That feeling when...

...you're so disgusted with the state of the world that you literally can't think of anything worth posting.

Ecuador?? Fucking Ecuador???

I'd just like to point out the screamingly obvious here: Kamala would not currently be bombing Iran, kidnapping foreign heads of state, or doing... whatever the hell it is we're doing... in Ecuador -- Ecuador? Did I even read that right? Nor would she have CBP murdering citizens in the street.

 

"Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad," sure, but right now the President is visibly succumbing -- on live TV, yet! -- to both Dementia and physical health issues, and simultaneously being directed and channeled by some of the worst people on Earth. And if we're being honest, he was neither all that bright nor principled (aside from self-interest -- I guess that's a principle) before his health started going.

 

Would a lot of bad shit still have been happening, out of sight instead of out in the open? Yes, absolutely. ICE and CBP should both have been dissolved after Trump's first term. Do we now know the names and faces of a bunch of horrible, evil people who need to be stripped of wealth and influence and relegated to financial and social exile -- Homan, Bovino, Musk, Miller, Rubio, Bessent, etc.? Absolutely. 

 

Look, if you voted for Trump and are now regretting it, well... welcome to the party, I guess -- but I need you to sit with yourself and take a long, hard look at how you got there: who you were listening to, what information you trusted, which predictions you took seriously. And I need you to seriously consider how you got it so wrong, so you don't fucking do it again. I don't want to hear "nobody could have predicted--"  or "I had no way to know" or anything like that, because there were voices worth listening to that were absolutely screaming that this -- exactly this -- was going to happen. 

 

And the ones who were opining -- on major news networks or opinion columns, for example -- that it really wouldn't make any difference who got elected? They need to be ruthlessly mocked, remembered for their failures and enabling of all this, and faced with consequences for helping this happen. (I'm not saying murder them, but, like, when you get something this wrong you shouldn't still have a job where you get to tell a large audience what's what.)

 

Meanwhile... if we do manage to put American boots on the ground in Iran, it's going to be the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq all over again, but on steroids. If -- may the gods help us -- we move against Spain for refusing to host us while we're conducting an illegal, unconstitutional war of choice , we're now at war with NATO and that is absolutely going to end badly. (Yes, that was an exercise in the fine art of understatement.) If, if, if... and all the people in charge seem determined to make the worst possible choices.

 

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. There's a lot going on out there. 

No more adventures!

Okay, so these were pretty cool people and I was happy to help them... until now. I mean yeah, okay, a wood elf with glowing runes imprinted on his face; a dragonborn berserker who thought he was a lizardfolk; and a humanoid frog with poisonous skin who acted as their priest. It was a weird group. But they saved me when my magic ran wild and the insects I was enlarging became huge instead of just big. So I threw in with them. 

It worked out pretty well. I could enlarge the dragonborn and let him do his thing with the flaming sword, and  then hang back and throw the easier spells that didn't require my concentration. That was right up until we went down into the Sunken City, and started dealing with all the mechanical beings they'd left behind. 

Alvedes was the guy who'd hired us, and he was pretty cool but he wasn't a warrior in any sense. He wanted Ahriman's Tome, the grimoire of the long-dead witch-king.  He led us in, directed us to the Planetarium and took the mapping crystal from it. Then we discovered the Sunken Palace, where we found several useful things, but also a lot of mechanical defenders... and for the most part, we were doing well, until we got close to the King's Library. 

A thousand tons of fallen stone had closed it away, and a Steel Predator roused itself to chase us out. I've never come so close to dying in my life. 

We made it back to Riftguard. I'm going to join the college here, and stay the hell away from any ruins in the Rifts. 

Iran

And now we're bombing Iran. 

I'm just sitting with that.

We're not At War, because the President can't do that by himself, and Congress hasn't even been informed, let along declared war. Instead, we're just... at war. But at least we have good reasons for going to war, even if nobody's actually managed to say what they are or what the plan actually is. 

And of course the first reports I'm hearing is that we've already managed to bomb a primary school full of little girls, with eighty-five dead.

I hate this. I hate it so much. It's going be Iraq all over again, on steroids.

The things I would be doing right now if I had Vast Supernatural Powers... 

Update: the air strike killed more than one hundred children.