Well, the bad news is that the DOGEbags are on the verge of learning — well, basically, everything about U.S. individuals and corporations — with the goal of making Elon Musk and his billionaire buccaneers even richer than they already are.
The good news is that asteroid 2024 YR4 may blow us all to smithereens, rich and poor alike, when it arrives around Christmas 2032.
Might I suggest that Skippy the Dipshit pull his snout out of our butts for a moment to commandeer Thor’s hammer from Marvel Studios, zip up to 2024 YR4 in an armored Cybertruck Starship, and swat the pesky rock into the heart of the Klingon Empire?
Of course, Cap’n Skippy might not pack quite a wallop once he’s off-planet, where money is just so many pictures of dead presidents, most of whom were not drooling, raving embarrassments. But at least it would keep his sticky little fingers out of our pockets for a while.
My friends at Soma Fabrications are knocking 20 percent off their already reasonably priced frames and forks, which makes them a deal and a half for anyone in the market for a new rig.
Click the link to get the deets. And you’ll wanna move fast, because this sale ends tomorrow.
Me, I’ve finally gotten my paws on a Soma Pescadero, the frameset I originally wanted to review for Adventure Cyclist back in 2021.
The Pescadero was out of stock back then, and what I wound up with instead was a New Albion Privateer, which proved to be an excellent bike, so much so that I bought it after writing the review. And it remains the bike I ride most often.
But I’m really looking forward to throwing a leg over the top tube of this Pescadero.
I’m a few parts short of a party at the moment — the Racer centerpulls I ordered from Paul Components are taking the scenic route to El Rancho Pendejo, and I’m trying to decide whether to perform a complicated three-way transplant to put wheels on the Pescadero or just buy a brand-new wheelset from the good folks at Velocity USA.
I used an old pair of wheels on the Privateer — Mavic Open Pro rims and Shimano 600 hubs — and I could go that route again, robbing a similar wheelset from a Steelman Eurocross or the Soma Double Cross. But I like those bikes as they are.
And that three-way swap I mentioned would involve moving the Double Cross’s wheels to the Pescadero; shifting a Soma Saga’s wheels to the DC; and giving an unused Velocity Cliffhanger/LX wheelset to the Saga. Some redishing seems likely; brake adjustments are a certainty. What we shade-tree mechanics like to call “too much like work.”
So … yeah. We’ll see. No rush on wheels if a feller ain’t got no brakes. But all y’all will want to get busy if you want a good price on a new whip. Tell ’em The Dog sent you.
The FreeDummies have finally turned their beady little eyes to the Land of Enchantment.
According to Alaina Mencinger at The New Mexican, Los Alamos National Laboratory has been “suspending programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change and scrubbing old issues of the lab’s magazine that discuss these now-disfavored topics.”
LANL employees are federal contractors, not federal employees. Nevertheless, a review has determined that at least two of Dear Leader’s edicts apply to the lab’s DEI and affirmative-action programs, “and the lab is ending such programs as a result,” Mencinger writes.
The New Mexican apparently got its hands on some internal communications — a memo signed by lab director Thom Mason went out Thursday — and bits of this, that, and the other have already begun slip-sliding away down the old memory hole, among them issues of LANL’s National Security Science magazine, focused on anything and everything from climate to diversity, nuclear deterrence to manufacturing.
And it’s not just magazines getting fed into the shredder. According to Mason, LANL has “received guidance” to suspend climate action, sustainability and carbon-neutral energy programs. It goes without saying that LANL is also removing “relevant terminology” from external communications.
But, good news, comrades! “The removal of some content isn’t permanent,” according to the Ministry for Sit the Fuck Down and Shut the Fuck Up.
“To comply with recent direction from the Presidential administration, parts of our website are temporarily unavailable while they’re under construction. We appreciate your patience as we work to update and repost them. … You may notice changes to our website while we reconstruct pages and evaluate language.”
Huh. “Construction” and “update” are not the words I would have chosen for this odious project. As for “evaluating language,” I’d be inclined to leave that sort of thing to the smarties, who are very much not in evidence as the Stalinization of the federal government continues.
Mad Blog Media 