They're having me on

One week ago

I had a strange dream that Hillary Clinton was my mother, but then she died. This feels like that dream. 

That one time Donald Trump ran for President and everyone fucking loved it.

Written in 2023.

Today, the approved grade school curriculum instructs children that all of Donald Trump’s speech transcripts are actually written by a great satirist who went by the pen name of Donald Trump. Of course we know that the purported satirist’s real name was in fact Donald J. Trump. In any case, the Internet Intelligence and Surveillance Bureau has ensured that the Internet is federally curated to the highest standard such that our children never learn that, as they believe, the 2016 Donald Trump campaign for the Presidency was not actually a great work of elaborate fiction. Of course, many of our youth may not even know of Donald Trump, and he has and largely and ultimately fallen out of the public and political realm of interest.  

Almost one decade later, it is important to recall Donald Trump’s brief and fiery foray into political demagoguery in order to fully consider the volatility of the crucible that catalyzed, in some ways, our Nation’s transformation to what it is today. Numerous socio-psychological studies have been published characterizing the unique phenomenon associated with the Donald Trump campaign, but the lack of primary records after the IISB in association with the National Archive Bureau destroyed all public documentation in any non-print format of Donald Trump has allowed us to forget, in a sense, the potency of the lessons learned from Trump. This is because his source of potency was the kind that can only be captured by primary records like audio and visual recordings. 

If read as satire written by an esteemed author, Donald Trump’s rally speeches are compelling. In fact it is expected that some of our youth, legally exempted from exposure to Donald Trump as fact, may choose to analyze his words as satire in their own graduate studies, an event that is highly anticipated in the older and Trump-exposed professoria for contextualization of their metasocial studies. 

The current academic consensus on the Donald Trump phenomenon focuses on the commonalities of his branding and persona with themes of the liminal, visceral, and American Successful. These themes are immediately relevant from any of the limited Trump recordings available through the NSF Archive Access Program. As an example, we consider the much studied recording of Donald Trump’s rally  in Las Vegas, Nevada on 2/22/2016:

Tenuous and growing rock music plays over an auditorium filled with 15,000 before an empty stage as a Trump voice loop pronounces headline catch phrases, a montage in a theatre production. The crowd cheers madly, pre-printed signs flapping madly like wings of a flock. And so Donald Trump holds court for another night. He arrives in silhouette, then his strange hair shines and he is unmistakable. He walks out to a victory theme, blowing kisses to the crowd and pointing encouragingly to the few lucky he chooses. Reaching the microphone, pausing for the crowd, he is ready. He speaks, and he speaks like he is speaking to a broad. Seductive, like he’s nurturing you in bed. Close your eyes, and listen to his nasal, self-congratulatory confidence. His voice, bored and sated and so generous. He is embroiled in his own success and his own very real fantasy where he reigns King. It is very real. It is huge. The multitudes cheering for him only serve to reinforce his juggernaut excretive power from the political digestive system. 

“We’re going to make it better than ever before. You beautiful people.” 

Donald Trump holds court another night. 

“I’m self-funded you know. That’s very important.” 

If you vote for Donald Trump, you are part of his deal. You wrote the deal, because Donald let you in on it. He’s so damn honest, right? You were part of the amazing intuitive business decision making Trump is so adept at. And because we all know Donald so well, we know that when he’s President and is dealing with national security problems, he’s going to continue to bleat out his profane stream of consciousness that we love and adore from his daily pedestal that we built. And we will know that he is a man of the people, for our people only. 

Access Level IISB RN1989345  Scheduled for digital ablation in 18:32:29 hrs ; IISB22

Let’s all never forget

that relatively, one is infinitely more than 0.

I have a painting in my room at home

It’s a pop arty rendition of The Dead Toreador (bullfighter). A man flat on his back in chiaroscuro, with his cape and his sword beside him. It’s on the wall over my bed and almost as large as me, held up by a single nail that has a downward tilt, which I know because I hung it myself. His head is at my feet, his feet at my head, and I’ve always thought that when it one day finally falls in my sleep it will be a wonderful, if painful, symmetry. It’s been on my wall for years, however, and I had truly forgotten the name of the original artist. Now I’ve long since moved out but I sometimes think of the painting and try to remember the name. Magritte? Matisse? Doesn’t matter. Passing thought.

Today I googled ‘suicide’ because I was surprised to learn that it has made the CDC’s shortlist of leading causes of death, following all those diseases we know and detest and in some ways brought upon ourselves as a species. One of the first image results was a vaguely impressionist and possibly 19th century painting of a man fallen back. He is on his bed, a gun in his hand, a smear on his chest. The bed sheets are mottled around him, and he is alone. It is titled ‘The Suicide’. There is a small painting above him on the wall. It’s not at all in the same style but I had an immediate and visceral realization that the essence of the two paintings was the same, and that somehow the context of my knowledge of the two was perfectly logical. I googled both and they are both of course by Edouard Manet. This is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me.  Especially because I was the one who painted the painting on my wall. 

Here’s a thought

Anyone done whole exome sequencing on mass shooters for comparative analysis?

OH REALLY. 

in all fairness, the article is talking about epigenetic markers, but what a headline. 

What is going on in the uk parliament these days?

I have a friend,

really a friend of my mother’s, with whom I spent a Christmas holiday a few years back, and it’s her husband’s birthday and she wanted me to send a short happy birthday video message so she can compile them and she asked for me to send it over Skype so I did but then she asked for it on Whatsapp instead, but Whatsapp hasn’t been working on my phone because I have a shitty Windows phone that won’t update itself apparently and I can’t manually update it because it’s so obsolete after less than a year that it just implodes or something, so I tried to figure out how to download a Skype video message so I could just upload it to google drive (google, the only aspect of sanity and reliability in this story), but it turns out it’s much more complicated than I thought, you have to find the Skype roaming logs deep inside your computer, luckily I have installed and working the cygwin64 windows terminal and cd on over to c/cygdrive/users/username/AppData/Roaming/Skype/username to find the golden cup, main.db. Wait, I have to download an SQL database reader. So I do, and extract the zip file. However, sqlite download just gave me a couple of .dll files and I admit I am not sure where to save them, what the binaries are, if I need to compile.  I’m getting “cannot execute binary file” error messages and when I pulled up stackoverflow for similar concerns, comments were along the line of “What did you do to your machine??” and “You have fucked up on a fundamental level of computing”. So. At that point I realized it’s been 30 minutes and I’ve just gotten way over my head for a dumb birthday video. Solution: Re-record and upload to google drive. Duh. 

Ok thanks Netflix

There was a great moment

during a Skype meeting with some collaborators when we were faced with the problem of lysing E.coli for application of the lysate (containing a metagenomic screening library of proteins) to MRSA biofilms, without leaving massive amounts of lysozyme (no way are we going to his tag lysozyme and optimize that procedure in one month, which is when the grant is due), detergent, or subjecting the proteins to multiple freeze thraw cycles, or having to rely on a membrane filter that will all too likely filter things we want too, when my PI and our collaborator both seemed to fall upon the same idea. “Dude!” said my PI. “We’ll just kill them with Beta lactams! Our staph is resistant, and we’ll just permeate the shit out of them!”

B-lactam resistance is like, the definition of MRSA. Our E.coli is a vanilla lab strain, resistant only to what we intend. This is an elegant leverage of those properties for the purpose of our experiment, which I appreciated.