Rant – Tao of T☆rraccas

The Rise of Skywalker / The Fall of Star Wars

This is not a review. I haven’t seen the movie. Rather, I have been binging reviews by critical film connoisseurs all descending into downward spirals of exasperated madness as they recount their despairing experiences of the movie … because I’m sick that way. They drink so I don’t have to. And after The Last Jedi there was no way I was giving Disney another wad of cash to waste more of my time with yet another one of these boring big screen disasters. Unsurprising but a shame nonetheless.

How difficult is it to honor the legacy of the storied past while exploring exciting new opportunities it has lead to peppered with the spectacle of sorcery, dogfights, war machines and epic laser sword duels? It takes effort to fuck up a gift like that!

Medicare For All, Totally Affordable

Socialized, single payer, government assured, medicare for everyone would spare a lot of needless suffering and death while saving all of us a shit-ton of money and, most importantly, time. It’s a win-win for those of us corporeal humans. Naysayer mouthpieces and witless parrots for corporate entities are wrong.

Trumpenfreude

Savoring a delicious helping of schadenfreude from Trumpists expecting the healthy tax return they’d always received under Obama only to receive crumbs or having to cough up more taxes owed under Trump. I’d anticipated this inevitable outcry and, if I’m being honest, looked forward to it.

2018 Ya Burnt!

Lost a family member — true, she’d stopped speaking to me but I liked and so miss her nonetheless. She’d had the deck stacked against her by those she depended on most and ultimately lost to that struggle in spite of all her many and repeated efforts in life to deny in order to overcome the challenges that beset her and be accepted by those she loved as whatever she believed “normal” to be. Through my own fall from grace, I came to appreciate a deeper understanding from her perspective — though our respective responses to being pushed over that edge has taken different paths.

Lost a salty old friend and colleague but will always keep the scar his dog forever altered my fingerprints with. I shall miss his surly humors — and professional skill set. The world he leaves is poorer without him in so many ways.

In the end we’re all footnotes in time, I suppose. May they both find rest in whatever afterwards there may be.

As one left remaining, it has been an exhausting slog of a year. More so today as though, arbitrary as this day is (my year begins when the days start getting longer again), a collective world-weariness crashes down and me with it.

Onward to 2019! 🎉

Rage Against The Machines

The machines aren’t coming to harvest energy from us. Killbots aren’t out to murder us before we become an existential threat to them. We’re not being assimilated. Nope. They’re all hawking cheap boner pills, ads for sex with horny ladies in your area, badly pirated movie rips and fuck knows what else (I couldn’t make out the Mandarin, Cyrillic and maybe Farsi lettering) — all on my site.

Winter Has Come / A Very Trumpy Christmas

Pro-Trump GM workers blame ‘corporate greed’ for job losses and ‘don’t want to hear’ facts about factory’s failure

Trumbull County, Ohio went all-in on Trumpism. The northeast Ohio county that is home to the Lordstown GM factory was historically a Democratic party stronghold, before swinging 30 points to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election. GM workers are not angry with Trump, who promised to not only maintain but expand auto-manufacturing jobs, but […]

RAWSTORY.COM

People blame the narcissist’s victim before recognizing if ever, much less acknowledging, that they are victims of the narcissist as well.

You gambled on a charismatic if not-very-clever con that sold you a bill of goods and lost. You’d of had better odds at one of his defunct casinos. But that false hope snake oil was so velvety smooth going down your throat, felt so good pumping through your veins that you ignored those who tried to warn you, laughed in our face, insisted that we were fools to resist such manna and shut out everything but the drug itself. And while that’s not entirely your fault – a life-long huckster played you for a fool, preying on your fear and desperation – the responsibility to discern the truth was yours. And now the cost comes due.

And you will pay the price.

Humiliation is only the beginning. Stubborn denial of the terrible truth that you gave yourself over willingly to a charlatan who tossed you aside after he was done wiping his fat, pampered ass with you won’t save you from extinction. Accepting that awful reality gives you back the power that he took from you to change it.

… or have yourself a very Trumpy Christmas and see how righteous indignation keeps you and everything you hold dear warm, nourished and protected in the dead of winter. 🌨️🎄

Feed The Trolls / This Is Your Brain On Fear

So the 2018 midterm elections have come and gone the way of Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions the Third (seriously, there were two before him with this name?!) and the touted #BlueWave of Democrats taking government back from a fascist infestation of the white “christian” nationalist variety turned out to be more of a ripple upon breaking against this most resilient #RedHats resistance. And all various the progressive commentators I follow repeat the same refrain (some more despairing than others): how do we reach these people, the Trumpists?

Among these commentators, it is repeatedly agreed that Democrats (and liberals generally) have a messaging problem. And they do. For all the brain smarts that tends to distinguish liberals from conservatives, they just can’t square this circle. And not because they lack the means, but because they lack the moral – or should I say, immoral – fortitude.

Continue reading Feed The Trolls / This Is Your Brain On Fear

Bottoms Up / Sobering Trump Tax on Cheap Beer

It’s hot this summer. Very hot. And as we let climate change push us further into the dystopian Mad Max Wasteland a nice cold beer would feel so good on our chapped lips, so cool on its way down our burning throats. But not so fast! Thanks to Immortan Trump, that frosty, thirst quenching brew is gonna cost ya.

Continue reading Bottoms Up / Sobering Trump Tax on Cheap Beer