Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Some samples from the net showing reactions to Dizzy Donny’s regime and their hypocrisy and latest failures.
Tone deaf and ignorant, screaming like a lost and bewildered toddler. That’s Trump.
More FAFO for your consideration.
Honesty. Integrity. Principles. Intelligence. Senator Kelly has all four. Cadet Bonespurs and his regime have none of them.
An effective and creative protest.
They tell us that it’s foggy out there. I’m looking out the windows and all I see are blue skies and sunshine to beat the band. It’s 32 F degrees, ’bout the same as yestidaz temperature at this time but it doesn’t feel nearly so cold on account of the plentiful sunshine headin’ our way. That’s how it is today, Satyrda, November 22, 2025, in Ashlandia of southern Oregon, or SO, as we call it. BTW, the high temp for SO will be in the low 60s. Maybe.
Brekkie has been done up and served but while I was doing it, I regarded my wife’s early Friendsgiving Day preparations. They reminded me that Thanksgiving is this coming Thirstda in ‘Merica. That kind of thinking led to The Neurons offering of the song called “Alice’s Restaurant”. Other than that refrain and the song’s object being about a visit to Alice one Thanksgiving and how it came to change Arlo Guthrie’s life as told via the tale of a massacree, there’s not much about Alice’s Restaurant in the lyrics. I listened to them all this morning, smiling in memory of hearing it other times, chuckling at the turn of phrases and events. A good way to waste time while sipping a fresh coffee, and a fine antidote to the trumplusional world we’re facing on this Satyrda.
I read today about how Trump denied what he said he said. Typical Dizzy Don, using terms he doesn’t understand, throwing them about, shouting about killing others, and then pretending that he’d not said all of that, and that his toadies hadn’t repeated much of it.
“These are people that, in my opinion, broke the law,” Trump said. “Now what happens to them, I can’t tell you. But they broke the law. That is a terrible statement. I can say that if I ever said that and there were a Democrat as president, all hell would have broken loose.”
I don’t think much of Lame Donny’s opinion. Too many of his opinions are built on thoughts with less substance than air vapor. Of course, those Democrats didn’t break any law, but as a person who regularly breaks laws and has been convicted of doing so, Dozy Donny wouldn’t know what the law is if it bit him in the ass. Remember, this burning match of intelligence is the one who wasn’t sure if he was supposed to obey the Constitution.
By the time Dumb Donny answered that question, he’d been sworn into office twice. An adult American, supposedly a graduate of accredited school systems, Dim Donny couldn’t answer a question which most high schoolers would get right.
My eyes are rolling and my head is shaking as I think and type that.
Anyway…
Though it’s sunny and clear, peace and grace are nowhere to be seen. Hope they show, hope they show. Back to the coffee and on into the day we go. Cheers
Read on Facebook. Stolen immediately.
Charles Pierce is credited as the author of this opinion. His short but thoughtful review of past Presidents’ behavior are contrasted with the current POTUS’s behavior. Trump’s lack of empathy, lack of vision, lack of manners, insights, and intelligence were again displayed. He is a base and craven individual.
As Charles Pierce shares.
“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, “And we shall overcome.” I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh’s madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
“And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
“The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
“Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don’t have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn’t he a funny man? Isn’t what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.”
– Charles Pierce
Yet, Trump and his supporters believe that this clownish behavior makes America great again. Their vision for America is appallingly short-sighted.
History will not be kind to Trump and his minions.
Trump Said Auto Emissions Don’t Affect the Environment. That’s Not True.
President Trump announced on Monday that he planned to relax limits on pollution from cars, saying that the move wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”
But decades of science show that the pollution from automobile tailpipes has harmed the environment and public health, from the days when leaded gasoline sent neurotoxins into the air and soil to the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet right now.
No need to read any further. ‘Decades of science’ means nothing to PINO Trusk. Those are facts. Facts do not count in Trumpworld. We’ve already seen that with vaccinations and COVID-19. Measles and vaccines. Anything and vaccines.
Trump’s vision for the United States is a dark and poisoned place.
He’s just a monster.
Yes, here we go again.
Anyone remember President George Dubya Bush’s war on Iraq?
He wanted to attack it and was looking for a reason. Polls show the public divided about it. Administration officials like Colin Powell said that Iraq wasn’t a threat.
Then we had 9/11.
The Bush Administration was quick to try to connect 9/11 and Iraq, and then began painting pictures of fictional ‘weapons of mass destruction’. They worked hard to sell the need to invade Iraq because of the imminent threat Saddam Hussein posed. Intelligence was cherry picked. The press got involved. Stories were planted by journalists favorable to the administration. Then the administration would quote those newspapers and stories to convince people that even the ‘liberal mainstream press agreed’ that war was needed.
Any of this sound in any way familiar? It should. It was a marketing campaign. The Trusk Regime is doing something similar. Floating the idea. See what sticks. Repeating it, repeating it, repeating it so people become familiar to it. As using military force gains traction as an idea to ‘keep America safe’, the logic behind it becomes twisted. Intel will get cherry picked or made up completely. People not really paying attention to WTF is going on will begin agreeing, “Yes, we need to do this. We need to use military force against this growing threat.”
Use your search engines and the net’s ability to store and recall information to check the polls and reporting of the period before the invasion of Iraq. The pattern was clear then; it’s clear now. Part of the sell back then was how easy such a military adventure would be for a power like the United States. Remember them telling us how short the war would be? How they mocked people who pointed out there wasn’t an exit strategy? Recall, they told us the war would pay for itself.
Trump wants to attack places. Maybe Greenland. Maybe Canada. Perhaps somewhere else. Putting the nation on a war footing will improve his popularity and strengthen his hold. Because if we’re ‘at war’, then criticizing or challenging him can be called out as detrimental to the war effort. Look back at how popular Dubya became for a while. And that was done without AI and bots. Ponder how effectively bots and AI can be used to sell a war on social media these days. Think of DOGE and Elon Reeve Musk’s potential role.
Yemen was a trial balloon to let his military advisors and senior officials a taste of it. More will come.
Tick, tick, tick.
In another bit of WTF, America, some new DOGE bullshit springs into the spotlight.
Military to Remove ‘Enola Gay’ Photos for Violating DEI Rules
Images of “Enola Gay,” the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan are among those targeted by the U.S. military in an initiative to eliminate content related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
They are among a number of photos unrelated to DEI that have been mistakenly flagged, including those from an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project in California, seemingly because an engineer in the image had the last name “Gay.”
I mean, how, how, how amazingly ignorant is the Trusk Regime? How stupid is DOGE?
Beyond the fundamental stupidity of making a decision based on a single word, they are demonstrating amazing ignorance about our heritage. Our history.
Does that history matter to them? No, apparently not.
And that really brings the Trusk Regime’s crock of shit about ‘gay’, DEI, woke into an electron microscope level of insights. Our history is being denied based on some shallow, closed minds? They’ll deny the role of an aircraft in our history because of a single word, literally one of the most critical moments in modern human history, the one and only damn time when one nation used atomic or nuclear weapons on another nation? What are they going to do, rewrite the textbooks so that Colonel Paul Tibbets and his crew flew an unnamed aircraft on that historic mission? How much of a disservice is it to not just the crew that flew that machine but the enemy killed on the ground?
That’s just the damn bottom of the barrel, though. The Trusk Regime and the GOTP is trying to deny the role of anyone who does not fit their narrow, bigoted views. Gay, trans, lesbian military members who fought for the United States are being washed out of history by this pathetic group, most of whom never served in a military capacity.
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But those who deliberately wipe it out are bent on creating a new circle of ignorance.
But, I mean, come on. Seriously. What did we expect of ol’ Bone Spurs Trump? His grip on history and logic is pathetically weak.
He who cited the use of aircraft and airfields in the American Revolutionary War.
He who referred to Senator McCain, a navy aviator who was captured and held as a prisoner of war, as a loser.
He who warns of the threats of cancer from windmills, a claim without any merit.
He who used a marker to try to change the projected course of a hurricane.
He who had his staff saying that he suggested nuking a hurricane.
He who was documented to lie over 30,000 times in his first administration.
A man who still lies as much as he breathes.
That individual is a fucking idiot.
And you know what that makes his supporters and enablers.
It was almost five years ago when Donald J. Trump, a self-proclaimed ‘stable genius’, made these remarks. And this is who the GOP chose as their party leader?
This is the person some support as the next President of the United States?
Remind them, this is what he said about windmills.
Last night’s dream had a special guest, a stepfather who died years after Mom divorced him. He’s father to two of my sisters. An addicted gambler, he lived in a room in a church, given to him with a small stipend for being the church caretaker, in the years before his death, forced to go there after the factory where he worked on a baking assembly line was shut down.
I always felt sorry for him and said so to my half-sisters, his daughters. One snapped, “I love him but he was very stupid and made bad decisions. He never learned from anything that he did.”
Hearing her say that shocked me, although it had been my opinion of him. All that is background to the dream, along with the note that I’ve had about six dreams featuring dead people in 2023. This is George’s first appearance.
To the dream.
I was visiting Mom at her house. She and I and everyone present were decades younger than RL. George, the deceased stepfather, was there, planning to go on a trip. His presence surprised me; I knew he was dead and I knew that he and Mom were divorced, but there he was.
‘There’ was a half-finished house. I couldn’t fully grasp what was done, as it wasn’t consistent in the dream. George mostly emerged from the bathroom and was in the kitchen when I encountered him. One oddity about the unfinished house was that the yard outside of it was covered in white carpeting. Sometimes a part of the yard was set up as a room, carpet on the floor, trees around it.
My two little sisters, George’s daughters, were there, young teenagers. George didn’t like me and was showing it. I was making comments to Mom. When I did, George would correct me. He’s right, I would realize, astonished. I was wrong and he was right.
I poured myself a glass of red wine and drank it, repeating that two more times. When I checked the bottle, it was still full. I chortled to myself, I’m going to keep this bottle, and took it with me.
George emerged from the bathroom. I tried being polite with him, asking, where are you going? How long will you be away? He gave me mean looks, refusing to answer, walking up the stairs to the kitchen. which didn’t have any walls.
Going outside with my bottle of wine, I met my youngest sister by a table. A single glass was on top of the table. As I spoke with her about George’s surprising intelligence, I poured wine into the glass. I completely missed the glass! Red wine made a huge stain on the white carpet.
Horror struck me. Oh, my god, what was I going to do? My sister was anxious about it, too. We threw glances back at the house and warned one another, Mom better not find out.
I went back to the house. George was about to leave. I told him to have a good journey and to stay safe. He departed without replying.
It began against a scorched black and red sky. I was my current age. The sky was a backdrop as a group of us left one area, heading for a refugee site. We’d been fighting the aliens, and I’d gained experience and insights. My group was small: four. All survivors who had fought.
We arrived at the packed refugee center. An immense aerial battle was underway, with USAF fighter jets fighting invader ships. The AF seemed to be winning. Refugees cheered as invader craft went down with plumes of black smoke.
I knew better, shaking my head, warning the refugees, “It takes more than that to kill the aliens.” I’d fought the glistening white creatures. I knew how they functioned. They needed to be set afire and completely destroyed. If even a small piece survived, it would grow. As it grew, it would attempt to reconnect telepathically with other alien beings. As it grew, it would look for a host human or animal body.
I told the refugees, “We must find and destroy every piece of alien.” I described what to look for. Children rushed up. They’d seen alien pieces and stamped them with their feet. I was horrified. “Don’t stamp on them. Get your shoes off and burn them. The aliens will be clinging to your soles, and they’ll grow and take you over.”
The refugees scoffed. A young, short female survivor in my group said, “Listen to him. He knows what he’s talking about. Do what he says if you want to survive.”
Her words made the difference. The refugees believed me. I went around with people, organizing groups, making certain they had fire. We set up children to look for surviving alien pieces. They walked around in threes. When an alien was found, two stayed there to mark the place while the third went to find an adult to burn it.
The process seemed to be working. Then I saw a small alien piece come up out of the drain in a tub. Although I immediately burned it, more small pieces emerged. I burned them, too, then sent out the warning, the aliens are in the drains. They’re coming up. Check the sinks and tubs. Check everywhere there’s a drain pipe.
I found a tub where a large alien piece had already come up. Approaching it to burn it, it shot out tongue like pieces of itself, trying to hit me. I knew that if it hit me, it would take me over.
Another person said, “They’re going after you. They know you’re a threat.”
I agreed. The conclusion implied scary ramifications about intelligence and awareness of these surviving pieces. Another arrived with the intelligence that more aliens were coming up the drains. “They’re coming up everywhere. We can’t stop them.”
I entered another bathroom. A large, white alien almost filled the tub. In the middle of it was a naked toddler. The child was looking at me and smiling. I said, “The aliens have taken over that child. We need to kill it.”
Intense dream. Really shook me.
Before last night, I had a dream with the same theme three nights in a row. The theme for them was one, back in the military (again), two, going to see a general about an intelligence matter.
In the first dream, I’d received information via a white paper. I was distilling the information for use in something else. Some of what I read wasn’t clear to me. I took the unusual step of calling the general for an appointment to clarify what he meant.
Real life background. I was enlisted in the military, retiring as an E-7. General officers are a big deal. I worked with several but I would never directly call one to ask for more information.
Intermission over. The general was accommodating and set up an appointment for mid-afternoon on the next day. The dream was then sort of a scramble between the call and the appointment time. Things kept going awry. Uniform items were missing. Yeah, classic anxiety dream.
Awakening, I thought, geez, another military dream. I also thought, humorous, isn’t it? Calling a general (a higher authority) for more intelligence (ha!) and then scrambling to meet the requirement levied on me.
I was comfortable with that, but the next night, I dreamed that something had gone wrong. A messy situation had evolved (details were murky and ill-defined, but I knew with the dreamsense that often takes place that I needed to take action) and I determined that I needed to call a general to get more intelligence. Those were actual words used in the dream.
Two in a row, I thought the next morning. Feeling a little inadequate, are we?
The third dream carried on most of the theme from the second dream. Call the general, get more information, but now pursuing a mad scramble to ‘get it all together’. My hair needed cut to be within regs, I couldn’t find a clean uniform, and then raced to find shoes. Yeah, clear messages from me, to me, about feeling inadequate and stuck in place (which was reflected in my writing energy later that day).
Then, walking and reflecting yesterday, along came The Traveling Wilburys with “Heading for the Light”. Well, I’m hoping that I’m heading for the light. Last night’s dreams included being on a television quiz show, but it was mostly backstage action of getting ready. I was being coached but I kept getting lost.
The dream ended with a production assistant (a young, short woman wearing a headset) finding me in a dark area back stage. I was speaking with others. She rushed up and said, “There you are. It’s time.”
I replied, “Okay, I’m ready.”
Hope I’m right.
Michael Seidel, writer 