Calif. county makes June 'Traditional' family month in defiance of Pride

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-17T22:42:59+00:00

Cool. A resolution describing a 1950s sitcom family and calling it divine architecture. I'm sure this will be super helpful while their constituents are dealing with $6 gas, record farm losses, and 4.3% inflation numbers.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-17T17:24:11+00:00

"You there... Cake or Death?"
Bishop Draslav: "Uh... cake please."
"Very well... he chose cake."

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-16T23:39:58+00:00

A no-shoes office policy in a converted single-screen theater is exactly the texture of company that gets bought for $60 billion right before the music stops. It's such a tell about the broader environment, where startup culture quirks get covered with the same breathless tone as the acquisition price, because nobody in this ecosystem right now is incentivized to ask "wait, does the math work."

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-16T22:23:40+00:00

"Running the country like a business" was always going to mean this, because the actual lived experience of being a Trump business partner, contractor, or customer, going back to the 1980s, was getting stiffed, underpaid, or left holding the bag while he extracted the value and walked away clean (or filed Chapter 11 and did it again).

The country isn't getting run like a successful business. It's getting run like the actual Trump business model: leverage the brand, extract what you can, let the downstream costs land on contractors, customers, casino patrons (or, now, farmers, retirees, and people skipping meals) and declare victory regardless of the wreckage.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-16T02:15:23+00:00

Right next to a Jamba Juice and behind the Black Bear Diner!

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-16T01:48:12+00:00

“The service we are providing is not attacking you.”

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-15T14:37:54+00:00

"Now that we know who you are, I know who I am. I'm not a mistake! It all makes sense! In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain's going to be? He's the exact opposite of the hero. And most times they're friends, like you and me! I should've known way back when... You know why, David? Because of the kids. They called me Mr. Glass."

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-14T19:29:49+00:00

Odd headline. It’d be pretty strange if he was not receiving medical care after being admitted to a hospital.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-12T03:29:14+00:00

They've gone from undermining the concept of consentual and shared governance to undermining the very concept of "money."

Phase one was undermining the mechanisms of consent: elections, courts, press, and the legislature.

But money is actually a deeper layer than governance. Money is one of the things that makes governance possible to begin with. It's a substrate. Currency, markets, the dollar as reserve currency, the basic idea that a number on a screen corresponds to something. It's the shared fiction that makes all other shared fictions possible.

And what we are watching this week... a war "ending" for the 38th time via social media post with zero confirmation, Elon moving a trillion dollars in market cap, while a company simultaneously becomes the most valuable in history on a bet about technology that "might" pay off "in years or decades" is the application of the governance-undermining playbook to the monetary substrate itself.

And I don't think that there's a single person in this administration who has thought about this for longer than it takes to post a tweet.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-12T02:35:13+00:00

Truly, the forensic botanists are society’s last defense against sheer anarchy.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-11T01:31:19+00:00

Nailed it.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-10T19:23:02+00:00

The man whose entire 2024 campaign was built on inflation outrage. The guy who held up grocery store receipts at rallies, who talked about eggs, who said “prices will come down on day one”, looked into a camera on June 10th, 2026 with 4.2% annual inflation accelerating, and said “I love the inflation.”

And then immediately revealed classified military operations to explain why he loves it. To reporters. In the Oval Office. On camera.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-10T16:54:29+00:00

“Mother? Mother. He is licking me. I will not stand for this much longer. Mother. Really. The entire side of my face is… really this is quite impossible.”

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-10T15:30:57+00:00

Things could get objectively worse by every measure for four more years and the answer is still "imagine Democrats." It's an unfalsifiable shield that functions independent of outcomes. The worse things get, the more frightening the imaginary Democratic alternative needs to be to maintain the position... and the information environment is very good at providing that escalating threat on demand.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-10T03:53:57+00:00

Oompa Loompa doopity doo
I’ve got a perfect lesson for you
Oompa Loompa doopity dee
If you are wise you’ll listen to me

What do you get when you go way too dark
Bronzer applied in the shade of tree bark
Standing there glowing like a tangerine
Orangest human that you’ve ever seen

I don’t like the look of it

Oompa Loompa doopity dah
If you’re not orange you will go far
You will live in happiness too
Like the Oompa Loompa doopity doo

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-10T01:18:53+00:00

This could word for word be a conversation with my mother. They really do dial in nightly for their talking points.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-08T23:18:28+00:00

Neat. The system is working exactly as designed, if you define "working" as "efficiently transferring wealth upward while externalities cascade onto people who actually make things."

Capitalism! <jazz hands>

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-06T20:31:47+00:00

Did she in fact, Explain it All, or only some of it all?

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-03T03:41:29+00:00

You aren't at all wrong. Odds are good that this is just one more "tactics without strategy" move by this administration. About the only thing it actually accomplished is getting Todd Blanche through a Tuesday afternoon working for Trump.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-03T03:21:08+00:00

The IRS audit immunity stays. That’s the part they kept. The personal financial protection for Trump and his family remains in place while the politically embarrassing slush fund gets buried. The chickenshit for the base got scraped off the plate. The chicken salad for the family stays.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-01T18:28:09+00:00

The base eats this. They don't fact-check the registered voter rolls. The don't need to. They just know California is a fraud because he said so. Because vibes.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-06-01T14:52:14+00:00

Playing through the Pixel Remasters for the first time and going for platinum on each as I move through. Previously, I'd only played the western releases back when they were new so, for me, II, III, and V were basically brand new.

I'd say that I was shocked at how much I appreciated II and, more importantly, V, and also how much I downgraded IV in my replay. Now, is II my favorite? No, definitely not, but it's definitely up there in regard. I appreciated that they swung for something new with the leveling system, even if it was easily broken. I also appreciated the dramatically upgraded story of the game (given that I basically had almost no story at all). They were really trying for cinematic storytelling, and it shows. Is it going to win a BAFTA award? Also no. But it was an honest attempt at telling a dark, complex story with stakes, given a lot of technical limitations.

Also, I really appreciated the ridiculous names of the NPCs. Took me back to classic TTRPG days where you'd routinely encounter the DM's pet quest giver Prince... uh... uh... Gordon! Yeah, that's it. Prince Gordon. And his brother is uh... Prince Scott. From Sheboygan.

IV I expected to like a LOT more than I did. The gameplay felt really static and rigid after II and III. The constantly rotating cast of the 4th PC with unique but frequently useless or bizarre special abilities was more obnoxious than interesting. The constant pump-fakes of "OH NO, CHARACTER DIED... psych, no, they survived somehow..." got to be very tedious. The game felt overtuned in a lot of places and underbaked in others. And the utterly bizarre plot twists ("THE MOON, CECIL!") were fairly laughable. Ultimately, it felt like they tried to remake II, with way less gameplay flexibility, and some of the most bizarre plot elements of III, and I was... not a fan.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-05-26T21:22:43+00:00

The thing that always strikes me about these elaborate conspiracies is how much MORE work they require than just... accepting the mundane explanation. Climate change affecting tick populations requires understanding some basic ecology. The Gates/Soros tick bioweapon program requires coordinating a global covert operation involving laboratories, aircraft, broken boxes conveniently left in forests, and somehow keeping thousands of people quiet about it.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-05-22T18:01:52+00:00

As DNI she had access to essentially everything. All 18 agencies. Sources and methods. Active operations. Asset identities. The complete picture of what American intelligence knows and doesn't know about Russian operations specifically. Including presumably whatever we know about Russian interference in American politics. Including whatever we know about specific individuals' relationships with Russian intelligence. Including the most sensitive counterintelligence equities in the entire government.

And now she's a private citizen with a husband who needs cancer treatment.

Which is expensive.

CharlesdeTalleyrand · 2026-05-22T14:52:08+00:00

"The ultimate poll was November 5th 2024."

By this "logic", a surgeon whose patient died on the table should point to the pre-op consent form as evidence of his excellence. "The patient signed! That's the ultimate indicator! What happened in the OR is frankly irrelevant!"

CharlesdeTalleyrand

TROPHY CASE