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.

Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.

Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.

I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they’re decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it’s still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn’t take immediate action.

But yes, I’m bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don’t even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.

We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that’s not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.

So I can’t be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.

The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do… assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.

But I don’t say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I’m saying this as a sober assessment. We’re not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020’s era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we’ve wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.

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.

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.

In the summer here (July and August during heatwaves) my office goes between 80°F - 90° so no, I don’t wear a thing, hence the towels.

On my regular furniture, if I’m wandering around unclothed and need to sit down, I’ll drape something, often my briefs, before planting my butt.

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.

If you can’t afford one, or rent, or wander around, travel bidets are about $20-$30 and are a water bottle with a hook-shaped wand-spout and an air valve.

My proctologist has a personal vendetta against wiping, and I messed up my piles from ages of wiping too hard. Bidet and dab to dry.

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.

Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.

I’ve never used AI, even when wanting to give it a try. There was either a queue or a fee, or must click-wrap agree to terms and conditions for free two months and I wasn’t going to do those.

I never did an NFT either.

Fixed but still funny.

I have fat in my freezer and am a total noob at stock making. The fat is leftover from a slab of pork I cut up into 8oz portions and froze.

I would like to hear / read more about this earth thing called stock, if you are willing to share.

Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.

Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven’t seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we’d have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it’s very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.

It’s our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values – he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ – which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.

1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being [nigh] and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world’s failure to end, and Christ’s failure to return in their lifetimes.

So let’s say you’re in the market for a credit card. You can choose from:

iChar-Jit: We are ethical. We don’t sell to Nazis. You (and your kids) will be safe from buying questionable products or from questionable sources.

MoneySLAM Our card is usable by anyone, for anything, anywhere. Bangladesh; In orbit around Jupiter; Russia; Sex; Drugs; Bombs.¹

1. Some products may be dangerous or unethically sourced; Please spend safely and exercise good judgement.

Assuming all other factors (interest rate, online accessibility, confused foreign sales reps etc.) are more or less equal, which card will you get?

ETA Interactive services absolutely should be more focused on equal accommodations (making sure everyone is served evenly, even if they want a gay wedding cake) than on whether or not the transactions involve questionable crap.

Though if the money exchange market is capitulating to activists, it’d be interesting to see if environmentalist causes could pressure them as well. Because fossil-fuel based products are killing the human species (and most of all the others). Stop allowing transactions for diamonds and chocolate.

If they’re more hesitant about other kinds of unethical transaction then it’s because the company officials think furry porn and queer content is icky, not from activist pressure.