Well in another "Bye bye" post, we get to say goodbye to what's left of the "Washington Post". Once a top tier newspaper, it was gutted and destroyed when the editorial staff wanted to endorse Harris and Bezos said "No".

At that moment it ceased to be a newspaper of professionals and showed what it had become: An in house organ for the beliefs and values of its billionaire owner. I was paying a subscription for that now, and that was what I was going to get going forward.

I cancelled my paper and online subscription that day. And I subscribed to the Baltimore Banner, which was founded as a local news source by people fired from the Baltimore Sun.

Apparently a lot of other people did so as well, but the problem wasn't the billionaire, no it was that they simply needed to become more "selective". So they fired 1/3rd of the remaining staff, including at least one reporter who was left stranded in a war zone in Ukraine.

The only department left apparently is "wellness" and "Politics". So basically it is nothing more than a house organ for Bezos to suck on Trump's fat and ugly little cock. And to any "journalist" there, that is all they are working for from now on.

Which seems to be a shrinking number. At least one manager I know asked to be laid off rather than can his staff once he saw what the layoffs were. I would as well, and if I hadn't been I would be insulted that they think I would work for such a shill shit show and resign immediately.

Honestly I think every person there should quit and Jeff can run it all with Amazon's "AI" bot. I did ask it some questions; it refused to answer to anything political, and more interestingly gave me Epstein answers when I asked it to compare the Post's bias based on article sentiment from 2000-2021 and 2021-2025.

It's not even an AI, just a dumb fake search engine. Fitting for such a trash organization.

RIP Washington Post. With you gone, one of the "boxes" of Democracy (the soap box) grows weaker.

Was listening to the song Fairytale of New York with the family this evening, it's an old Pogues song and I remember liking it because I loved Kristi MacCool back in the day. But I guess I never really got it, and this evening, listening to the lyrics....

I suddenly got it.

And yeah, it is beautiful. And sad, and brings back memories from long ago. Long, long, long ago.

I kept them with me, babe, I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone, I've built my dreams around you

Long ago.....

Quidam
Quidam
The night draws back....
In the world of dreams
you dance....

From your depths
The good and the bad
It draws out the silence

Quidam
Quidam
At the shores of your dreams
On that threshold
you dance...

And all around you
The good and the bad
It draws out the silence

Quidam
Quidam
The night draws back....
In the world of dreams
you dance....

From your depths
The good and the bad
It draws out the silence....

Was in NY picking up taxes for the Relay Improvement Association with Carolyn Green and my brother. It was insane, C was driving an old Toyota 500 mini truck, we got the stuff and had to drive home. Jeff got yelled at by a homeless person and I had to get him in the car and talk down the homeless guy. Then we drove past a train museum and I wanted to go in but could not due to no time. Then we got lost and drove into a building and down to a sub basement with all sorts of acrane altar stuff like a Masonic vault. Then I walked back to figure out the way out but my cell phone kept losing signal and I had to go back and forth to get us out. Then Carolyn was gone and I had to hot wire the truck to drive it out and...

What an insanely busy dream. Nothing but setbacks, nothing but stress all to meet a deadline that was completely arbitrary. I have no idea what the fuck was going on other than I feel that the days are going by and I am neither prepared nor do I know really where I am going.

UGH! Ok, it is Monday, it rained last night, everything is wet, and there are a bunch of things to do. Yes, taxes. Yes crazy. Yes lots to accomplish. I will be ok.....

"People have trouble understanding the consequences of the kind of inequality we have seen develop since the Reagan tax cuts for a pretty simple reason. With fortunes like these, it becomes possible to buy things that ordinary people do not understand as being for sale: courts, political parties, means of communication, a whole cohort of compliant intellectuals, all leading towards the ultimate purchase: the government that represents the only effective limit on their owners’ freedom of action."

So this weekend I drove up to Baitcon. Main roads were clogged so I took back roads up to NY state. And while driving I found something interesting:

I now know the last words I will ever hear, and the last words I will ever say.

It's kind of interesting, you wonder what the last thing you will hear, will it be comforting words from loved ones? Will your last words be those of wisdom or insight or something else?

"AbortABORTABORT!!!!!"

Yep, that's it. I heard it in my ears as I went to pass someone on a 2 lane road and they sped up. Saw the oncoming car, and realized I had a second to make the last decision of my life. The above is what I heard as I gunned the 928, and pulled in front of this guy a second before the car blew by me in the other lane.

At a speed of 100mph and 60mph that would have been the end. And I would have been at fault, no doubt about it. And everything would have gone dark. But apparently that did not happen and I think I'm here typing this. Maybe. Maybe I'm in the final stages of death somewhere on a NY side road and all of this is a hallucination.

It's like being in a bardo, a space between spaces. It was an amazing weekend, perfect camping weather, good food, good people, good times. Cool, nice breeze, good fire in the evening, big comfortable inflatable mattress. Everything was nice.

But it's Tuesday now and things have not winked out so I think I made it. But if I didn't that was an incredibly stupid thing to do, and I will never do something like that again. I still have a lot to live for and about 19 years left to live it. I'd rather enjoy those days, and the people I share them with.

So yeah, my last words may be to abort the bad decision I made except this time there is no way out. Except in this case maybe there was. Maybe I did pull it all out of the fire...

We shall see. On to the day!

Balticon was great! Choclicon went through 10 pounds of fudge, 10 pounds of fountain chocolate, and a whole lot of other stuff. Lots of people, great time, now at home but will pop back this evening for the dead dog events.

What fun!

Haven't been writing too much in the old diary here, mostly because things are about as bad as I expected. The Orange goon is back and yeah it's about the same as 1996-2000 with even more stupid things every day. It's a combination of outlandish shit coupled with folding like a broken beach chair. Noisy, stupid, frustrating, and the worst part is all of this is self inflicted.

Yep, we WANTED this. We had a nice stable economy, good rights, reasonable expectations that the world would not fall apart the next morning and we traded it for complete shit, a stock market that's little more than a pump-and-dump scheme, and just petty cruelty. But there's no consequences for those in power, so why not?

*sigh* You know, I've lived a pretty good life overall, no real regrets long term and if I checked out tomorrow in a gulag overall I'd say life was a pretty good net positive. But man it's weird to look back and see all the times we have just self flagellated ourselves. From "wars on drugs" to "wars on terror" to a self inflicted COVID nightmare to.... well whatever the fuck this now is. At major inflection points we have a choice to just do it better, and instead we shoot ourselves in the foot again and again.

Perhaps it is human nature. Takes us hundreds of years to make any sort of progress, then we backslide 99% backwards again into the dumps. I've seen glimpses of what we can be and can achieve, but as they say it is far easier to destroy than create.

And this batch is like a bunch of howling monkeys, destroying everything and creating nothing. Again.

Ok, I'm only allowed one sigh per post. We did do an incredible trip out to Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand. The trip was fantastic, bit of a whirlwind, but that's what Alex and I like. Met Bec in Australia along with some friends which was totally awesome, got to see uluru, got to fly a plane again, just got to do all sorts of STUFF.

As I said, life has been very good overall and I'm making the best of this current situation. I keep hoping that this time people will learn, but I really wonder if that's just not in the cards and good old evolution needs to start grinding down on this. Eh, we shall see.

Other thoughts are going in my head about the past, nostalgia, and the like. I'll write more about that at a later time, train is pulling into DC and I have a fun filled day of WORK ahead of me. These days I work for the lols, but I should try to take it seriously for other peoples' sake.

Off we go!

So it's 2am. Again. And I'm up. And my mind is just racing with thoughts. Change, life, all that sort of stuff.

Last week sucked. It was one of those weeks in the single digits, which is really annoying where I live as it normally doesn't get that cold. It's the cold where things just break in your hands, the cold where stuff doesn't work, and the biting wind cuts through anything you're wearing.

It was also the week for in-office meetings on our big finance project so I got to get up every morning at 6am to get to the train station. That sucks, moreso in cold. On Tuesday they did didn't run trains till 9am so I was seriously late *grumble* and cold from standing on a windy platform.

Wednesday was... worse. The 928 was not too happy to start but it got going. It's been making a squeak sound for a month, I figured it was a cold bearing. Drove it to the train station, let it charge the battery for a bit, went to work.

Came home (in the cold), hopped in, and realized I had left my cell phone on the train. Fuck. Then tried to crank the engine and it was dead. Held it and it went really dead. Since I didn't have a phone and no one's going to rescue ME, I walked home from the station. Got another car, tried to jump it, jumper cables are shit, gave up and called a tow truck. Came at 11pm but I had work the next day so off I went....

Thursday I charged the car after work but was still dead. I figured I had burned the starter out, so I spent this weekend working on it to get the starter out. At least it was warmer (40) which is balmy by comparison. New starter on the way, probably will replace the battery to but....

I just realized that the problem may be the engine is locked up. There is a failure mode where the main thrust bearing can be worn down, getting to the point where the engine is just destroyed. Then the car will not start. If I put in the new starter and it doesn't work I just trash the whole car and that's it.

Which means I need another car. And I hate buying cars. I hate new cars that tattle on you and have endless monitoring by who knows what. So there's that. Overall it's just.... annoying and change and I don't want to deal with it.

I hate winter. And that's not even touching on the abortion our country has become. That's politics and I'll save that for later. It can't poison everything in my life, so I'll just deal with these disasters.

At least I'm not going in to work this week. In fact I don't think I'll go in anymore. Maybe I'll stop going to meetings and see how long it takes them to fire me or something. Naah, I'm not that unprofessional.

But there are good things. Alex made amazing dinner, D boy has a job starting monday and maybe they will finally move out. B and I had a nice evening, she picked me up and although I feel like an unhorsed peasant, it was pleasant. This week I have to meet with a finance advisor, have someone come out to look at the kitchen cabinets, and of course get the starter in before we freeze again. I'd like to know if the car is trash.

Ok, maybe I'll fall asleep in a bit, took some melatonin. Should have done it at midnight, but now it's 2am so we deal with what we have.

Was reading my posts from 4 years ago when Biden won it and we somehow escaped from the crap-sack universe.

Well, now we're back in it. Again. I wrote this in November 2016 just before the election....

"So we'll see where this goes. If Trump wins my family will do fine: We're rich, white, have some political power, and I happen to be the right party. And if Trump wins then maybe that is what this nation both wants and *NEEDS*. We got ourselves out of the deepest hole I have ever seen in my financial lifetime, and now we want to jump back into a deeper one. There are reasons to let this happen: People who are constantly being fired, having their money taken away in the markets, losing their insurance, houses, cars, livelihoods are surprisingly easy to scam and get even more money from: There is a reason payday loans and other financial scams target the poor."

And yeah, we did fine, but the country went into an even deeper ditch. The fun part though is this time we know exactly what we're getting. But to be honest I wrote back in 2016 that we also knew what we were getting.

"For myself: This is very unfortunate. But unfortunate or not this is reality. This is what the people in the US have chosen, what *we* have chosen, and now we will reap the benefits of our choices. Reality does exist, and now we will get a good dose of reality."

Time to waste another 4 years on annexing Canada, going to war in Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico and all that crap. Like "Freedom fries" these next 4 years are just going to suck. I'll read some of my politics tagged posts from 2016-2020 and see how they have aged....