holy shit, Glitch McConnell is kinda sorta somewhat almost alive!

okay, the lights are clearly on. but is anyone home?

so there we all were, just trying to make it though another fucked-up Monday, when out of the clear blue, we got hit with the News of the Century:

after three months of being hidden away from the public, Mitch McConnell was on his way to the Senate.

holy shit-kadoodle, Batman! he’s alive!

but then we got the video of The Esteemed Senator Turtlehump being wheeled out of his terrarium, and it was a big bowl of what in the actual fuck?

what bill of goods are we being sold here?

okay, there’s Mitch, clearly most sincerely not dead — but does he really look alive? we see him being wheelchaired from his doorway to his waiting car, but do we really see any sense of cognition — any sign at all that Mitch has any idea where he is, or what is happening to him?

even presidential side-piece Laura Loopy was all what on God’s green shitpile are they trying to pull?

Like I said, Mitch is brain dead. You can’t look at his face and say he’s not a vegetable. He’s not even responding to cognition tests. It’s like wheeling a corpse around. Worse than what the Democrats did with Joe Biden to be honest. He looks incapacitated. Brain dead.

the thing is, Laura’s not wrong. (I mean, not the part about Joe Biden, duh.) Mitch is clearly unwell.

later, when the MitchBot5000 showed up in the Senate, reporters were banned from recording video.

Some more photos of McConnell as he returned to the Senate for the first time in three months following a fall at his D.C. home.

Reporters were barred from recording video

perfectly normal stuff, am I right?

please do not record the senator while he is making grunting noises and shitting himself.

I mean, how do we know that’s not what Mitch is doing? they won’t allow us to find out.

could Mitch McConnell’s handlers kindly stop pissing on our heads and telling us it’s raining? it’s been over three months since McConnell was found unconscious on the floor of his house, and taken away in an ambulance. in all that time, there hadn’t been one single shred of evidence that Mitch was cognizant, or even alive. now that he’s finally here in front of us, all we want is an answer to a single question: is he competent to do his job? but instead of getting any answer from Team Mitch, we’re just cordially invited to go fuck ourselves.

what the hell? if McConnell is actually aware of his surroundings, why can’t we get any proof of it?

this is not how a functioning government works. this is how a clown show works.

wheeling a Zombie Mitch from location to location is just elder abuse at this point. why is he being dog-and-ponied around? is it because he grunted ‘iwaaaagwrrrrg’ and one of his handlers went, ‘Mitch says he wants to go to work’?

fuck off, Mitch. stay home. you’ve had a long, distinguished career of being the most evil person in the Senate, making life worse for We the People. bravo. job well done.

now step down, and try to enjoy what remains of your life.

* * *

there really need to be term limits, or age limits, in the Senate. look at Chuck Grassley. he’s 92. this session, he’s going to be expected to vote on things like data centers and AI. does he have the capacity to understand those issues? and it’s a bipartisan problem. three years ago, Democrat Dianne Feinstein died while in office at age 90. like McConnell, she had absent from the Senate for months, and when she finally returned, it was obvious that her brain had gone fuckity-bye.

When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.

“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.

four months after that conversation, she dropped dead. here’s what I wrote at the time.

look: I get why ancient Senators refuse to step down. it’s a cush job. the perks are awesome: power. free healthcare. a staff. travel. your face on TV. you don’t really have to work very hard, and you get shitloads of time off. and if you live in a safe, deeply-red or deeply-blue state, you don’t even have to campaign all that strenuously.

hell, I wouldn’t quit that job. would you?

of course you wouldn’t. you had to pry Dianne Feinstein’s job out of her cold, dead hands. is Mitch McConnell next?

come on, this shit ain’t supportable. term limits, now.

---

here’s some other cheery news we got yesterday. it turns out that some Putin-linked Russian oligarch bankrolled First Failson Cokey McSniffles’ lavish, private-island wedding.

New: Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses at Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding, including renting out a private island and paying for the fireworks show.

perfectly normal stuff, am I right? I mean, who among us hasn’t had some corrupt crony of Putin’s drop a couple-hundred thou in our lap, so we can get hitched in style?

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles.

no fucking duh. of course Mister Oligarch is going to expect something in return. that’s how this ‘enjoy your free wedding’ shit works. at this point, I think I’d be shocked if Donny and his family managed to do something that wasn’t corrupt.

naturally, House Republicans swore to get to the bottom of this scandal, vowing to immediately open hearings.

no, wait — what am I saying? Republicans didn’t promise to do any of that shit. instead, they had the most predictable response in the universe: look over there, it’s Hunter Biden!

Florida Rep Anna Paulina Luna: “there’s no evidence. we opened an investigation into Hunter Biden because of the evidence in the laptop that specifically pertained to influence peddling, and unless there’s a laptop that comes out with specific criminal evidence, I don’t think that opening up an investigation into Don Jr.’s wedding party is something that's a good use of taxpayer dollars.”

holy shit, An Appalling Lunatic is more brain-dead than Mitch McConnell. not this again. there was never any Hunter Biden laptop. what there was, was a tampered-with hard drive that someone claimed had come from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

in Don Jr.’s case, we don’t need anyone to gin up fake evidence. we’ve got evidence up the yin-yang. over to you, ProPublica.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event.

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said.

can someone please copy the ProPublica article onto a laptop, and claim it came from Hunter Biden? maybe we can trick these Republican shitweasels into investigating it.

---

yesterday, the dumbest fucking moron in the known multiverse spent an entire day power-loading an infinite series of diapers, because AI.

Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.

what Dear Leader was reacting to were the multiple stories that have been in the news lately about how the three largest AI honchos have all called for putting the brakes on the current race to build the smartest six-fingered plagiarism robots possible, lest these super-smart AIs start running wild and doing shit we can no longer control.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay asking that the pace of capability advance be slowed and committing his own company to embed outside evaluators with employee-level access. Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would do likewise. Elon Musk … wrote three words: “Dario is right.” Three rival laboratories in the most valuable commercial race on earth asked to be restrained, against their own immediate interest.

and that came right on the heels of this cheery news.

For three years, Jacob Coxon helped train increasingly powerful AI systems at OpenAI and Anthropic. On Sept. 8, he walked away.

“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon posted on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” His dire warning amassed more than 90 million views in less than 24 hours.

tell me, is is bad when the guy who helped invent the tech gets so terrified of what he’s done that he quits his job and starts blowing the whistle — and then, his own boss and the boss’s cronies go ‘he’s right, this shit’s hella bad’?

that sounds pretty fucking terrifying to me. isn’t that the plot of umpteen science fiction books any movies — some rogue AI decides that humanity needs to be killed to death — or turned into batteries?

literally everyone is concerned right now that the rush to build ever-smart AIs is a bad idea that’s in need of regulation: We the People, our elected officials — and even the homies who built the damned things. shouldn’t that tell you that something in fact needs to be done?

oh no, wait. there’s one dumb asshole who’s totally down with letting AI do its evil, unregulated thing — and he’s pulled out his favorite word: hoax.

I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all! This is even wilder than the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

this fucking idiot — everything he doesn’t like is a hoax. yeah, as if the tech bros now clanging the alarms are hoaxing themselves. cool story.

why is Donny so dead-set against regulating the development of plagiarism robots ? because, as Robert Reich reports in his post from this morning, he and his failsons stand to make a mint off of AI tech.

So what explains Trump’s absolute refusal to regulate AI? Could it possibly be that he and his family have personal financial stakes in it?

Indeed, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump have invested substantially in American Data Centers, a firm created to support AI cloud computing and AI infrastructure.

remember what I said earlier about how, ‘at this point, I think I’d be shocked if Donny and his family managed to do something that wasn’t corrupt’?

but Donny says not to worry, because he knows more about six-fingered plagiarism robots than all the six-fingered plagiarism robots — and he knows exactly what’s needed to keep things from getting out of hand.

The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT

so that’s all we need, to keep from ending up as batteries to power the matrix? a smart president?

oh shit, we’re fucked.

---

we might as well have us some Daily Claudia, as we wait for our new AI overlords to enslave us.

here are two photos of Katie and her mom from the mid-1990s. this first one’s on a boat off the shore of Newport, Rhode Island.

and I believe this second one is from Plymouth, Mass.

have a great Tuesday, everyone. remember: I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

---

here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

---

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.