Which it may be doing, this article suggests, but not before making online discourse exceptionally toxic.
Gamergate’s Legacy Lives on in Attacks Against Kamala Harris
https://www.wired.com/story/gamergates-legacy-lives-on-in-attacks-against-kamala-harris/
This BBC article dances around the truth of Elon Musk’s support for Trump- they’re both vile people, only interested in stroking their own egos and inflating their bank balances. Neither of them has a political ideology beyond saying what they think will get them the clicks or votes.
Los Angeles is an unlikely champion of a new wave of water savvy urban planning. A city most of us think of as all about cars and concrete has introduced more permeable surfaces to soak up water rather than turning it into run off. The change has been so successful that not only was severe flooding avoided during recent extreme rainfall but it will help solve the city’s water supply issues.
https://www.wired.com/story/los-angeles-just-proved-how-spongy-a-city-can-be/
(Manslaughter would be a more plausible charge, but murder makes a better headline.)
Hydroxychloroquine used to treat Covid 19 killed people. A study has estimated that there were around 17,000 deaths where the drug was involved. With all the overlapping factors of pandemic medicine it’s hard to give a number where it was the primary cause. But there can be little doubt there were people who would have lived if they hadn’t taken it.
So what should be done about all the people promoting it at the time, such as Trump? I’m sure some were out to profit from it, playing stock market games with tragedies. Trump, I think, was primarily stupid, grasping at anything to distract from how badly he was handling the whole situation. I’d still like to see him face some consequences. Maybe this could be added to the 90+ criminal cases, and who knows how many civil ones, that he faces.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/12/hydroxychloroquine-covid-increase-chance-death-trump
Two of the largest landfill sites serving Los Angeles are suffering underground chemical reactions undermining their stability and releasing toxins and greenhouse gasses. How many more such dumps are pumping out methane, I wonder?
In a comic or a b-movie, the waste stew would have been hit by lightning and become some sort of shambling monster. But real life gives us the rotten egg stink of hydrogen sulphide and the long term horror of climate change.
via bldblg
Not a surprising conclusion, really. And Britain has no room to be smug, either, given the Daily Mail fawned over Hitler and our dear departed Queen was taught the Nazi salute by her uncle.
Fascinating details from the latest indictment against Trump.
https://theintercept.com/2023/08/02/trump-indictment-justice-department-jeffrey-clark/
More on the American ‘UFO whistleblower’, with various people in Washington clamouring for inquiries and revelations. As with all conspiracy theories, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some interesting revelations to be had- none of which will look like the little grey men the true believers want.
https://www.wired.com/story/ufo-whistleblower-us-congress-investigations/
As I kick around plans for a near future story about an independent minded neighbourhood fighting corporate and political corruption, it’s becoming clear that the idealism will need a robust defence. This report on the John Brown Gun Clubs protecting people targeted by the far right in the USA has given me some ideas.
New York City is sinking under the sheer weight of all its skyscrapers. Added to sea level rises, those images of Manhattan turning into a glass and steel Venice are getting closer and closer.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/new-york-city-sinking-skyscrapers-climate-crisis
Wired does a quick recap of the criminality around Trump’s election, and considers what might come next.
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-indictment-historical-reckoning/
This look back at Las Vegas capitalising on nuclear tests ties in to the theme I’ve got planned for a few model builds this year. I’m going to take the already odd and tense air of the Cold War and give it a dimension slipping twist. The videos will appear on YouTube, and back stories will be on Patreon.
It was disappointing to read the YouTube had unblocked Trump’s channel. But if he is arrested next week, it would be cool if someone could hack it and make video of him in handcuffs the only footage on it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65000325?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA
As the Trump presidency tumbles down in its final days, I thought you’d like a trip back to a more innocent time, when I wrote this piece of silliness in anticipation of the orange one’s inauguration.
Hopefully, the Biden inauguration will go off without a hitch. But Trump is going to be furious if it gets higher ratings than his. Which is likely, given his efforts to turn it into a racist version of White House Down.
January 20th 2017
It happened just as President elect Donald J Trump went off script whilst swearing his oath of office. A figure appeared from nowhere, gun hand outstretched toward The Donald, finger already pulling the trigger.
She had come from the future, her mission- to kill the President before, on January 25th, he nuked Latvia to prove the country’s Prime Minister wrong and show that his fingers were long enough to press the atomic button.
Even before the bullet had left, she was joined by dozens, maybe hundreds of other assassins. With everything from lasers all the way down to clubs, each of them had come back with a specific mission- eliminate Trump before he could carry out the action that blighted their particular future.
It was one of the lasers, by an almost immeasurable fraction of a second, that got the job done. Which triggered the second wave of temporal assassins. These were dedicated to cutting down Mike Pence before he could institute his plans for homosexual re-education camps and sexuality snooping.
Into the middle of this already confused mess came a pair of twenty-second century Men’s Rights Activists. Angry at the unfair advantages equal wages gave females and the sissification inherent in paternity leave, they had decided to travel back and kill the first female President. Incompetence had shunted them sideways as well as backwards, but they never found that out, as they were burnt to a crisp by one of the many flamethrowers present.
With so many bodies and temporal anomalies overlapping, a critical mass was formed. A gore explosion was followed by collapses in the fourth dimension. Time went crazy.
Washington is now the flickering city, to look at it is to watch a jump cut time-lapse of the city’s past and possible futures. Buildings and people appear and flash away randomly, as the time-line tries to knit itself back together.
The inauguration was ground zero, but the effects have radiated out, and there are pockets of temporal instability all over the world. There are pockets where you can step into the past and pull people and things back. The USA is currently being run by the dream team of Kennedy and Lincoln, snatched up just before their assassinations.
It’s a crazy world, ripe for adventures and wacky hijinks. Annoyingly, I can’t think of any silly stories to tell in it right now.
Soon-to-be-former-President Trump is currently failing bigly to overturn the result of the US election. Which is good, because there were times earlier this year when I thought we were living through the prequel to one of my novels.
Sounds of Soldiers was started on November 1st 2008. Whilst not stated explicitly in the story, the back-story was that McCain and Palin won the election, McCain keeled over from the stress, and the (then) worst person imaginable became President of the USA. The culture/civil war that ensued affected the rest of the world, as US troops ran amok in Europe.
Luckily, Obama and Biden won in 2008, and it wasn’t until 2016 that the US got its worst President ever.
Sounds of Soldiers wasn’t finished during NaNoWriMo 2008, as planned. But I wrapped it up in 2009, and published it in 2010. It remains one of my favourites of the books I’ve published, and is available in paperback or for Kindle from Amazon, or- if you don’t want Bezos to get any more money- you can find it on Smashwords and other online book shops.
There’s a script the conspiracy theorists, and gun nuts go through it every time there’s a mass shooting in the US. This article on The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories blog picks it apart.
These days, a mass shooting in the news is basically a guarantee that in the next 24 hours at least 100 different people on the internet are going to use the red paintbrush tool in MS Paint to put meaningful circles around pictures of people’s eyebrows.
I used to regularly argue with a conspiracy theorist in his site’s comment section. I’d investigate his claims, quickly find out how reality disagreed with them, then get accused of being part of the conspiracy for pointing out its flaws.
It was fun, in its own dumb way. But he withdrew from being wrong on the internet, and now the United States has a conspiracy nut as its President.
Conspiracy theories aren’t just amusing stupidity any more, they’ve become weaponised, and they’re being used to create further division (and endanger people such as the students in Florida who are speaking out after they came under fire- their friends were killed- in the latest school shooting).
Well, I tried to warn you about Palin, really. This week, I’ve taken a break from talking about my current work to say a little about Sounds of Soldiers.
Get Sounds of Soldiers-
Garth Owen has taken a break from writing about zombies and vampire to start an ongoing side project.
Alternative Facts is an ebook (also available from Smashwords and other stores) and a mailing list of flash fiction, satire and silliness. As long as Donald Trump and co. keep providing inspiration, the mailing list will update weekly, and the new material will be added to the ebook every month. Volume one of the ebook will update until December, then volume two will be published in January 2018. Half the royalties will go to appropriate charities.
You have to buy the book. Donald Trump has signed an executive order saying so.
(You don’t have to buy the book, but it would be lovely, and would help the project along, if you did.)
Trumpy Executive Order courtesy of http://hepwori.github.io/execorder/
I’m not one of life’s chanters, so I turn up to take photos and shoot video. This one is from the impromptu march on Monday in Manchester. I shot footage at Saturday’s as well, I’ll work on that one during the week.
You’ve got to give the man a little credit. He’s got a lot of us interested in being politically active again.
As on Monday, this march was also against the Conservative government, and their weak eagerness to make a deal with President Wotsit.