Gee, do you think he's hiding something?

I know people throw the word 'hero' around a lot these days, but I can think of no one more worthy of the epithet than the President. How come? Because he's taking a stand. A stand against the House Ways and Means Committee Chair, Richard Neal, who has formally requested his tax returns.

"The line must be drawn he-yah!"

-Basically Trump

Fun fact: it's also synonymous
with particularly  loud flatulence.

(source: early modern English)

Why is he fighting a request for something every other President since Nixon has voluntarily released to the public? Because he's a man of principle. Because he's a man of conviction. Because he's committed numerous crimes and doesn't want us to know about them. But mainly the other two things. Crimes? Who said anything about crimes? Trump is a name synonymous with integrity. Just ask the many people who have gone to jail for being connected with him.

You see he's not doing this because even a cursory look into his financial dealings over the last few years would open him to prosecution, he's doing this for future presidents who may someday want to hide their financial malfeasance.

What about all the kids who may someday grow up to inherit millions of
dollars, screw contractors out of wages, pay off porn stars to keep quiet and
then run for President on a platform of hate and division? What about them, huh?

What I'm saying is that innocent, above-
boards people don't need phalanxes of lawyers.

So Trump's lawyers are arguing that-holy shit, incidentally, if you were someone who needed lawyers as often and in the numbers that Donald Trump does, you'd reevaluate things, right? Like, that's not normal. Anyway, his lawyers are insisting that this is presidential harassment-which I'm pretty sure was never a thing before he came along, and that House Ways and Means has no right to the tax returns. Meanwhile Neal says yes he does. Who's right? Legally, I mean? I don't know. Who's guilty as sin and we all know it and just can't seem to make anything stick? Yeah...

I know, I know, slippery slope, but why the freak out and lawyers? Like, if he's genuinely concerned about the legality of Neal's request, and not the contents of the returns being made public, why not release the tax returns like every other President has done and in fact, he used to say he would do, and then argue about how legal the request was...unless, wait, you don't suppose he's hiding something, do you?

"Um...yes. Lots of things. Mainly crimes."

-Everyone

Today in parliamentary easy mode:

"It's only undermining the will of
the people when Democrats do it."

I take issue with nuclear option. Like, the practice of, but also the term. As you may have read today, actual worst person on earth and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the also kind of terrible, but must mostly just cowed by their base, Senate Republicans invoked the nuclear option today in order to get some low-level Trump appointees confirmed with a simple majority instead of the sixty votes it would have required yesterday. You know, because democracy is hard.

And we can't even get on too much of a high horse about this since Democrats have used it in the past, but what's particularity terrifying now is that the President doing the appointing is a vindictive goon who loves to appoint people to jobs that they're either aggressively unqualified for, openly contemptuous towards, or both.

Yeah, I actually can't tell which one it is
with her. She might just hate children.

"Because AOC!"

-Republicans

Anyway, the worst part...well, second worst part, I suppose the worst part would be that the former host of The Apprentice now gets to hand out political appointments that the GOP will just rubber stamp. The second worst part is listening to Mitch McConnell pretend that the GOP is somehow the aggrieved party because Trump keeps nominating shitty people that Democrats can't possible sign off on. And then he goes in front of the cameras and acts like he has no other choice but to launch the legislative ICBMs.

Pictured: the real victim here.

I mean, listen to this nonsense:

"This systematic obstruction is unfair to our duly elected president and, more importantly, it is disrespectful to the American people who deserve the government they elected."

-Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell, suddenly giving
a shit about the democratic process

Hang on, the government they elec-oh, sorry, I thought he was done.

Less controversial nominees
such as this literal garbage fire.

"We cannot set this new precedent that the Senate minorities will systematically keep an administration understaffed down to the least controversial nominees anytime the wish somebody else had won the election."

-the guy who stole a Supreme Court

appointment from Barack Obama
warning us about the slippery slope

Many important scholars have pointed out
that the Electoral College can go fuck itself.

Ok, so it's not so much a new precedent as it is a system designed specifically to keep a party with a slim majority from running roughshod over the legislative process and putting idiots picked by a goon into positions of power. Also, since he brought it up, someone else did win the popular vote. And the American people do deserve the government they elected and not the one a two-hundred year old electoral system designed to keep underpopulated rural states from feeling under-appreciated, handed us.

The fact that Democrats control enough seats to force the GOP to put up acceptable choices for appointments isn't obstructionism, it's how the Senate works. The nuclear option isn't a tactic of last resort, it's like cheating at poker. Like changing the rules mid-hand so that your three jacks now beat a straight, and then explaining to everyone else at the table that you had to change the rules because they had better cards and democracy depends on it.

Hey, get me, I made a poker reference! 

It's all fun and games until we build Skynet...

I'm sorry, we're pro-killer robot? Pro? Because according to this, the United States is joining noted election rigger Russia as well as countries I'm not mad at including Australia, Israel, South Korea, and the United Kingdom in opposing a ban on autonomous military robots capable of using lethal force. So...killer robots.

So this, but presumably with better aim and fewer quips.

At least someone is taking
Terminator seriously...

The annual and coyly named Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons held in Geneva, Switzerland last week brought together representatives from dozens of nations around the world to discuss the soon to be a huge problem of killer robots, and-huh? Yeah, I said soon. I'm not kidding. Yes, I know it sounds like they're taking Terminator way too seriously, but the military is using human-operated and armed drones right now, so autonomous drones aren't really in tin-foil hat country. And the CCV is trying to come up with policies now, while killer robots are still a hypothetical. So what I want to know is why all the pro-killer robot sentiment?

Russia's opposition to the ban I get. They (and by extension, us) are basically run by the mob. And our opposition makes sense on its own because we love the shit out of guns and someone's probably making the case that James Madison was talking about goddamn murder bots when he wrote the second amendment.

"Well regulated militia...keep and bear arms...this is good James, but do you think
we should be a bit more specific? I mean what if someone improves on the old
muzzle loader, or invents some kind of autonomous killer robots some day?"

-Benjamin Franklin, giving notes

"Robot peace in our time!"

-Neville Chamberlain,

speaking too soon

But South Korea? They're kind of famous for robots and you'd think the last thing they'd want is for them to turn on them. And the UK? A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense said:

"The United Kingdom does not posses fully autonomous weapons systems and has no intention of developing them. We believe a preemptive ban is premature as there is still no international agreement on the characteristics of lethal autonomous weapons systems."

-Some Ministry of Defense spokesperson

"Utter nonsense? Rubbish?
Twaddle? Perhaps a load of tosh?

-Some British guy

So couple of things...according to The Independent, last September the Ministry of Defense released a report indicating that they believe that future wars will be fought with robots, so it's a little weird that they wouldn't be looking into it, except they are. Last November a study came out showing that the UK is 100% funding and developing autonomous weapons systems. Also, there's another story, this time from the BBC, about the Ministry of Defense carrying out military exercises using autonomous vehicles last December. What's British for horseshit?

And what does he mean there's no international agreement on the characteristics of lethal autonomous weapons systems? Seems pretty self-explanatory.

"They're not totally autonomous. You
do have to tell them who to go kill."

-Dick Jones, Senior President

of Omni Consumer Products

"Equivocate!"

So I'm neither Woodward nor Bernstein. I just searched for Ministry of Defense and Robots because I wanted the name of the spokesperson mentioned in The Guardian's article so I could try and come up with a funny attribution. Instead I got a bunch of stories about how the people who gave us Daleks love their killer robots. Add to this-huh? What? Yes, I know Daleks contain organic components and are therefore technically cyborgs. I was taking some license.

Huh, exploiting the rules to get the
outcome they want no matter how
shitty seems to be Russia's thing, huh?

Anyway, back to how none of us are going to survive the rise of the machines. The talks in Geneva were stymied by the pro-killer robot countries who, led by Russia, and despite being massively outnumbered by the anti-Skynet nations, were able to use the convention's stupid rules to make sure debate was limited and nothing got settled. But I guess what I don't get is how dumb are we? Like, as a species? I mean, do we need a robot war before we take action here?

And yes, know how I sound, but we waited until after mustard gas, nuclear weapons, and mines to do anything about those, so maybe before we destroy ourselves in some kind of robopocalypse is the time to talk about the robopocalypse?

That's like waiting until after you have zombies to hold a vote
on banning rage-virus research. Like, the genie's out of the bottle.

Wait, we're buying Shang Tsung now?

"Don't take my word for it, read the four page
summary written by some guy I appointed
based on his contempt for the investigation."

Can we just talk about video games for a moment? I ask because the obvious thing to talk about now would be politics, like how the President is taking a victory lap to celebrate how exonerated he was by the Attorney General's summary of the Mueller report which explicitly does not exonerate anyone. Like, it even says in those exact words that it doesn't exonerate the President, but here we are. Oh, and by victory lap, I mean building his racist wall, lying to idiots at campaign rallies and bragging about how he didn't participate in the Russian interference that got him elected.

And holy shit, Betsy DeVos de-funding the Special Olympics because the GOP is openly monsters now? I just...just...so let's talk about video games, which I'm also upset about, but in a cranky 'why in my day' way and not in a 'we're spiraling into fascism and there's nothing we can do about it' way.

"I mean, what have disabled children ever done for us? Amiright?"

-Betsy DeVos, Secretary of-huh? No, she didn't 

actually say that, but that's 100% the sentiment

And we all opened our copies like
a bunch of short sighted schmucks.

So like I was saying, back to comforting, apolitical video gaming. Back in my day (here we go) video games were a one-time purchase. You just bought a game, took it home, foolishly discarded the packaging and manual because ebay wasn't a thing yet, and played the game. But now it's more of a games as service model. What that means is that larger publishers are interested in making games that they add paid content to over months and even years so like some kind of addict you keep coming back for more.

"Just fucking buy the Assassin's Creed season
pass and we can all get out of this alive!"

-Ubisoft

Which sucks. Sucks how? Well, I mean, sure it's not de-funding the Special Olympics bad. I do have some perspective, and it's not like game publishers are holding a gun to all our heads, demanding that we buy downloadable content. Well, not usually. But as far as the hobby of video gaming goes, I think paid DLC sucks. Take for example Mortal Kombat 11. Yes, eleven. Can you believe they made eleven of these? It would have absolutely blown ten-year old me's mind to think there might someday be a Mortal Kombat 11. Anyway, it comes out late next month, but this last week the publisher, Warner Bros. announced that Shang Tsung would be the first DLC.

Shang Tsung, if you're unfamiliar and I sincerely hope you are, is a long-running character in the Mortal Kombat games. He's a sort of magic shape-shifting sorcerer/martial arts master who wants to conquer the Earthrealm by winning the Mortal Kombat tournament which whatever. Doesn't matter. Just know that for a game about palate swap ninjas ripping out spines, it's has some pretty deep lore. There're movies, cartoons, even novels. It's a thing.

"Finish him!" Shouted a disembodied voice.

Sub-Zero leapt into the air and then landed at precise foot-sweep distance from his defeated, yet somehow still standing opponent, Johnny Cage. The ninja began to jerk spastically, but to no avail. Cage collapsed before him. The fight was over. Sub Zero had one, but without pulling off a fatality.

"Goddamnit!" He roared "Forward forward down, high kick! They never give you enough time..."

-an excerpt from Jeff Rovin's classic novel, Motal Kombat

"Yeah, I got Shang Tsung, you a cop?
You've got to tell me, it's the law."

It's also important to know that Shang Tsung is a character that's usually just included in the games' roster but this time you've got to buy him separately. Ok, big deal, I mean, it's just a game. But, again, we could be talking about politics, so hear me out. It would be one thing if, after six months, the publisher came out with DLC that added Shang Tsung, but this game isn't out yet which means they've deliberately held back game content in order to wring it out of completionists. Is it me, or is this the games industry adopting the business model of smack dealers?

Above: Shang Tsung whose paid DLC
is now history's greatest injustice.

(source: a lack of perspective)

And look, Mortal Kombat 11 is by far neither the first nor the worst example of this, and I honestly will probably never play it anyway, but for whatever reason-probably the curmudgeonliness that comes with getting older-I find myself longing for the sepia-toned past when games were sold as complete experiences and not gateway drugs. But again, perspective. These are video games and none of this shit really matters, it's just sometimes easier to complain about nonsense than it is to dwell on garbage people doing garbage things. I mean de-funding the Special Olympics? What the actual, factual fuck is that about?

Huh, oh, yes, I did see that the Trump administration is now saying that they won't be defunding the Special Olympics, and I think that's super. But seriously what do they want, a cookie? For not taking the Special Olympics away?

Because people who threaten children don't get cookies
for reluctantly backing down from threatening children.

I stand behind my sour grapes.

Well, that's disappointing. The Muller Report I mean. I think a lot of us were hoping it would end with the former host of The Apprentice being perp-walked out of the Oval Office, but instead it's going to be weeks and months of shitty tweets from the President gloating about how guilty he's not. Which is bullshit because not getting caught isn't the same thing as not being guilty.

Sour grapes? Absolutely, but they're still, you know, grapes. 

"They couldn't prove
anything, so vote Trump!"

Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the Mueller report in which he said that the Special Counsel found no evidence that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia. They benefited from Russian efforts to screw with our elections, sure, but they apparently didn't colluded with them. So they were tools, unwitting tools, but tools and I'm not sure we needed a two year investigation to come up with that. But hey, here we are. The worst part is going to be Trump's bragging about how he won fair and square when really he won because Russia wanted us to have the worst possible President.

"What? Conflict of interest? Me?
I...uh...hey, look over there!"

-William Barr, easier today

As for obstruction of justice, same deal, it's not that he didn't obstruct justice, it's that the Special Council decided not to decide. Instead, according to Barr's summary, he laid out the arguments for and against prosecuting the President and left it to the Attorney General to decide whether or not to pursue. Barr, the AG Donald Trump appointed who in a surprise twist, looking at all the evidence and taking, I don't know, twenty minutes to think it over, decided not to prosecute. But at least Barr quotes Mueller's report by pointing out that:

"...while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it does not exonerate him."

-Robert Mueller being super-clear that

he's not exonerating the President

Hey, do you suppose in retrospect, leaving it up the
the President's appointees to decide whether or not to
prosecute was, I don't know, maybe not the best move?

"In my defense, a decent chunk of the
electorate are dumb idiots."

-Huckabee Sanders

The White House of course wasted little time lying to our collective faces:

"The Special Counsel did not find any collusion and did not find any obstruction...The findings of the Department of Justice are a total and complete exoneration of the President of the United States."

-White House Press Secretary

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, hoping

we're all incredibly stupid

Pictured: Huckabee Sanders holding
a press conference earlier today.

I mean-did you, did you see what she did there? Barr's summary specifically says that Mueller didn't make a call on the obstruction of justice charges and Huckabee Sanders doesn't either, instead saying that the DOJ's findings exonerate Trump. So anyone not listening very carefully to her words is going to start parroting that the Mueller Report exonerates the President. Which it doesn't, it says it doesn't, but that's not going to be the narrative. This is how these people work, which is why we call them garbage people.

So now what? Move to Canada? Drink? Not bad ideas, but take heart, there's still the three or four hundred other investigations being run by people Donald Trump didn't personally appoint and failing that there's an election coming up next year. If we can stick it out until then, we should be ok...unless of course it's another shit show of gerrymandered districts, fake Facebook posts, and last minute email hacks, but that wouldn't happen twice in a row, would it? Wait...would it?

"You wouldn't think so, but not much surprises me now...
Anyway, I should be going, I've got a book tour to get back to."

-The woman most of us voted for

Newsworthy? More like boozeworthy...

Sorry, that was uncalled for. I'm...I'm better than that. But for real, do you know what's not newsworthy? This. Yeah, I know, clicking on links isn't your jam, so I'll explain. Dudes finding beer isn't newsworthy.

Breaking News: They have it in stores.

Above: Nebraska earlier this week.

(source: slight exaggeration)

I mention this because in the midst of the devastating floods in Nebraska-huh? Yeah, devastating floods. Nebraska. Yeah, I missed most of this too, but the dramatically named bomb cyclone that drenched the midwest last week left the State of Nebraska mostly underwater. No really, most of the state. According to this, 76% of the state's land area and 95% of Nebraskans are affected by the flood.and it's going to cost something like $1.3 billion to rebuild.

So it's kind of weird that we haven't heard much about it. I mean, I know it's one of the boxy middle states we just lazily drew in on a map a couple hundred years ago to fill in the gap between coasts, but still, you'd think a new inland sea would be worth at least a mention.

It was all over the news during the Cretaceous.

Never Forget...that time Juggernaut
knocked over the World Trade Center.

I think it's because we basically live in a comic book universe where we're so used to catastrophes that the odd one can slip past us. Like, if you say lived in the world of the X-Men or the Avengers or something-yes, I know if's called Earth-616. Pfftt...nerd. Fine, say you live in Earth-616 and every other day Galactus shows up, or Magneto destroys some famous landmark and every couple of years the fate of the planet/universe/multiverse is put on the line, after awhile people would get used to it, right? Like that, except for us disasters are drowned out by the President's angry Tweets and feigned surprise at how rich people buy their kids' way into college.

But dudes finding beer? Right, getting off track. Anyway, a couple of guys doing cleanup found a fridge washed up in a field and helped themselves to some Busch Lights.

This just in: two Nebraska men found garbage in a field,
opened it and drank what they found inside.

It takes a brave person to step forward
and admit to a fridge full of Busch Light.

Which, ok, finders keepers or whatever, but a couple of things don't sit well with me about this. First, is that when these guys found the fridge, they had no idea who it belonged too. I don't begrudge them the beer, it's just that for all they knew, that fridge had floated past the bloated corpses of its owner on its way to the muddy field in which they found it. While it turns out they did wonder about the fate of whoever's fridge it was, and someone did later come forward alive and well, they didn't know that at the time.

But I guess what really bothers me about this this story about a couple of dudes finding a mini fridge full of beer that washed up in a field, is that-at least as I write this-the story that comes up first when you search 'Nebraska Flooding.'

"But hey, look on the bright side, at least some guys found beer."

-The news

So that's what they're going with, huh?

"It's just our way of saying
'fuck you' to gamers in rural states."

-Google

In unsurprising news, that Google thing that was announced today turned out to be a streaming platform, just like everyone thought it would. And it's-huh? We talked about it last week. It's ok if you don't remember, half these posts are basically filler. Here, I'll sum up: it's a service where you stream video games to your device, instead of downloading them or buying discs. All the heavy lifting is done on the server's end so how fancy your device is doesn't matter as much as how solid your connection is.

It's the future I guess. Anyway, they're calling it Stadia. Stadia. Yeah, I don't know what it means either, but Google spent a lot of money making it up and then focus testing it, so here it is. I mean, it's not like there's some way to find out what a stadia is so why even-

Oh, right. Goddamnit...

Above: The bleeding edge
of technology...I guess.

Ok when I search it I get:

"A method of surveying in which distances are read by noting the interval on a graduated rod intercepted by two parallel crosshairs...mounted in the telescope of a surveying instrument, the rod being placed at one end of the distance to be measured and the surveying instrument at the other."

-Dictionary.com, 

clearing that up for us

So cool...say, do you suppose someone at Google is overestimating the public's familiarity with nineteenth century surveying technology?

WonderSwan meant someone at SNK
was picking random words out of
their Japanese to English dictionary.

I know this thing isn't a game console per se, but it is supposed to compete with them and you'd think they'd go with something a little more evocative. Playstation 4 is the fourth Playstation console. Switch switches between console and handheld. Xbox One is, confusingly the third Xbox, ok, bad example. But traditionally console manufacturers wanted something that spoke to their platforms' strengths. The name Sega Genesis suggested the start of a new thing. Super Nintendo meant better than Nintendo.

You're going to have to click, it's
like white on white. Because future.

Stadia kind of just means hey, why don't you Google what a Stadia is? Anyway, maybe it'll be a huge flop or maybe it'll be the next thing for video games and then Google will own that industry too. But whatever it is, I want to talk about the controller. Yeah, left turn. So the controller has the Konami code on it. For some reason. The code, sometimes called the Contra Code, or sometimes the Gradius Code, is up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. Or select start if you're playing Contra with a friend. Which, I mean, c'mon.

Get it? Because the eighties? 

Even if you were never into games (thanks for hanging in there!), you've probably seen it referenced somewhere. It has the power to grant thirty lives in Contra, add all the power-ups in Gradius and weirdly to blow up your ship in Gradius III. But perhaps its most frequently summoned ability is its way of adding a sheen of hipster credibility to anyone trying to sell shit to people in a certain generational range. That is the last five minutes, tail end of Gen X up to the Millennials with nostalgia for games they were probably too young to enjoy first hand. I don't think Think Geek, Hottopic or the boys section at Target would still be in business today if it didn't have the code to slap on its merchandise.

Its inclusion on Google's attempt to consume the video game industry and bring it too into its Shadowrun-esque vision of a desolate, ultra-capitalist, Megacorp-dominated future feels a little, I don't know, insulting? Or at least it would if I weren't of the Contra generation who lack the ability to care hard enough to be insulted.

"Cool. Whatever. Fine."

-Characters from the 1999 film Go,

unofficial spokespeople for that

generation I'm talking about