.  It went on for decades in both cases.

If any of these guys made $12 as a Walmart packer, they’d all be in prison for decades. Instead, they’ll get to move on in life because nothing says the game isn’t rigged like being able to rub palms with a known sex offender without consequences.  There are rules for the weak, and impunity for the powerful.

The federal justice system convicts at a stasi like rate of 99%.  They’ll put a 19 year old who gets caught on the streets of Baltimore with a baggy of crack behind bars for two decades.  But damned if they’ll get around to cleaning house with a powerful senator, or banker, or celebrity who enabled a 15 year old to be raped.

This is how societies and cultures fail. Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, all these consequential leaders who carved the world we live in today, gee these dudes sure did have their own flaws. But I’m pretty sure closet felon wasn’t among them.

PS.   By the way, there’s no picture to this post. Why? Because almost every photo on this issue seems to already be doctored (faked) in some way, by one side or the other, to emphasize that Epstein was associated with [insert political rival here]. As if, one should be forced to forget, that everybody was in on this game.  It’s cultural suicide.

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the spin cycle continues

I’ve probably been in that El Paso Walmart half a dozen times, but still: Kindly observe (again) another act of senseless evil by human scum(s).

Kindly observe (again) how said human scum(s) will now be given a platform by the shameless media to become famous and get their message out.

Kindly observe (again) how the political, business, entertainment, and/or educational elite express the same pointless platitudes without ever proposing any concrete solutions whatsoever thus ensuring its continuation for the next few decades at least.

Kindly observe (again) as the usual rhetorical bomb throwers use this event to justify whatever preconceived notions they have on religion, terrorism, guns, culture, and/or whatever and compete to see who can shout the loudest.

Kindly observe (again) as this spin cycle continues.

Kindly observe (again) that it will happen (again).

We recommend you do as I do, which is to not pay attention. For the average person on the street, it’s not even worth it anymore. You can’t change it, and you’ve got problems of your own to deal with each and every day as you live your life. This sort of thing is now as common as the changing of the seasons, and it’s not going to stop, so why bother expending your very valuable mental energy on it?

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Version #37 of 83 – Circa 2019

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Version #38 of 83 – Circa 2019

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The National Gallery of Art – you’re not welcome

Sometimes the safest way to get through the day is to never get excited about anything. That way if things tank, you can just shrug and go get a beer. Instead, I got somewhat excited, things tanked, and it sort of robbed me of part of my brain for the rest of the day.

Those unfortunate to be long time readers of this blog will remember I occasionally go to galleries, dig Japan, and like weird art. I thought this was encapsulated in a visit to the National Gallery of Art which I walked to after being in DC for work.

They had a visiting exhibition on Japanese art and animals. What could go wrong?

The exhibit appeared to be underwhelming, and lacking structure, so I was having a hard time getting sucked in. But, this was because I spent the entire time looking over my shoulder to see whether a security guard was going to yell at me again.

I’ve probably been to a dozen galleries across the globe and never had to talk to a security guard, let alone interact negatively with one. It happened to me at The National Gallery of Art, four times, in less than an hour. Whether they were unhappy with the way I was carrying my backpack, or how close I was standing to an exhibit, or so on, they were in your face. They even got directly into the face of some poor old guy who was clearly hard of hearing.

Here is how a normal human interaction should work:

“Excuse me Sir, we would ask you stand back from the exhibit. You’re a bit too close. Thanks so much.”

This is how The National Gallery of Art thinks human interactions should work:

“HELLO!!!???”

I literally walked out. I said something unfortunate to the fourth guard, waved him off, and stormed out. I’ve never done this before. I was in the place for less than an hour. What a shame.

Turns out my experience is not rare. So now I’ll turn it over to some additional online reviews for folks who didn’t appreciate a Stasi like experience while looking at art, some of these are just heinous:

Lived in Paris where I had the very best art available. This is the best American art displayed I have seen by far. One complaint: I have a service dog and the staff who watch over the art in each of the rooms containing art were always anticipating my service dog was going to do something wrong (which never happens….ever) and they were anxious to catch it in the act. It was hard to relax and enjoy the art when someone is doing that to you in every room you enter over and over and over for hours.

Wow my son is 12 and I’ve raised him correctly, I dont need you following you telling me to not let him touch.

there are scumbag security officers working there. i was not warned in advance about closing time i didnt gave time to gather stuff. they got physically aggressive with me when it was closing at five pm. i am deaf and schizophrenic. i was trying to draw in peace in their galleries. i recommend to avoid the area. dangerous staff and guards. even the info desk lady scowled at me for being evidently deaf. avoid this hellhole.

The place is jammed with sweaty rude security guards that looked at me as if I had no business there and followed me around as if I was in a department store about to steal something. If I had blue eyes and blonde hair I’m certain I would have had a different experience. If you are of color go with someone or be prepared to be uncomfortable . I’m so disappointed because I love art and had planned to visit often but the security staff is extremely unprofessional and ruined the atmosphere for me to fully enjoy the art. Also no curator at any of the popular exhibits I visited. I expected more from the nations capital😶😢😒

How can you get kids interested in art if they are not welcome at all! I went to visit with my 3 kids (10, 7 and 5). We live in the area but I was waiting for the right time to go as I was hoping to get them interested in art at a young age. Unfortunately my experience was really bad. The museum is great as it hosts great works of art, however almost every person I interacted was either a snob (very common on people interested in art for some reason) or plain rude. As soon as we entered the very first room, my 7 year old got to about 2 feet from a painting pointing at something he liked. My wife quickly stopped him and started explaining that he needed to stay away from the art. Even though she stopped him in time and we clearly had the kids under control, a security guard came and started scolding my son. My son got really scared, sat on a sofa and started sobbing silently, since he wanted to cover his face he put his legs on the sofa to cover his face with his knees. The guard came to him again and told him he needed to take his shoes off the (very cheap and plastic) sofa. I told the guard he was overreacting since he was just a kid and then he started with his typical speech of “you cannot tell me how to do my work” and actually asked us to leave the room. We did not leave the museum but you can imagine the kids have no interest on ever going to that museum again, and neither do I. I have great respect for the Smithsonian as an institution and love all other museums, however I was deeply sadden with the experience. I really cannot imagine how art can be promoted to kids if they are not welcome at all.

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fuck this place

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DNC’s master plan to reelect Trump makes headway, say sources

“We couldn’t be happier with the progress we’ve made, particularly in the last two nights,” said a smiling Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez. “We’ve had a well-oiled, styled plan to get the job done and we’re doing just that.” Perez referred to the latest incarnation of the Democrat’s master scheme where the 47 viable presidential candidates spent the better part of a lauded CNN debate insulting each other over things they said when they were twelve. “The way we figure it, we want to leave a final candidate to face Trump who’s so battle scared, so discredited that they stand no change in the general election. It’s the way to get the job done,” Perez commented as he donned a MAGA hat, cackling, “lots of people talk about a circular firing squad, well, we’ve got that, only each candidate has a flamethrower!” Local Democrat activists seemed most pleased with the prospect of a second Trump term. “It just warms my heart to hear our front running candidates propose policies that are both simultaneously unaffordable, making the Trump tax cuts look tame, AND also sound like lunatic fringe ideas concocted in a Moscow salon that are toxic to 84% of American voters,” said Michelle Anderson of Soho, “my friends and I couldn’t be happier with how this has played out.” Perez ended his interview early as he was offhand informed by an aide (that this reporter overheard) that the planned candidate-on-candidate sexual assault (with racists remarks included) scheme was going according to plan. Perez seemed pleased, stroking his MAGA hat as if it were a white fluffy kitty.

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