The thing is, this isn’t a curse.

A curse is what happened to Bill O’Reilly, to Tucker Carlson, to Glen Beck. Either there’s a scandal reckoning, or the guy believes his own rhetoric a little too much and says something kooky or too far out the Overton window, or draws the stupidest chalkboard diagram and someone in FOX notices his average viewership is 72 years old, and retires his show.

They take a serious demotion in popularity and a pay cut and all but retire. That’s how witch’s curses work when they do.

However Kirk did suffer one of Charles Dickens’ many curses. ( …Charlie Dickens – Charlie Kirk – coincidence?) In A Christmas Carol the chapter on the visitation of the Ghost of Christmases Yet To Come. Wealthy people who have not empathy with nor sympathy for the rest of us folk eventually die and then are not grieved when they’re gone (except by those who have to gain by presenting a sad face). Kirk wasn’t one of the moguls, but he spread their rhetoric and was one of their ruthless minions.

Not soon enough.

Narrator: The problem wasn’t the kids it was the US.

Clarification: venues getting shot up is a specifically elevated problem in the US (exacerbated by availability of guns, but that’s not really the root of the problem). The thing is, the root of the problem (right-wing-leaning low-information constituents – lumpenproletariat in left-wing speak – suffering from precarity sometimes turn to violence) is being visited on European nations where two-party systems have taken root, and neoliberalism has set in. It’s the old King Log vs. King Heron problem. We’re seeing violence and counterviolence in the EU, just with less frequency and fewer guns, but it will catch up to them.

We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.

But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).

That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.

All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.

So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.

Let them scrape. AI as it currently is, is still autocomplete with extra steps, and still prone to hallucination. As it is it will be usable to make cheap, passable content, but not hit those moments of inspiration of human art (yet – there are real AI groups looking to make AGI)

It is a bubble which will pop and AI will be seen as a tool (a resource-costly tool) that requires its own set of experts independent from the experts that use ACAD or write editorial copy or do investigative work. Id est, it’s not the replacement of employees that boards of directors want it to be.

And AGI is centuries from being efficient enough that you can make Rosie the Robot who cleans your house and makes a good upside-down pineapple cake.

I wasn’t meaning to imply that restricting societies to small states is the solution, only that once a state gets larger than a village there’s going to be factioning and rivalry (and hence renegade behavior either to harm or subvert institutions).

Just as we found an alternative solution to infectious disease (centralized disease control, when we give it a proper budget) we need to find an alternative solution to factioning and subversion than keeping groups small. We just don’t know how to do it. Yet.

SMBC once posited a gamification of being nice to each other, in which society was self policing because everyone behaved with benevolence for the points. So I’m not the only person who’s thought about this.

Plenty of women – teenage parochial schoolgirls, specifically, get impregnated as virgins when the definition of virgin is not having coital sex or having an intact vaginal corona (hymen). When boys and girls who love each other very much make out and get overly involved, yet their pregnancy concerns (and guilt) keep them from engaging in actual coitus, even a small amount of jizz on her vulva might make their way through the vaginal canal and cause conception.

Plenty of medical doctors have encountered unexpected pregnancy of women who’ve never had sex and who had intact vaginal coronas.

However at the beginning of the common era, virgin was assumed of any unmarried woman unless known otherwise, and was a shift of property value of the woman to the father or husband. Mary who was unmarried, would be a virgin by default as a young woman. Though her pregnancy is evidence that she isn’t a virgin.

Too be fair, in Hellenic culture Zeus raped me was a common excuse when a young woman fooled around without license, and ended up in a family way, and before the era of the Olympian, Poseidon was the one going around having his way with young women. In fact, the classical myths teem with children sired by gods. This isn’t new.

💯

Full Goblin Mode.

In my defense, either I dress, or I turn out all the lights at night so no-one has to see my undressed form, except as a shadow.

Personally I call shenanigans having had executive and standard office chairs made of leather, pleather and nylon mesh.

None of these are comfortable on the bare butt, and even will get sticky once you start sweating against them, so I’ve always had to drape towels between me and the chair.

Also do not get leather / pleather if you have cats.

I had art I personally crafted accused of being slop (gen-AI free!). Dunno if it’s a compliment or a criticism.

Shotgun is an America thing, coming from the stagecoach era. The shotgun in question has a shortened barrel for reduced storage footprint.

The BMW R12 has a sidecar mounted with an MG 42 light machine gun. But no-one calls sidecar gunner

You can’t convert them. Fluid ounces are volume. Regular ounces are weight (which isn’t quite the same as mass, though they’re used interchangeably on earth).

1 fl oz = 1 oz when the substance is water (at slightly above freezing). Any other substance would involve a specific mass factor.

I think the problem is the intrinsic enemy within rhetoric that is used to keep the public willing to tolerate draconian measures. Also the draconian measures, themselves.

It’s like the thing with cults (which I thought about looking to start a good cult or two): The basic cult template is to create an us vs them mentality against the rest of the world so that the followers can be exploited as cheap labor, easy sex or sexual labor.

(I wanted to created the Esoteric Order of Dagon as a means to allow gender redefinition and gay marriage. But cults have the evil pre-baked in.)

[ now I’m just ranting ] This is also the problem with the (blackboard hypotheticals) of the Christian Nation or the Islamic State. Either one, assuming they want a peaceful thousand-year reign needs to embrace enlightenment values such as liberty, social equality, short or no hierarchy, rule of law with no selective enforcement and sustenance guarantees. And by then, the conservative faithful might feel there’s not much of the religion left.

But without these concessions, the government is at odds with the public. It’s less of a problem if your society is under a population of one-thousand, but then larger societies will dominate your society with culture, if not a massive army.

This does happen to me. When I go out to family gatherings, I am exhausted coming home, often needing to nap for a couple of hours before doing anything.

Would you like the Fashion Police Annihilator Pistol or the Commando Laser Hairbrush?

When 32-bit color depth came out, a magazine reported a request by a non-computer person to create a list of all the colors. Just all of them. The response was something like

00 00 00 Black
00 00 01 Still black
00 00 02 Nope, still black
00 00 03 More black
…

So a list of 4000 colors, named, might actually be useful at least to give someone a scope of color depth.

If they strike down Obergafel, may it be the last straw that breaks public obedience to the federal justice system.

I mean, since the public is getting abducted and rendered without due process daily, it’s not like federal law actually matters, already.

If they’re coming for you anyway to deprive you of life and liberty, why not crime? You don’t surrender if the enemy gives no quarter.

Isn’t that the dude who then said he was fired due to his Jubilee appearance and got $35k from GoFundMe?

And then it turns out he was fired months earlier?

I think the maggots are already chewing at the heart of Jubilee.

In the post about the new convert your colleagues to your faith in the breakroom memo by the Trump regime, I offered an example of what my spiritual workmates might encounter if they raised the topic of Jesus, several paragraphs about the cosmic horror of reality.

The main thrust is that all spirit, whether another subatomic factor, or a manifold like gravity, is transparent to to the standard model of particle physics. It’s also transparent to relativity, but we expect that.

And that includes human souls, ghosts, afterlife.

My point was I’ve thought about and researched existential philosophy at length, possibly to suggest I’m ASD (disclosure: I’m diagnosed), and my evangelical rivals may as well be walking into the Total Perspective Vortex.

I remember a point right after gay was a generic derisive (e.g. That’s so gay! = That sucks! ) for a short while I’m gay for meant I like this so much I’d be willing to do sexual favors to get it (e.g. I’m gay for mineral water right now )

Similarly when we talk about architecture porn we mean stuff that would excite people really into architecture. In some places, we still see it. ( _Gun porn, food porn, grammar porn, etc.)

It’d be awesome if we generalized sluttiness the same way.