April 26, 2026
Again...
I was streaming during the event, I was unaware of it until much later.
There is not much that is known at this time. What is known is that a Teacher of the Year from California ran the scanners at the White House Correspondent's Dinner and got off several shots before being subdued.
Thankfully unlike the Butler shooting, no one was killed. One Secret Service Member was shot but his bulletproof vest's manufacturer is going to have a field day with advertising.
Not counting the Iranian backed attempt from 2024 (which was disrupted during the planning phase and seems to have gotten nowhere near the president), this was the THIRD assassination attempt. The third time shots were fired at him.
At this point, I think it likely that Trump does not finish out his term, and think it likely that he joins Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy.
I also think that will be a disaster, as it will normalize political violence in a way the 4 others did not. The opposition party is openly calling for this, the protesters outside the WHCD cheered when the news reached them.
IDK who Jason Howerton is, but he's correct. almost everyone doing politically motivated assassinations right now is on the far left. The only one I'm aware of in recent years that was an assassination of a left winger was the brutal murder of the leader of the very left wing Farm-Labor Party. However that turned out to be a leftist who was angry that Melissa Hortman had voted against a measure to bring more Illegal Immigrants into her state.
I fear the we are entering a period of political violence we haven't seen since the late 1960s and early to mid '70s. This was a cycle that has played itself out in many other American countries, and turned many of them into abattoirs. The U.S. has been lucky in that regard, but is not immune to the immense currents of historical trends and human nature.
We are in for a rough ride.
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09:41 AM
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April 21, 2026
Inconsequential Interlude
Take a break from the dystopia countdown to watch this.
Even if you know nothing about Genshin Impact, it's fun.
...and after Mauvika's motorcycle....it doesn't seem so out of place to people who are anymore.
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02:47 PM
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BETCHA' DIDN'T KNOW....
Today is election day in Virginia.
On the ballot is this:
Question: Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?
The wording is ....I haven't taken a civics or poly-sci class in years. I don't have access to the style guide...There's a technical/legal/academic term for this that
OH RIGHT!
It's BULLSHIT.
Sorry for the francophone digression but this amendment is Grand Theft State.
Constitutional amendments are NOT in anyway temporary measures.
The before and after if this gets passed is here:
If you are in Virginia and can legally vote please vote no.
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02:06 PM
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April 18, 2026
OK: This is a Freaky Venn Diagram....
The takeaway is that men are muck more tolerant of the speech of political opponents than women are of political allies.
The article this is screen-capped from is here and a longer, more detailed version of the article that goes into the methodology, but does not link to the actual paper is here. The actual paper is eluding me at the moment. It's somewhere in a vast pile of data compiled by F.I.R.E. for their free speech rankings of schools.
I should note that this is not akhsually a Venn diagram, but rather a line graph that has had Venn bubbles added to it for clarity. Still, the bubbles are regular spheroids and do not overlap.
The result is rather stark in any event.
I'm not sure what to do with this information. It's really interesting, and kind of terrifying. It might explain the sudden explosion of censoriousness around the 2010-2015 timeframe once women reached a certain critical mass in corporations and government. However it does not present any sensible or viable solutions even if that hypothesis is corroborated by further research.
The graph just sits there. Festering.
So I thought I'd share it.
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10:55 AM
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"It's Like a Firework, But Bigger and has a Carburetor!"
Tomorrow morning (4/19/26) the Twitch channel will be streaming the next Blue Origin launch. This will be the second launch of The New Glenn booster" Never Tell Me The Odds!" which will be launching a Blue Bird COMSAT. The launch window is 6:45 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. EDT (10:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. UTC) so the stream will begin around 06:30a.m. EDT /10:30a.m. UTC. This is the first re-use of a New Glenn booster! Blue Origin is a competitor to Space-X and competition is a good thing, as it potentially gives more options and redundancy in the upcoming Moon and Mars endeavors. This class of rocket is slated to land the Blue Moon lunar probe at Shackleton Crater (lunar south pole) later this year. Also: Blue Origin is a division of a massive Mega-Corporation that might, or might not be affiliated with Twitch so everyone be there, show support and under no circumstances be the first to stop clapping for this pyrotechnic display by Mr. Bezos. I'll be providing my usual commentary squarely at the intersection of Dunning and Kruger and we'll do something after the fireworks have subsided.
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April 15, 2026
I'm going to go out on a limb and say....
YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!
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April 03, 2026
On the Current Unpleasantness in South Asia
Due to numerous obligations as well as exhaustion in the aftermath of my surgeries and my return to a job that 3 months of bedrest has not prepared me for, I've been rather silent on the intervention in Iran.
This is because, in addition to time and endurance deficits on my part, that prevent me from doing enough research to feel comfortable opining on the matter, the issue is rather more complex than seems to be appreciated by the majority of the commentariat.
Broadly, I am supportive of this action, though I am less sanguine about the likely outcome than I was in the first week.
Iran is a far greater threat to the US. and the world than seems to be appreciated. Governed by a fanatical, millennialist cult that seeks to bring about an apocalypse, in order to bring about the Islamic version of the rapture, the actual facts of the governing bodies' ideology comports so closely to many slanders against Protestants, that it may explain why so many do not take it seriously. It is however the ideology of "Twelverism" or "Mahdism" the cult that runs Iran now.
Full disclosure:
Islamic eschatology, especially Shia eschatology is waay outside my bailiwick, so I am hesitant to discuss this at length.
However, my understanding is that Twelverism is one of a few branches of Islam that reacted to the collapse of the Arab Empire (which was in many ways the most powerful and advanced civilization to that point in human history) by concluding that the empire had been too open minded, and free, and not sufficiently strict in their adherence to the Hadiths...thus collapsing from their own decadence rather than a combination of those Damn Mongols, Rabies, Black Death, climate induced famine and civil unrest.
This school of thought has persisted and spawned several times especially in the modern era since the Europeans, rather leapfrogged their Arab tormentors, both technologically and scientifically, closing, and then widening in reverse what had been an impossible gap before the fall of the Arab Empire.
The people who run the government of Iran, and adhere to its theology are nasty, dangerous, and fanatical. They run a repressive totalitarian state and are hell bent on supplying fanatics who share their ideology with aid , intelligence, and weapons. They see all those not comporting to their beliefs as affronts to reality that must be converted or killed.
Whatever one might think about the policies of Israel, the attack of October 7th was an atrocity that no civilized polity can abide. Whatever grievance one might have, mass rapes and wanton deliberate, sadistic slaughter of civilians is not a viable response. This is very different from a stray bomb, shell, or bullet, that hits an innocent. The results might be similar but those results were unintended. In fact, many of these instances, stemmed from the terrorists setting up military facilities in close proximity to their own civilians in order to cynically pump up collateral damage amongst their own people for propaganda gain. This reflection upon the recent past is not a distraction, or digression. Hamas, and Hezbollah are Iranian proxies, and indicative of the type of people this regime supports.
In contrast: The Iranian people are part of one of the oldest and most civilized polities on the planet. Held hostage by their murderous government, they have shown great courage in standing up to the IRGC (which amongst its many odious talents acts as a secret police).
In stark contrast to the governance of the Mullahs, the Iranian government under the Shah and his predecessors has been one of the most peaceful in human history, not fighting any wars from the 1700s untill the 1940s aside from fighting pirates, or responding to border incursions .
If the Mullahs were not a major force in the country, we would not care if Iran had nuclear weapons.
But the mullahs yet breathe and the barbaric depredations of their Palestinian proxies show what circumspection and good behavior can be expected if they ever get a bit of canned sun.
The recent uprisings by Iranian students discussed in this rather dated piece gave some hope that the despotic regime, might be ripe for toppling. if only support was given.
At the same time, Iran admitted, nay, boasted during negotiations that they already have enough enriched (60%) Uranium for 11 fission bombs. 60% EU is going to admittedly result in a very big and unwieldy bomb, but I not comforted very much by that.
Iran has a space program, so it is only a matter of time before they will miniaturize a bomb to fit on one of their satellite launchers. At that point they can hit any target on earth.
So yes. I think that the decision to attack Iran was defensible and likely the correct decision given the intel at the time. This does not seem to be a situation of an open ended war of choice built upon lies and kickbacks by defense contractors as the invasion of Iraq was.
I supported that war when it happened. I believed the institutions and statements by our government at the time. One reason I believed the fiends who opened that abattoir is that I recognized that Iran was then, as it is now, a terrible threat. However, regards the idea that Iraq had WMDs, or that Iran's myriad threats rather than Raytheon's quarterly earnings were a concern to those who made those decisions, well, I was wrong. It was the biggest foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in a century.
To the extent my naive online typing on the matter persuaded anyone at the time to enlist...I will never wash that blood from my hands.
So I do not take this position lightly.
I think Trump was correct to do what he did, given what was known at the time. The uprising in Iran indicated a very real possibility that the regime could be toppled if it were decapitated and the citizenry given some cover.
However:
I think that the build up took too long.
The logistics necessitated a positioning of assets that required a long enough lead time that the monsters who ran the country were able to kill most of the opposition leaders.
At least that is my assessment at the moment, given that all the Open Source Intel I've had time to peruse indicates that the Iranian people have not stepped up. The regime, gutted as it is, with its fleet at the bottom of the ocean and its air force swept from the skies still maintains a Gestapo that clings to power through terror.
This does not mean that this expenditure of blood and treasure will have availed us nothing. The gutting of Iran's military capability is a welcome development, and one can sincerely hope that we have knocked out their nuclear program for some years.
I actually think that Trump has made the world a safer place, at least for a time. However the resulting economic effects, particularly the current oil shock will likely have very bad results electorally.
I think this action was terrible, as war always is, but I think that it was ultimately the right thing to do. Whether it passes a cost benefit analysis will be unclear for some time.
That will come to pass only after we see what damage this decision will have done, long term, to the economy, and the politics of the U.S.
as well as how thoroughly the Iranian nuclear program has been hobbled.
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So: My Monitor Died
I've been scrambling to get that replaced, and hooked up...and talking to my computer in such a fashion that I can stream. I did, but its stand is....it concerns me.
There was also and update of OBS (my streaming software) which reset my settings.
So After a ton of running around I FINALLY came back to the blog and with great trepidation dared to look at the Disquisition by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn-With-An-Anime-Avatar on Frieren. Only to be completely perplexed. I was pleased at the lack of death threats...but confused.
THEN I realized that they were comments on this livestream, of the Artemis 2 launch.
Well:
Obviously somebody watches my streams.
While we are on the subject:
This is the Tentative Stream Schedule through the 17th of April.
There are a few down days as there is stuff both mundane and stream related that must get done and there are also some upcoming events like Genshin 6.5, ZZZ 2.7/2, and most notably, the farthest humans have ever been from Earth! Things that I will most certainly be streaming. Curiously, aside from those 3 items, the schedule is subject to change due to WEATHER of all things, since some of the mundanity involves yard work.
Times are all EDT and the channel is here: https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet
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