For your Christmas catching-up: The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump

Here it is Christmas Eve, and I’ve JUST NOW shoveled my way out from under my workload to pay attention to my own site for a change.

I know most of you want to think about this like you need a hole in your mistletoe, but I promise it’s funny and enlightening. The Impeachment of Donald J. Trump examines where we are, how we got here, where we might be going, and – are you sitting down for this? It actually explains things so they make *some* sense!

It’s a defining Christmas for the Trumpster. Lots of soul-searching is due (though we may be sure none will be undertaken). If ghosts of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John McCain visited him tonight, that would be most fitting.

 

Who Needs Halloween When You Have The Real Life Horror Of China?

Yeah, so there’s a new post up at 123ish.com, about the current situation with Hong Kong’s protests and China. It came onto our radar when it involved the gaming community via the Hearthstone fiasco, when a tournament player got suspended for making a little demonstration in support of Hong Kong’s struggle for liberation from China.

I went into covering that story intending it to be light-hearted satire, poking a jab at Blizzard Entertainment and making a few swipes at dictator Xi Jinping and his Winnie the Pooh resemblance. But once I started reading up on what the hell is really going on in China, the story got too grim. Be advised, that link goes to some stomach-churning stark reality. Hong Kong is protesting because it doesn’t want to be subject to Chinese control. After seeing just a taste of what’s going on there, can anyone blame them?

At the very least, China’s torture of Falun Gong members amounts to a modern-day Inquisition, except even Torquemada never got sadistic enough to harvest organs from subjects while they were still alive. The treatment of everybody else in China isn’t exactly winning any human rights pageants either. The continued censorship of most of the world by China through corporate proxies is added salt in the wound. We are all living under China’s bootheel already, whether we know it or not.

Xi Jinping is a modern-day Hitler, and in some ways he’s even worse. This is no laughing matter. China must be stopped now. Why is the rest of the world turning a blind eye?

Faster than I could post, new stories of horrors and atrocities are coming out of China by the day. Read well, because we can do something about China now, or we can all look forward to a “re-education camp” tomorrow.

I wasn’t taking boycotts against Blizzard and other companies seriously before. But now, I’m going to have to at least think it over. If the price of doing business in China is kowtowing to this savage, monstrous regime, then it is not worth it.

UPDATE: A Redditor explains the culture of fear inside mainland China. He, too, points out “Chinese government may be the most powerful totalitarian regime in human history.” and “The West has tolerated CCP for too long.”

UPDATE: NGO Human Rights Watch now declares China “a global threat to human rights.” HRW executive director Kenneth Roth states: “Beijing has long suppressed domestic critics. Now the Chinese government is trying to extend that censorship to the rest of the world. To protect everyone’s future, governments need to act together to resist Beijing’s assault on the international human rights system.”

 

New at Spookwire: Exploring the Denver Airport’s Wacky Conspiracies

Ah, Denver International Airport! Nothing adds spice to the most controversial – and most expensive – public works project in history like decorating it with Nazi murals, demonic horses, grimacing gargoyles, and Freemason symbols. Join me on a tour of DIA, as we delve into the mysteries surrounding this nexus of nuttiness.

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1980s Arcades Revisited

So I notice Millennials and Generation Z (or younger folk, if you’re sick and tired of these arbitrary generation definitions that nobody agrees on) seem to wax nostalgic for the arcade times. This, even though they may have been born long after the arcade heyday. There’s ever a word for it: anemoia, nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

So I figured to either sharpen or alleviate some of that with an IMGUR gallery time capsule of 1980s-era video game arcades. Not so much focused on the games as on the arcades themselves, the chains and one-offs that we encountered in malls and boardwalks across the land. Then one of my freelance clients clamored for their own arcade nostalgia experience, so I posted a far more elaborate arcade rat memoir there.

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The Las Vegas Grasshopper Invasion 2019

Pardon me for sounding so… preachy… but as a prophet I am obligated to share my testimony. The Las Vegas grasshopper invasion is God’s punishment for not believing me when I said this exact same thing happened in Bullhead City, Arizona, back in the 1990s. Bullhead being a tiny town and the 1990s being what they were (I swear we were the only household at the time to discover Internet), there weren’t many to witness it, so now I finally have a back-up confirmed sighting.

Yes, folks, Old testament locust plagues happen!

I love how all the news reports have to reassure panicky people over and over: They’re harmless. They don’t bite. There is nothing to be scared of, don’t panic. What, are people running around screaming in fear of being devoured?

Having braved a plague like this (BELIEVE ME NOW???), I’m afraid I have to point out that they’re not entirely harmless…

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New at Spookwire: History of Witch Torture

For your leery-eyed, lurid entertainment, we round up some of the historic ways kinky Catholics used to torture random women accused of witchcraft.

Since it didn’t make the cut in the article, I HAVE to rave about this TV commercial from the 1980s, Time-Life Books’ Enchanted World series, narrated by the Prince of Horror himself:

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You know what I haven’t blogged about in awhile? LINUX!

Anybody out there remember the elder days of yore on the web, when I was one of the few bloggers to talk about Linux and FOSS? I figured it’s time to update distro recommends for a new generation. So here’s the top five Linux distros for every kind of user.
As usual, I dodged the trendy meme distros in favor of time-honored practical systems for anybody from the most clueless newbie to the salty veteran power user. Wow, it has been a long time!

Follow on for one of my classic Linux essays, the final battle report of the Microsoft vs. Linux wars:

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