TIRED:
Cyberpunk
Cottagecore

WIRED:
Cybercore
Cottagepunk

Thought for the day:

If I was a mad science supervillain designing a bioweapon to exterminate my enemies, I couldn't do better than come up with one that looks a bit like the common cold (to those it doesn't kill), reinfects victims repeatedly, causes more low-level brain damage with each reinfection, and inflicts short-term memory loss so they forget all about it.

Remember, there is no pandemic. MWAHAHAHAHA!

(And this is why Brain Worms Kennedy is taking over public health in the USA.)

In 20/20 hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the drop in traffic to my blog (both views and comments posted) since January 2024, and noted Google's de-emphasizing blogs in favour of extruded text product, and realized: if you suppress public speech via small private media (blogs) you're implicitly boosting the reach of centrally controlled platforms.

This is censorship with American characteristics.

The fix, as they say, is in.

Yesterday's news leads me to forecast the next big thing in SF/F genre fiction: the Cosy Dystopia—a future or fantasy setting in which the backdrop is ghastly but the sympathetic protagonists are running a tea shop in the borderlands.

Think Warhammer 40,000 space marines, with added knitting. (Narrative focus STRONGLY on the knitting.)

@grease

What's really needed is a sequence:

1. Trump loses, conclusively, next Tuesday.

2. Putin dies. At this point, a rescue package for the Russian people is vital to prevent this whole mess recurring 20 years downthe line.

3. Harris leans on Netanyahu VERY HARD INDEED. (Better still: Netanyahu dies.)

4. A coordinated crackdown on the fossil fuel lobby, worldwide, to disrupt their pro-carbon astroturf campaigns.

5. A ramp-down of US/China tensions: ideally wait out Xi (he's not young).

Final note: I'm not American, I don't get to vote on Tuesday. But I get to live in the world the US election will create. As the hegemonic superpower of the day, everybody is going to be affected by this. Hence my concerns about someone else's political crisis.

Footnote about Nazis and their targets:

You might think you're safe.

But … they start with their political rivals, and the trans, then the rest of the LGBT+. Then it's on to "auslanders"—folks who aren't the pale patriarchal penis people. Women get beaten back into the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant to make soldiers for the fatherland. Jews, blacks, asians, indians, hispanics, EVERY minority—even though collectively we're the majority. Finally they eat their own.

I repeat: NOBODY IS SAFE.

About me and Nazis:

Back in 1906 my great-grandpa and his family emigrated to the UK from the part of the Russian empire that became Poland in 1918.

A bunch of their relatives said "naah, life's good" and stayed home in the old country.

In 1939, Nazis invaded and by 1943 they were all dead.

It turns out that FAFO is a REALLY BAD way of dealing with Nazis.

And Trump and J. D. Vance are playing a medley from Hitler's hymn book, at ever-increasing volume.

You know how this ends—if you let it.

Welp, there's some indication that in addition to being a deadbeat grifter and rapist Trump is also a pedophile, but is this getting any media attention on the front pages …?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/trump-jeffrey-epstein-tapes

@tokensane @tuban_muzuru The obvious thing about photovoltaic and wind power is that they're harder to ship around—you can do it with a supergrid, but it's expensive and connects stationary end-points. (Unlike gas/liquid fuels.) So the obvious first step is that energy intensive industries may migrate towards energy rich regions. Which, with PV, will eventually mean Equatorial Africa and Central America/northern South America.

@tuban_muzuru Russia is running a resource extraction economy (with a sideline in artillery shells). They're a petrostate that's failed to modernize even as much as Saudi Arabia and Iran. Meanwhile the rest of the world is in the middle of the biggest energy transition since the early 1900s and the move to oil. That's what's causing all the instability: existing energy cartels fighting back against their inevitable demise.

(The geopolitics of a solar-powered world will look rather different.)

@tuban_muzuru I invite you to contemplate the geopolitical implications of Russia deploying Iranian-manufactured drones with Starlink terminals in the Ukraine war. Elmo—as a private citizen—is playing a very dangerous game.

The Democrats don't need to destroy Dilbert Stark, he's got perfect aim with his rocket-firing foot-gun!

(The immigration service will be side-eyeing him by now, and USSF/USAF/NSA must be jittery about trusting their classified payloads to a Putin fanboy: I suspect his security clearance is Going Bye-Bye soon. No need to take his money, just make him delegate control then ship him off to a compound in South Africa where he can prep for the apocalypse in peace without annoying the neighbours.)

REMINDER FOR NON-BRITS:

Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the Consertive party, is a woman of colour.

But she's also:
— a climate change denialist
— denies institutional racism exists
— a militant transphobe who wants to strip transgender people of civil rights
— believes the British Empire was beneficial to its colonies
— opposes marriage equality

... She's the most right-wing leader the party's ever had.

(TLDR: She's the antithesis of Kamala Harris.)

Kemi Badenoch elected new Conservative leader – as it happened

Badenoch says Tories need ‘a clear plan to change this country by changing the way that government works’

the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)

Guess where ...

Welp, yesterday Apple notified me that my backordered new Ipad mini was now due after November's 8th. So today I walked into the Apple Store in Brussels and walked out with three exact same backordered model (then cancelled the order). Why does Belgium get them more than a week before Scotland?

I'm sorry, cancer, your human's terminal.

Luckily Dilbert Stark was born in Apartheid South Africa so is permanently ineliible to run for POTUS. Ahem: until Project 20205 seizes control and amends the constitution into irrelevance.

Found on the Other Place and worth re-skeeting!

Apropos the folks saying that the Prosperity Gospel offers you everything Satan offered Christ …

I'd like to note (as a not-ever-Christian) that Satanism as constructed in Christian culture is simply a Christian heresy that posits the other side winning.

So everything the evangelicals accuse Satanic cults of is projection of their own wish-fulfilment fantasies.