December 19, 2022

Tales told by two idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Tales told by two idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
By Hal Brown 

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DonkeyHotey, background from InPixio

One of the two specimens shown above in the DonkeyHotey caricatures was a threat to American democracy. Hopefully we will soon know how close he came to turning our country to a fascist dictatorship and whether justice will prevail so he pays a price for this.

With Trump, putting him in  certain perspective, he's a tragic comic figure. He's a pure idiot who stumbled into a position of power by malignant guile and grift which was enabled by the gullibility and fears of his base. Add luck to that and we have the spectacle of a grandiose narcissist that began his presidential campaign riding down a golden escalator being cheered on by people who were paid to be there and who survived the "I could grab them by the pussy" incident. 

All this could have been the subject of the exploits of comic strip character.

The other, who like Trump belongs on a petri dish in a CDC lab where highly contagious microbes are studied is Elon Mush (typo or Freudian slip) Musk. He's not a garden-variety idiot. Rather, he is a rare breed because he's an idiot savant with a reported 155 IQ. 

When it comes to having a human version of hoof-in-mouth disease (which can be fatal in animals) he's just as much of an idiot as Trump. Both have recently engaged in a self-defeating crime spree against themselves. Anyone reading this follows the news so I don't have to list what they been doing.

Giving credit to caricaturist DonkeyHotey, a name meant to be pronounced Don Quixote, for leading me to think of this comparison: both Musk and Trump remind me of the Cervantes character:

From Wikipedia:

In the course of their (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) travels, the protagonists meet innkeepers, prostitutes, goat-herders, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts and scorned lovers. The aforementioned characters sometimes tell tales that incorporate events from the real world. Their encounters are magnified by Don Quixote's imagination into chivalrous quests. Don Quixote's tendency to intervene violently in matters irrelevant to himself, and his habit of not paying debts, result in privations, injuries, and humiliations (with Sancho often the victim).

Trump has had several "squires" (aka sycophants) who we could say have been akin in their loyalty to him Sancho Panza was to Don Quixote. Musk has none. The reason for this difference between the two of them is fodder for psychohistorians. 

I'd hazard a guess that Musk never mastered the ability to put aside his obnoxious authoritarianism with people working under him. Trump has the need to be worshiped up close and it appears that Musk only is comfortable wielding power without letting anyone get close to him. It may be possible to gain some insight into his personalities by analyzing his three marriages and why the first two ended in divorce. From YaHoo News:

Excerpt: His first marriage was to author Justine Wilson in 2000, ending in an acrimonious divorce in 2008. In an article for Marie Claire in 2010, she claimed: “Elon's judgement overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.

"‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.’ ‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.’”

From Cervantes to Shakespeare's Macbeth and the title the of my blog today. Here's the actual version of the altered quote in context:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

 I can't envision Trump or Musk uttering something like this on their deathbeds. They are both as shallow as the puddle left on the street after a light summer drizzle which will fast evaporate when the hot sun comes out. 

Deep people, those we consider to be self-aware and introspective, live their lives informed by knowing they are mortal. They consider that when they die their legacy will be the good that they have done for their children and for those who were in a position to do so, for society.

Addendum:


This excerpt is relevant to today's blog:

Donald Trump may be very wealthy, but he's rapidly turning into a sad and pathetic figure. According to this report in the Washington Post, the former president tends to wander aimlessly around Mar-a-Lago, bored and lethargic, depending on his attendants to call around to allies to ask them to deliver "affirmations" and cheer him up. One former adviser characterized his new life as sad, saying he wanted to replicate the grandeur of the White House but it's more like "a Barbie Dream House miniature." Ouch.

This is not a picture of someone gearing up for an arduous presidential campaign. It's a picture of an old man trying to grapple with the fact that he's retired and doesn't have much of a purpose anymore.





December 18, 2022

A blog devoted to finding a Fediverse server to join Mastodon

This has been a blog page devoted to finding a Fediverse server to join Mastodon
put together by Hal Brown

I'm not going to keep updating this blog because I discovered that there was a more comprehensive list which people can use to decide which Fediverse  Mastodon server they want to use to read and toot on. Click below:



This is my blog about Mastodon from Dec. 16


Below: Just a few servers on Mastodon

Click above to enlarge image

Those who want to view or join Mastodon can do so at lots of web addresses for Mastodon servers which are decentralized. They are all on a Fediverse. 

The fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networkingmicrobloggingblogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. On different servers (technically instances), users can create so-called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the software running on the servers supports one or more communication protocols that follow an open standard.[1] As an identity on the fediverse, users are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities.[2] In some cases, users can show or share data (video, audio, text, and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities, and allow other identities to edit other users' data (such as a calendar or an address book). Wikipedia

You can read more about Mastodon here:

The images below are about 42 of the links which you can use to view or join Mastodon. Click to join. There are over 160 as of Dec. 20 and more are added just about every day. 

These two appear to have the most members:
Mastodon Social

This is where I toot. I can't find a logo for it so I'll use my version until I find an official one.
 

These are other popular ones:




This one is called Pachyderm

The servers above appear to have the most members.

Others have fewer, even some less than 200.



All the images below are links.  The newest links are on the bottom of the list.






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This one is in German

















Seeing how GOP is about to drive off a cliff reminds me of a favorite Charles Addams cartoon

Seeing how GOP is about to drive off a cliff reminds me of a favorite Charles Addams cartoon
By Hal Brown

Click to enlarge
My Version
CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE

When I was too young to appreciate the writing in The New Yorker, which my parents subscribed to, I looked forward to each issue for the cartoons. My favorite cartoonist was Charles Addams which no doubt showed something about my personality. In fact, that when I read McCarthy's Race For Speaker Risks Upending House On Day One in HUFFPOST this morning the above cartoon came to mind.

It was one of the two Addams cartoons which I liked the best. This is the other one:


I suppose this says something about my developing personality and my somewhat morbid sense of humor. I also like the cartoons in The Hanging Book:

Click above to enlarge - I misplaced or loaned out my copy of this book and writing this story prompted my to order the last used copy they had on Amazon.


If you stumbled on this blog because you're a Charles Addams fan and haven't already watched the streaming Netflix show Wednesday I highly recommend it. It has two Golden Globe nominations and features the Christina Ricci  in a supporting role. She played the original Wednesday in the original Addams Family TV show.

But I digress...

Back to what I think the cartoon represents. The car which is about to careen off the cliff is occupied by all Republicans but you have to wonder who is driving it. I'd have to choose between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump depending on whether we are thinking only about Congress or the GOP as a party.

Who then is this driver?


He sees the approaching semi and is aware that the Republicans who are chasing and about to overtake him, and is smart enough to take advantage of the opportunity that fate afforded him.

The Democrat's leader, President Biden, lacks the ruthlessness gene and is not a malignant narcissist, anything but, so he wouldn't even dream of sticking his arm out the window and making the universal "it's safe to pass me" gesture which he knows would result in real life in the kind of movie scene where a car speeds off a cliff and bursts into flames.


The other way to interpret the cartoon is to say the man waving driver of the car to pass and die engulfed in flames is Donald Trump and he's being chased by any and all Republicans that don't bow down to him.



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