Tag: trump is a fascist

Bribes

Remember when bribery was illegal? That was before the nazi in chief of the fascist states of america declared that it was a smart move to let a foreign government give you an airplane as a present. Our new air force one, which will stop being air force one and become trump’s personal plane once he leaves office, assuming he leaves office before he dies.

Yeah, this country fucking sucks. Can you imagine if Barack Obama told the public he was taking a passenger jet as a gift from an Islamic nation? Fucking fascists.

Change of subject. Two things to look forward to this week. First, I have my three year post-gastric bypass surgery check in at the weight loss clinic. I expect them to tell me that I am the greatest patient they have ever had, and that no patient they’ve dealt with has ever had such overwhelming success with their post-op program. I am hoping for a plaque or something to honor me.

Of infinitely greater importance, my step son Harry is going to graduate from the University of Vermont this weekend. I am so proud I am so proud I am so proud I am so proud. Did I mention how proud I am? We’ll be heading up there after work on Friday. I am really looking forward to it. I don’t know if you can tell by the context of this paragraph, but I am really proud of Harry.

Okay, Robert. Back to work with you.

254/365

Art Imitating Life

Sometimes I hate it when art has to imitate life. I hate it even more when the people being called out metaphorically by said art are too fucking stupid to realize the art is talking about them.

Mild spoilers for Andor season two episode nine. If you haven’t seen the episode, or if you haven’t seen Star Wars Rebels season three episode 18 (I think that’s the one), stop reading. You have been warned.

Last chance to bail (Bail Organa, if you will)…

In Star Wars The Return of the Jedi, a rebel leader gives a briefing spelling out the details of the second Death Star. It’s the “many Bothans died” speech. That character’s name is Mon Mothma. She was a senator who became one of the primary leaders of the Rebel Alliance. She shows up in a deleted scene in Revenge of the Sith, then she shows up for real in Rogue One and Rebels and Ahsoka and she’s one of the main characters in Andor. In a novel that is canon and takes place after Return of the Jedi she is actually elected to be the first Chancellor of the New Republic. Pretty sure that’s the job she’s doing in her brief scene in Ahsoka, but I have to go back and watch that entire series again just to be sure.

In Rebels we learn that her last act as a senator was to give a speech where she called out the Emperor as the bad guy for the whole galaxy. She gets chased out of the capital and smuggled to the rebel base by our Rebels heroes. Once at the rebel base she gives another speech that basically calls for revolution and the rest is Star Wars history.

This week’s third episode of Andor gave us the speech at the senate. It was perfect. Both in terms of the story itself and for our current shit show of a country. Replace the name Emperor Palpatine with Donald Trump, or even Orange Shit Clown, and it stops being fiction and starts being reality.

The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

“This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Palaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide. Yes, genocide. And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber. And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we’ve helped create, the monster who will come for all of us soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine.”

Like I said… I hate it when art has to imitate life, and I hate it even more when the monster and his cult are too fucking stupid to realize they are the monsters and not the heroes. Fucking maga cult bullshit.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Another Painful Week Ahead

You know… some days… I really wish I could just stay in bed and wait for something to come along that magically picks me up and moves me and my family to somewhere in Europe.

I mean, what the fuck?

First, the orange shit clown announces he is going to reopen Alcatraz and use it for what he says is the worst criminals in the country but what we all know is to use it as a concentration camp for people who don’t like him. We all know that, right? Why ship immigrants to El Salvador when you can ship them to Alcatraz? Forgetting the fact that it failed as a maximum security prison once before and that it is just a museum now… Seriously… what the fuck?

I was hanging my head in embarrassed shame after reading about all of this and that’s when I heard the second idiocy of the day. The orange shit clown has announced a 100% tariff on… wait for it… you’re not going to believe this one… movies. That’s right, you read that correctly. He just doubled the price of a movie ticket. He took an industry that has been on death’s door since Covid and doubled the price of admission in order to… checking my notes… save it.

Again I ask, in all seriousness… what the actual fuck?

Here’s a photo of two cats with stunned, disbelieving looks on their little cat faces. Both of them have asked me why we’re not packing up to move to Europe where people are less certifiably insane than they are here in the country formerly known as the united states and currently known as fucking moron land. I don’t know, cats. I just don’t know anymore.

A 100% tariff on… movies… yeah, that’s going to make america great again for sure. Finger right on the pulse there, you fascist schmuck.

Tired Afternoon

I stayed up too late last night and now I am tired. That’s how it works for all of us, but it seems to be a bigger issue for folks who are old like me. I am going to have a birthday in a couple of weeks and I’m going to be 54. Wait… really? How is that possible? I know in the grand scheme of things that 54 isn’t that bad, I mean it’s not 80 or anything, but damn… I was 27 a few days ago. Wasn’t I?

What was I writing about?

Oh yeah, I am tired. It seems somehow worse than that though as I didn’t have time to follow any news yesterday and today I got caught up on the collapse of civilization. So RFK wants to create a autism database or some shit? Hmmm… didn’t the nazis do that with mental illnesses? Yeah, something like that. No surprise that we’re resurrecting that particular evil, but there you go. That on top of prison time without due process and willfully collapsing the economy in order to scam a couple of bucks off the rubes. Yeah. Are we great again? Maybe I’ll open up a new Signal chat and ask about it.

Ugh. Here’s a cat:

If the cat didn’t temporarily straighten out your soul, maybe a song will help:

Protests

We tried. Twice. We drove up to Kingston, NH for a protest but when we got there there were only a couple of people holding signs in a park. We changed direction and headed to Billerica, MA where there was a big rally going on in the town common. We tried to stop but there wasn’t any place to park and well… at the risk of TMI… there were full bladder issues that needed attending.

We will do better next time, and I promise there will be a next time. Until then, here’s a cat.

231/365

I Hate When it Hits Home

I saw a headline this morning that pissed me off and scared the crap out of me, but I haven’t been able to verify it yet (and I almost don’t want to even try, in the spirit of burying my head in the sand). It said that trump mentioned including pharmaceuticals in his tariff bullshit.

That’s scary shit. Where is my step son’s insulin manufactured? Where is the company that manufactures it based? Is the already insultingly high price of insulin about to go up? Is it manufactured in china? Will the price go up 104%?

Like I said, I have not verified this report yet. I tried looking online for about four seconds and then stopped. Think of it as a no-news-is-good-news kinda thing, you know?

Further thoughts on being in the spirit of hiding ones head in the sand, I feel like I have less and less to say on the interwebs these days. I feel like the state of the world is just making me draw more and more inward. The collapse of american democracy is getting me in touch with my inner introvert. That’s my natural state, I think. Despite being a ridiculous online over-sharer over the last 25+ years or so, the real me is someone who clams up and doesn’t speak unless spoken to. I feel that I am losing the fight to not be that way all the time. Social media used to be my personal revolution (this is getting way too dramatic), but facebook and twitter and instagram and threads are all dead to me now. Flickr is a social media site at its core, but I don’t use it in that sense very much. I still use bluesky, but with each passing day I find I have less and less to say. I’ve been using Flashes as an instagram alternative, but that app is literally just bluesky with a filter to only show posts with images.

This isn’t a censorship thing. I’m not afraid to speak out. trump is a fucking fascist who needs to rot in prison for the rest of his miserable, evil life. See? I am not afraid to say what needs to be said. I just don’t feel much of an urge to speak up anymore. It’s not even that… it’s more like I will speak out when I have something to say… I just don’t often feel like I have anything to say. I don’t know. I will say it’s one of the reasons I am considering canning this blog and all of the social media things I still use. If my country doesn’t give a fuck about me anymore, why would I waste the effort acting like I give a fuck about it in return? I do, and I will do what needs to be done… I think I am just tired.

Jen and I have been watching a show that is set in Australia. Maybe I’m just jealous of people who live in countries that aren’t actively eating themselves. I don’t know.

Boy… this is a depressing post, eh? Sorry. There will be cat photos at some point today. I promise.

PS: I am turning comments off. I’m not interested in comments on this one. I’m not sorry.

Crushed

I am having a hard time focusing on anything today. I’m getting my work done, it’s just tougher than usual. I keep peeking at the internet to see how bad the markets are. I guess the numbers in the US started improving slightly before the numbnutz in chief announced a new 50% tariff against China. Fucking nazi putz.

I did see a flyer online that was interesting. I re-posted it and now I am sharing it here too. Mostly so I don’t forget about it, even though I will probably forget about it… you know how trauma fucks with your brain….

Bigger and better!!!!!!!

— Paul Dupuis (@prdvt802.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T15:23:34.058Z

Our calendar is currently clear on Saturday April 19th. It’s the anniversary of me and Jen moving in together. It was 2008 and we rented half of a duplex. I will forever refer to that day as our Duplexiversary. Maybe we can sneak into the city and yell at the nazis with a big group of people. I would have liked to have done that this past weekend, but there were other things going on that demanded my full attention (ie: the kids were home and it was awesome).

I tried listening to some podcasts in the background while I work in the hopes that it would distract me from the soul crushing current events. Nope. Didn’t work. Now I am listening to vintage prog rock (a play list of Genesis records released between 1971 and 1977). We’ll see if that makes life a little better. I doubt it.

Fucking nazis.

Rain

The kids are at a concert with their father and their step mother. Jen is working. I’m sitting in the living room typing this and looking at a sleeping cat or two.

I want to shoot film at sunrise but I can’t because New England in April means rain on the weekends. Not just the weekends, of course, it just seems that way. Every Thursday or Friday I start looking forward to the weekend and I check the weather forecast and it’s always the same. It is always rain. Rain and gloom. Even the Red Sox have been in a rain delay for the last hour and a half or so.

I wish I could have made it into the city to join in on the Hands Off demonstrations today, but the kids were here and I would rather be with the kids than almost anything so I happily stayed home. One of these days there will be a certain ridiculously tall old person with red hair in one of those Boston throngs, I promise.

Until then, here’s a photo of Lily that I took a few minutes before she jumped up onto the ottoman and curled herself into a ball and fell asleep.

217/365

I think Jen and I are going to do dinner via DoorDash tonight. It’s a special day for us so we need to do something nice to celebrate. 18 years ago today, on April 5, 2007, we went on our first date. As special days go, today is a big one. I love her so much, and it all kicked off 18 years ago today. Our relationship is old enough to vote, assuming the u.s. will still have elections… you know… nazis in charge and all. Oh shit, I just brought politics into my happy first-date-aversary message. Fuck me. Sorry about that.