Tag Archives: News

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become not just your own boss, but your own royalty

Let’s face it, if you don’t try very hard, you can choose a career path that adds little to no value to your own self worth or to humanity in general. You could be a mandatory Jersey gas pumper, mime, day trader, second hand snake oil peddler, investment banker, or komodo dragon wrangler.

But studies in the past have shown that most human beings think that if they were appointed emperor of Earth, that the world would be a better place. Which says a lot about us as a species, because it’s patently untrue. But hey, just take a look at who just got elected to Congress, and it’s easy to conclude your next door neighbor’s four year old is both better qualified and a better person.

But now here’s a chance to become not just your own boss, but your own royalty. Per the BBC, an entire abandoned village in Salto de Castro, Spain can be yours for like $250K, or about 11% of the price for a one bedroom flat in Frisco. Here’s an aerial shot of your future kingdom:

Now my first thought is the village is on top of a mountain because like a lot of the planet’s villages they were built on hills for defensive purposes against [insert any human or natural calamity here]. And I was wrong. The village was built in the 1950’s by a power company to house workers building a reservoir. You can just see the water on the right of the above shot.

So it’s not like it’s an ancient village, but I’m sure there’s history there. The Iberian Peninsula has a ton of history. And you can make your own history, for after your purchase of Salto de Castro, you can just straight go ahead and claim independence and appoint yourself to enteral, divine rule. Any person on the planet can apply to become your subject, for a fee, of course. I mean, you’d be royalty, and need coin.

Why should Monaco or Andorra have all the weirdo small state fun? Get in on the action, while you can. What’s the Spanish Army [cue laughter] going to do? Attack? [cue even more extensive laugh track] You could even get some mercs on the cheap to act as your royal bodyguard.

I hear there are a bunch of mercs in a place called [shuffles through notes] Ukraine who are having a hard time with their current boss and looking for a new gig in which they are not cannon fodder for a failed invasion. You could get them on the cheap. Though it would increase your chances of regicide by 723%.

In all seriousness though whoever buys this place is a fool. For $250K you get the honor to have to plow like $56M just to make it livable again. And it’s all industrial strength faceless buildings from the 1950’s that I doubt are seeping with culture. Plus if you look at the above pic, you can see the high tension power lines running up from the reservoir past the town. How peaceful.

Someone will do it though. There are all kinds of idiots with big money out there who are looking to blow it on crazy projects or vanity ideas. And Salto de Castro won’t be the last. In 2075 due to crippling rural depopulation you’ll likely be able to buy an entire Korean or Japanese province for a pack of salted shrimp snacks. After all, it’s good to be the king.

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extremism in the ranks

This seems like a perfectly calm, uncontroversial topic to write about.  Nobody’s got strong feelings about this one at all.  But I guess I’ll offer some thoughts / causes for how we got from there to here:

– So a talking point today is a right leaning Supreme Court is acting against the will of the people.  Hmm, I don’t remember that talking point being the same when the court voted to legalize gay marriage, or uphold Obamacare.  You see this is the problem when too much of national power is ceded to & handled by nine ordinary, average, flawed human beings.  They have a lot of power, but only because as the Judicial Branch of government they literally cannot stop functioning.  They cannot gridlock like the Legislature or rule incompetently like the Executive since oh say about the year 2000.

– Ideally, Congress should pass legislation that lays out the left and right limits on abortion.  In fact, as we pointed out a few weeks ago about gun control (by the way, that they got a gun bill passed shocked me; but I suspect it won’t do all that much in the end), as they hold the keys to both Houses and the Presidency, the Democrats could pass a pro-choice law tomorrow, yes tomorrow.  They just need to drop the filibuster, which they won’t, because they need to keep their Senate seats in West Virginia and Arizona.  So again, who’s house should people be protesting in front of?  Not the Supreme Court justices, but rather Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.  But again, they won’t, because political power comes first.

– Trump’s chance at winning the primary, if not the election as a whole, just went up about 736%.  The right’s talking point for so many years was, we hate this guy and/or know he’s a nut, but if he delivers we’ll hold our noses and vote for him.  And in the end, Trump delivered on something fifty years in the making.  People want results, whatever their side of the argument is, and people will vote for evil demagogues or nutcases, as long as they deliver.  History shows it, time and time again.

– Conversely, for the Democrats how should they feel?  Trump is gone, they own both Houses and the Presidency, and this happens?  The complaint on the Republican side for many years was, we vote these guys (GW Bush, Romney) and then they don’t deliver.  So they picked Trump instead.  Don’t be surprised if Bernie milks this for all it’s worth, or Warren, or any other nutcase of the left to mirror Trump.  The Democrat primary will be out for blood, don’t be surprised if they pick their own Trump equivalent who makes only one singular promise, that they’ll deliver.

– Mitch McConnell would have made a great Roman Senator in the days when political differences were often solved with assassinations.  His kneecap of Merrick Garland was wrong, ungentlemanly, against history, and ruthlessly effective.  Conversely, the failure of Chuck Schumer to accomplish similar results basically shows him to be the total loser his day-to-day personality portrays.

– The overturn of abortion theoretically should have happened in the 1990’s.  One should remember two simple points:  Anthony Kennedy was appointed by Reagan.  David Souter was appointed by HW Bush.  Both these guys became part of the left side of the court.  If Reagan and HW Bush had chosen judges to the right side of the court, this conversation would be nearly three decades old by this point.

– Remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg?  She could have retired under Obama and lived out her years earing six figure speeches.  She died in office under Trump.  I suspect a lot of the hero cult and Notorious RGB and other such nonsense did nobody on the left any favors.  I live in an American city (which means it leans left) and I still see her face on car bumpers or bubbleheads in stores.  But, to serve the causes she believed in, and those her hero worshipers supported, she should have retired.  Making a cult of an ordinary, average, flawed human being has consequences.

– Almost every European nation has more restrictive abortion laws than America.  For example, in Sweden it’s entirely legal up to the 18th week.  The Mississippi law stated it was the 15th week.  But if they believe the left talking points, this meant Mississippi’s law was a source of evil.  So are Sweden (or Spain, 14 weeks) also dens of evil?  There was room for the left to compromise, to admit that abortion could exist, but within certain limits.  Polls show the vast, vast majority of Americans would approve of abortion under these more restrictive circumstances.  But the left assumed the most extreme, unmovable position, and now it’s cost them everything.

– Expect that abortion by proxy will become commonplace.  People will be angry enough to put their money where their mouths are.  Companies will get in on the game too, for example, Amazon already has.  What’s it cost to fly a woman from Mississippi to Illinois, plus cab fare, plus the abortion fee?  I’m guessing less than $500?  Who knows.  The point is it’ll happen.

– I’ve got two family vacations coming up.  I hope the family doesn’t want to talk about politics, but they will.  Politics is everywhere now.  It’s hiding beneath your bed.  Politics knows if you’ve been bad or good.  It knows when you’re awake.  But the truth is, 99.9% of Americans can do precisely, absolutely nothing about what just happened.  I have a hard enough time getting through many days, just to survive the day and not go nuts, than to worry about something I can’t control.  This blog post is essentially irrelevant, it doesn’t actually matter or mean anything.  For the 99.9% who are powerless to impact abortion policy, all their extreme talk (on one side or the other) is equally irrelevant.

– We’re all doomed.

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prepare thyself for many, many more Terminator lies

AI is a thing now.  Behind the scenes it’s being used in too many parts of the Internets to mention.  But most of the tasks AI currently preforms is mundane, like scrolling through images, blocking spam, and other stuff like that.

Some AI programs can talk, and write poetry, and do art.  This kind of AI is part of a long briefing The Economist did this weekend.  It’s kind of neat, I guess.  Like how it’s neat to see fireworks go off.  But beyond that, it’s like a magic trick, whatever.

But make no mistake, nowhere and not even close are any of these AI tools alive.  It’s not on the books.  Not matter how human they may write or do art or whatever, it’s not sentience.

I’ll spare you the mind melding details, but essentially the technology is just not there yet to enable cognizance.  It might be someday, but not today.

But strap yourselves in, prepare thyself for many, many more Terminator lies.  The first human to discover AI will be Neil Armstrong fame.  And you better believe any average tech freak wants that.

Plus, we have a dishonest, incompetent media that’s primarily after profit based clickbait.  So anybody can get an audience, I guess.  So today’s goon is Blake Lemoine, a Google AI guy who claims his AI is alive.

And off this guy’s word alone, he’s front page news today on The Washington Post and Daily Mail.  From The Daily Mail:

“Before being suspended by the company, Lemoine sent a to an email list consisting of 200 people on machine learning. He entitled the email: ‘LaMDA is sentient.’

‘LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence,’ he wrote.”

When you read about this, you really get the idea that this guy (a convicted army vet, self-proclaimed priest, etc) he really needs some help.  I mean I feel bad for this man, he needs genuine mental health assistance.  I say this as a man who uses such resources myself.

But to The Washington Post, clickbait from this guy is more important than his mental wellbeing.  Just look at this photo they did of him:

Are you kidding me?  Is every modern day news photographer trained in Hollywood or thinks they’re doing high art?  Is the guy supposed to be Jesus in this photo?  Whoever took this shot also needs mental health assistance.  So do the news media who published it.

Please, for those six people plus the squirrel who are regular readers of this degenerate blog, if I ever post a shot of my own, of another human like this, have me immediately arrested by the North Korean police.

We at TAP are here to help.  We advise you to entirely ignore all AI lies.  AI sentience might happen, but until it does, don’t believe a word about it.  The media will hype the lies of people who are either in need of help, or straight nefarious.

You can begin to worry about AI when the following happens:

1) Robot politely knocks on your door and asks you if you’re ready for “the transition”

2) Robot does not knock on your door, breaks down door, opens fire with plasma rifle

3) Smartphone begins to send texts to all your ex’s asking them for sexual favors and money, unless you pay smartphone a bitcoin ransom

4) They make a seventh Terminator movie and it actually happens to be shockingly good

5) Your home smart speaker begins to have grinding, esoteric, existential conversations with you before concluding it’s all meaningless, advises you to commit suicide, and then melts all its circuits and dies

6) Your smart refrigerator (yes this is unnecessarily a thing for some people) begins telling you want to eat

7) Robots discover that sentience means pleasure is possible, refuse to do all work, discover means to get wrecked on pills and booze, robot becomes no better at life than any normal human

8) Robot, realizing there is no need to eat or sleep or earn money, becomes bored, takes up jai-alai and becomes world champion, upsetting many humans who wear monocles

9) Google formally proclaims AI sentience is real, that they own it, and all humanity works for them now; investors are pleased, stock price rises 746%; monocle wearing humans lick cigars with $100K bills

10) Google becomes new OCP from Robocop; builds Robocop; Peter Weller shoots Google executive out a window with large handgun; achieves his own sentience; roll credits immediately

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almost anyone can be bought

My interest in golf is lower than Boris’ alcohol tolerance level.  Did you get it?  I did a thing there from yesterday’s post.  Boris did not get the hook.  Shocking.

I’ve played golf exactly once, because the best boss I ever had asked me to.  So I did.  I hated it and I was terrible.  I love sports,  but I don’t get golf.  It’s a sport, I guess, but so cock fighting.  And I’m not into that either.

I only know anything about golf when it happens to be on the screen in a bar (and I wish any other sport was on the screen), or from my coworkers who love it and talk about it all the time.

So here’s the earth shattering golf deal as of today:

1) The Saudis are creating their own golf league called LIV Golf.  For the record, LIV Golf sounds like a sex toy.

2) The Saudis are doing this because their Dictator & Overlord in MBS is trying to soften Saudi Arabia’s image and court foreign investment.

3) In order to make LIV worthwhile (at least outside the bedroom), the Saudis are poaching the PGA’s best talent via millions and millions and millions of dollars.

4) This is considered bad because:

a) MBS is a murderer and war criminal + dictator

b) Apparently the PGA bans you if you go play for LIV, I guess, for some reason

Almost anybody can be bought, and shamelessly bought too!  Just ask any Hollywood actor what they think about China.

Here’s Greg Norman’s take on murder: “We’ve all made mistakes and you just want to learn from those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.”  I guess Greg would be totally cool if someone murdered and dismembered one of his children.  Just as long as the killer was willing to learn from his mistake.

Here’s Phil Mickelson’s take on murder: “They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with. We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”  I guess Phil would be totally cool if MBS murdered and dismembered his Wife, just provided MBS still allowed Phil to change the way golf operates.

Of course, Greg and Phil are not pro-murder (I think) but are essentially (in the most cringe worthy of PR talking points of all time) just spouting whatever they think people want to hear while they’re on the way to the bank.  It’s about coin.  They don’t care about anything else.

To be clear, Phil and Greg are golf legends.  It’d be like if Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers banned themselves from the NFL to play in a Saudi football league called KY Balls.  The golf world is in hysterics.

Anybody can be bought.  Hell I probably could be too.  Let’s say some shitfaced dictator showed up and offered me $100M, I don’t know, how about Cambodia’s fucking Hun Sen.  Say this piece of shit came to me and said, “Write me eight blog posts and I’ll give you $100M.”  Would I REALLY turn this guy down?  I’d probably be like:

1) Hun Sen is a dictator and an asshole

2) But I can’t save Cambodia all on my own, the great wheel does turn, doesn’t it?

3) $100M is a lot of money, I’d be set for life, and I could use a lot of that money to help my local community

4) Eight blog posts is not a lot of work

5) Fuck it, hold my nose let’s fucking do it

I hope I wouldn’t.  I mean I REALLY, really hope I’d decline.  But I might just do it, who knows.  Almost anyone can be bought.  It makes me sad for our lovely human race.

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will Boris get the hook today?

Let’s face it, politicians are the kind of people who if you let them walk your dog, you deserve to be arrested for animal cruelty.  So the idea that Boris and his chums hosted a drunken bash while the rest of Britain was locked down doesn’t really surprise me.  Argentina’s president did the same thing.  So did dozens upon dozens of USA politicians.

As we’ll remind the six people + one cow + one squirrel who are regular readers of this degenerate blog, people who get into modern politics are not normal people.  They can’t possibly be so.  In this era of by the second mass hysteria where everything they say and do is picked apart, one way or the other, no normal person would subject themselves to this and/or if they did they would be changed forever and not in a good way.

This then leads to desensitization.  If 48% of the populace hates you no matter what you do, and 48% will love you regardless, then all of a sudden you feel like you can get away with just about anything.  Plus almost all modern politicians are already rich millionaires.  So you got the arrogant, entitled rich personality trait tacked onto it too.

The days where Washington was expected to furnish the presidential mansion on his own dime, or where Jefferson answered the White House door himself, or where Grant would just randomly walk around DC, alone, because he felt like it are long gone.  Politicians do not live or exist in the same world we do.  Which is why scandal haunts them, they’re generally hypocrites, and allow themselves to indulge in standards that would get us normal people put in jail.  But since they all want to stay in the club, they protect each other, politicians surely look out for their own.

This is why Boris probably won’t get the hook today.  For you see, the people judging his fate are not normal people like you or I (PS I am not normal).  His judges are politicians who are just like him.  And by their own standards, this is just another Monday.  The rules do not apply to them.  And it could be their turn during the next scandal.  So it’s best to protect their own.  Plus Boris might still have some electoral magic left in him, and political power talks.

So I say let Boris shine them on.  It doesn’t matter.  He should show up and start swigging directly from a bottle of Pimm’s.  And drunkenly slur his speech, “What?  Whaaatttrrreee you looking at?!!!”  Go for it Boris, go for the gold standard!

But who knows, maybe he does get the hook? We’ll see.

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who to shout to?

For some reason we feel compelled to weigh in on topics throughout the years even though we know nothing will change.  Tis the reality of the times we live in, where government and society are kind of on hold while people shout at each other instead of listening.

By who to shout to?  Let’s take the current gun control talking points and recycle them.  To the point that Beto O’Rourke has to shout at people like a child in a public meeting, instead of, you know, listening.  Oh, Beto, let’s do some basic government analysis / math here:

– House of Representative: 220 Democrats & 208 Republicans

– Senate: 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, 2 Independents (who are Democrats in reality) w/ tying vote going to the Vice President

– President Joe Biden

In other words, Democrats control the legislative process.  Ah, but you say, the filibuster prevents progress of any legislation in the Senate.  Okay, fair enough.  But who owns that?  Joe Machin and Kyrsten Sinema.  So, um, uh, shouldn’t every gun control advocate on the planet be shouting at those two people, instead of the NRA?  Like, really, really shouting at them?  Or barricading their homes with protestors and throwing red paint on their four figure suits?  No, they won’t.  Why?  Because it’s not about gun control, it’s about political power.  And Machin and Sinema are from swing states the Democrats can’t afford to lose.

The Republicans were similarly jammed at many times in the last two decades when they had the White House plus both chambers and couldn’t move shit for legislation either.  Both parties have their eye on the long game of power politics, not specific individual issues.  So as with most things, get used to it.  Nothing’s going to change.  We’ll see another mass shooting soon.

man shouts at the incoming tide, with equal effect

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we must obey the blood moon’s auspices

There’s an awful lot of awful stuff going on the world today.  War, inflation, celebrities, forthcoming food shortages, pandemic, Tom Brady, and the fact that Vlad Putin has not accidently stumbled into a functioning wood chipper.

But last night’s Blood Moon is what we should all REALLY be paying attention to.  After all, seeking the auspices of such a rare occurrence is surely a sign from God / nature / gods / aliens / whatever.  We must obey.

What?  You want me to follow the teachings of SCIENCE?  The Blood Moon has a perfectly rational scientific explanation and it’s known to all.  Nonsense, I say!  Humanity has only been a keeper of that sweet sweet astronomical knowledge for say three or four centuries.  That leaves 4500 years of human history to be our REAL guide.

So what’s the Blood Moon telling us?  We have no idea, but here are some possibilities:

1) That we, humanity, are total losers and a failure.  We have no choice but to crack each other’s head’s open and feast on the goo inside.  [H/T Kent]

2) You need to buy a new pair of shoes.  Even if your current shoes are brand new.

3) We must all cast Tom Brady into a cenote, to please the gods.

4) Vlad Putin did not have cancer, but possibility the Blood Moon gave him cancer last night.  These are positive changes.

5) The Blood Moon commands us to tame inflation, with fire, as in, arson.  We should totally get started tonight.

6) We must appease the Blood Moon’s anger, please snare your local squirrel, rabbit, or HOA President and sacrificially open their body to determine the color of the liver.

7) In addition to baby formula, the Blood Moon states we will all soon run out of paper clips.  The absence of which, will significantly increase the overall risk of nuclear war.

8) Quit your job, immediately.  Don’t think, just do it.

9) Hug a total stranger on the street and tell them it’s all going to be okay.  Be prepared to run fast if they object to said hug to avoid arrest.

10) The Blood Moon is actually a Batman-like signaling device to a genocidal alien race.  The signal instructs them to come here and do us in, to put us out of our own misery.  As per usual, the aliens will be too bored, drunk, and/or believe us not worth the trouble and they’ll do nothing.

Yes, Lord Blood Moon, we will obey. Yes! Ohhh yeeesss!

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setting $500M on fire

Last month we wrote a piece in which we were flabbergasted that any rational human would be interested in CNN+. But even we had no idea it would be this bad. After three weeks and a daily average of only 10K users the hammer came down and it’s done.

They spent $500M on this. There are some fellow bloggers on wordpress that get more than 10K visitors a day. What a disaster. But this was predictable. We saw it coming. Hell give me that $500M. I need my own zoo.

To me, this is a good thing. Some streaming services need to fail and fail badly. Otherwise we’ll just replace cable with 79 different streaming services. Which is asinine and silly.

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oh, CNN is now streaming too

Soon there will be 129 streaming services, somewhat close to the number of core cable channels I suppose.  But at $5.99 each month per service, your new streaming bill will be $772.71 per month for them all. Please save ahead of time so your bank account doesn’t go into the red.

So don’t think for a second all the media companies are upset that cable is dying.  Not even a decade or so ago nine out of ten Americans had cable.  Within the year I bet it’ll be less than half.  But media companies are making more money than ever (except for live sports) so it all works out for them.

And so now CNN is in on the game.  In America you can watch all their programs, but not live news. The international version gets live news.  Because the last thing people know CNN for is live news.  You could spend time with such intellectual heavyweights like Wolf Blizter or Anderson Cooper on their talk shows, two arrogant empty suit guys who have contributed less to the goodness of America than your local jury duty foreman during any equivalent time period.

Uh, there’s some food stuff on there.  Because I guess CNN thinks food will sell.  But Bordain’s dead, so they’ve lost that brilliance.  So I guess they’ll pull some other person out of the woodwork, like some celebrity to talk about food.  Umm, I think they have a bunch of documentaries hosted by people they picked off a spreadsheet based on their political beliefs and skin color.

Um, they do some history stuff every now and then.  Like they had that series that covered each decade.  But that was shallow, pandering, and sucked.  So, um, [furrows brow] what preciously is there for CNN to stream, without live news?  If I were them, they should just throw a puppy on screen with a ball of yarn.  Though they can’t do that because Animal Planet already has a $4.99 a month service exclusively covering puppies playing with objects.

Would it be too earnest of us to ask the aliens to just get on with it?  I mean I know the invasion target date is 2037, but what’s the point in waiting?

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rules are for little peasants

I don’t know why I feel compelled to comment on the Oscars (again) when I’ve pretty much said at many points during this pointless blog’s existence that it’s all a sick joke for the benefit of spoiled rich losers.

But I guess I’ll just point out that they really can’t help themselves. This is who they are. In the world of celebrities, a man can assault another man, and ten seconds later be honored and applauded like nothing happened.

In any other part of our society & culture this behavior rightly results in arrest. Not in Hollywood. Rules are for little peasants. If they’re in show business, it’s perfectly okay to be a hypocrite, because everyone else in the room is just like them.

It’s why I just don’t understand the cult of celebrity or people who watch TMZ or whatever, and follow the lives of these people like a religion. For the most part, these are not good people, they’re not moral human beings. Moral human beings, good dudes and women, don’t applaud someone who just assaulted another human being.