I’m sipping coffee after working on my PAWIRNEATT (Project About Which I’d Rather Not Elaborate At This Time). My thickness planer is heavenly, I have sawdust in my nose, and I didn’t cut off a finger in the bandsaw. It’s a good time to be alive.
Then I think “I must get back to the squirrel story. I haven’t written the explosion yet. Nor the cosplayers. And there’s the part about the fish!” But the coffee was good so I sought an excuse. “I’ll check the news. Maybe there’s been an outbreak of sanity and I can put fiction on the back burner a while.”
How to detect an outbreak of sanity:
Did people start acting like adults? It could happen. Look for reports of nitwits with power they didn’t earn, don’t need, and can’t handle. If I they’re missing then the pendulum has swung towards a reality based universe and it’s time to cool the fiction writing.
- Did a big organization forget its purpose and act like a raving jackass?
You can’t go long without some large organization completely forgetting it’s reason to exist and behaving like a toddler with a hatchet. The usual winners in this reverse-lottery are the airlines and the vast field of Orwellian incompetence we used to call journalism. United did it’s share when they beat a paying customer and dragged him off a plane. Then, CNN stepped into the breech and went full retard over a silly joke. If companies like United focused on flying airplanes and CNN tried the novel idea of reporting news(!) they wouldn’t fall prey to serial face-plants.
Who picked up where United and CNN faded out? It was Google!
A Google employee posited a well reasoned discussion of the pros and cons of favoring biological diversity (race, sex, etc…) over ideological diversity (different opinions and approaches etc…). He also suggested that men and women might have different preferences in terms of careers in computer programming. The monster! I read his whole text. It wasn’t particularly overboard. You don’t have to agree with him if you don’t want to. There’s room in the world for all kinds of ideas and… Bwa ha ha ha that’s adult language. Instead a loud majority got high on groupthink and charged off the cliff.
Given the chance to react like sane adults who’ve lived a few years and possibly have met and spoken to both men and women… on earth… Google shit its pants. They fired his ass toot sweet. Meanwhile the press twisted it into some kind of female bashing manifesto of doom. It turns out men and women are exactly 100% alike except we need more female computer programmers because they’re 100% the same in a better diverse way. A million articles and not one mentioned the technology of search engines. Funny thing that.
Thus, Google fulfilled this month’s “nitwit of the moment” checkbox. Also, just to make it funnier, many female Google employees took the day off ’cause they had the vapors. Awesome!
Google forgot it’s a for profit search engine and targeted marketing company. They fired the shit out of some fellow for “perpetuating gender stereotypes” as if “gender role analysts” make computers run. A computer search company, shouldn’t give a flying fuck about anyone’s opinions about anything.
“Fred, how’s it going?”
“I was busy all weekend. I set fire to my left nipple, built a race car out of three dishwashers and a jet engine, planted heirloom tomatoes, wrote a poem, adopted a lizard, got a tattoo of Barbra Streisand on my nutsack, and shoved a beer can up my ass on stage in Tijuana. This morning, on company time, I wrote a new algorithm that shaves 0.000001% off a search routine.”
“0.000001%? Awesome! Keep up the good work.”
Firing people for “sucking a computer programming” is the only thing Google should be doing… and this is because they’re not allowed to execute shitty programmers. Google is legally obligated to stockholders to stay focused on getting rich and nothing else. That’s what “for profit company” means.
Also, Google pays real American dollars for a Vice President of Diversity, Integrity and Governance. That’s California-speak for “Soviet apparatchik”. Aside from the janitor (who they might contract out) why have anyone on staff who isn’t writing code every goddamn day?
Time for a Curmudgeonly Gem of Insight:
“Once a company has the scratch to hire a Vice President of Diversity, Integrity and Governance it’s time to put some kid from Tatooine into an X-wing and make a run at their exhaust ports.”
- Did something super, extra, mega gay happen and were we ordered to be impressed by such bravery?
A few years ago it was a former track and field star, turned reality TV show um… actor(?), who turned into a female shaped object for the cover of Vanity Fair. Then it was a few years of “bake me a cake you homophobic peon” and “who gets to shit where while shopping at Target?” It calmed down for a while. Now it’s Vogue with a pardoned formerly court-marshaled quasi-female thing wearing a swimsuit on their cover.
Predictably, we’re told this is brave and awesome. Because in modern America, women are exactly equal to men in programming and male-based humans are exactly perfect for filling out a swimsuit.
- Is Trump going to be impeached by next Wednesday due to Russia, Russia, Russia…?
I’m not sure what happened here. There’s less news coming out of this six month nothingburger. I’ve been enjoying the sillyness. I chuckle at the “62,984,825 people voted for Trump but they were all Russian spies” theory. You gotta’ roll up a copy of The New York Times and smoke it to get high enough for that one to seem more plausible than “Hillary lost because she didn’t win”.
“I’ll take ‘What’s got less hard evidence than Bigfoot’ for $200 Alex.”
It’s a portent of sanity as it seems to be fading. Like herpes there will probably be periodic painful inflammations (likely emanating from CNN) but I guess the party is over? Score one for everyone calming down?
- Is a socialist/totalitarian shithole threatening to attack somewhere most Americans can’t find on a map? Are we being told this is a big fat hairy deal?
Bill Clinton gave North Korea Danegeld in 1994 to lay off making nukes. This has been tried before:
Twenty-three years later North Korea has nukes, they spent the money, and they’re still an oppressive shithole. They were given stern warning about rockets so no way that… Whoops now they finally have rockets. Funny how that works.
Perusing news articles after the fact it seems like folks tried to get upset that an ICBM would hit Alaska. It didn’t seem to take. Then they postulated that maybe Korea could hit Hawaii or California. For whatever reason nobody freaked over Hawaii and probably half of us cheered over the California thing. Then they started talking about Guam.
This one took root. Why we care about Guam more than Honolulu is beyond me? Maybe if I worked at Google and had a subscription to Vanity Fair it would all make sense.
At any rate I have no commentary about North Korea. They’ve been fucking with us over for 23 years and like an abusive co-dependent nimrod we keep “engaging”. I’m not sure what’ll happen. I hope nobody gets hurt. Probably it’ll all blow over.
Conclusion?
People are fuckin’ nuts! None of the stuff I mentioned was even remotely sane (aside from the odd radio silence about why Trump is “super definitely toast this time”).
It’ll be forgotten as soon as something more weird happens. Presumably a shark will attack Britney Spears who’s just come out as a male transgendered freight hauler from New Jersey, CNN will blame Russia, Google will censor it, United will drop a plane on it, and Lil’Kim will be sad and lonely ’cause nobody cares about him.
My survey of the news is complete. Time to write more tales of Lesbian Activist Squirrels. Look for the next installment by next week.