If there was only some place on the internet I could post my deepest of thoughts. But there isn't. So what's on tv tonight?

Romanian Globalist Government Collapses After Losing No-Confidence Vote in Parliament
May 5, 2026

□ [“Barack Obama:  Trump Has Caused 'Genuine Tension' in My Marriage to Michelle"]

But Trump's not actually in the Obama marriage or any part of their household.  That's one of the things about building a strong marriage, whoever's POTUS isn't really going to cause any problems with it.  Is there something Obama would like to be telling us about this?

If nothing else, a strong relationship would help people rely on each other when times are bad.  In a weak relationship, one party might be encouraged to run away from the other, trying to save themselves.  Is Obama sure there's nothing he could be informing us about?  Well, maybe he's not aware of it and that's what Michelle is hiding from him.  Because that's how their marriage has always worked.

Obama is trying to find a way to get involved in public events.  The problem is he was never good at it anyway, when he had the most authority, popularity and experience.  Ten years ago, he was almost gone and people were already preparing for Hillary, he was already an afterthought.  And he never built anything else, I'd have to check but I think being POTUS was the longest he's ever held a job in his life.

I don't think this has anything to do with Michelle, she's just an excuse to pretend he really cares about something.  So much that she doesn't want him involved.  Yeah, this really doesn't hold up to any serious thought and it's not like he has any way to appeal to people that he didn't have eighteen years ago.  It's gone downhill ever since.

Over 300,000 Signatures Collected, Alberta Call on Premier To Trigger Referendum To Leave Canada
May 5, 2026

□ [“UAE Says Iran Launched Drone and Missile Attacks for the Second Consecutive Day"]

Ok, but

□ [“Trump Pauses ‘Project Freedom’ to Finalize Agreement with Iran – Blockade to Remain in Force"]

These don't go together.  Trump says Pakistan and other unnamed countries are the ones asking for this.  This looks good and bad.  One the one hand, Iran's neighbors obviously have to get involved, it's their problem too.  But on the other hand, I'm not really sure they consider themselves nations, they're just checking some required boxes the west imposed on them.  They could be very helpful in solving the problem but they also are very tied to Iran and tribal connections so there's no way anybody's going to fix that, much less Trump in the next three years.

Something about the rhetoric has changed.  Democrats still aren't speaking up about Iran.  It's not just that we've passed the 60-day deadline for Trump and they're informed on what's really going on.  Just the fact that Iran is still firing at their neighbors shows an issue that can't be ignored.  Iran can do this and is willing to do this, what's the incentive of sucking up to them so that they'll stop doing it?  They fired rockets at Britain when this started two months ago, do you want to hold off and give them more time to increase their military strength and range?

Trump has destroyed Iran's military, took down the Ayatollah and, at least economically, has walled them off from the rest of the world.  It's a really good way to handle this but it means we're all sitting around and waiting, we're not even the ones under siege.  And I'm really not comfortable with Pakistan playing a major role in this.

Secret Service Officer Arrested For Exposing Himself in Miami Hotel Hallway
May 5, 2026

It's long been noted that the Fantastic Four was very similar to the Challengers of the Unknown, Jack Kirby's last big title for DC comics.  They're both teams of adventure of exploration.  It's understandable that Kirby would develop something like this when trying to help Marvel with its financial problems.

But my theory is that there was a change going on in how an intellectual property was defined, particularly in visual mediums such as comics.  Most notably with Captain Marvel, DC had shown that they were very willing to sue anyone they claimed to be doing a rip-off of their property, even when it clearly wasn't.  Yet the Fantastic Four had no such problems coming from one of DC's competitors.

There were some specific requirements to ripping off an intellectual property and getting away with it.  I don't know when or how these were defined or modified but the FF certainly met that requirement.  The Challs were all male and didn't have superpowers, right there was enough to qualify as new characters that even DC couldn't sue over.  'Change the name, the costume and a few details,' that's enough to pass legal threats.

As to why the Challengers were the subject of this rip-off, Kirby was certainly interested in stories about exploration, even tying it to the space age.  It was also the last hit book he had before moving over to Marvel.  But it was the late 1950s so other changes were going on which might be entirely a coincidence, but Kirby's work showed that he was connected to them.

To explain that, we need to move off to the side.  Shortly after starting Challengers in 1957, Kirby also made an attempt to break away from the comic book industry with a newspaper strip in 1958, Sky Masters, about astronauts.  The strip failed, mainly because of legal complications between the co-creators, specifically Jack Schiff.

Schiff had been an artist and editor for DC since the early days, his first work was on early issues of Batman and was involved in creating known characters like Starman and Tommy Tomorrow or aspects of those characters like the Bat-Signal.  He would become the editor of Superman and Batman as well as adaptations of other media such as radio shows.  He was interested in science fiction and with control over the Bat and Super titles, he would be very involved in these characters' roles in other media.  Tv, movies, cartoons, toys, international editions and more.  Whether he was the genius who came up with everything or just the messenger repeating what he was told, all the new developments in Intellectual Property by DC Comics went through him.

He was not behind the rebooting of golden age characters like the Flash or Green Lantern but they would lead to the reboot of the Justice Society, now renamed as the Justice League, with Superman and Batman as founding members.  Different IPs are put together in the same title, even new versions of the characters.  Schiff had also been editor from the start when Superboy got his own title, after DC had purchased it from creator Jerry Siegel.  So Schiff knew when and how a company acquired ownership of IPs, a judge had ruled that Superboy was a distinct character from Superman, which DC already owned.

So with a career already pushing twenty years at DC, Schiff sued Jack Kirby, claiming he was co-creator of Sky Masters.  Looking into all the legal troubles gets complicated very quickly, so the short version is that Schiff said he was entitled to ongoing royalties for the strip and a judge agreed.  So DC already knew how royalties worked although it would be a couple decades before they started paying those to their own employees who created profitable work.

This shows some of the ideas that were happening at the time in a visual medium, and that's not counting any influence they were getting from Hollywood or anywhere else.  The Fleischer Superman cartoons, the Batman movie serial, the George Reeves Superman tv show, these all had their part in how DC handled their IPs and may explain why they were so willing to sue other companies that did anything remotely resembling their property.

So after the lawsuit, Kirby could no longer get work at DC.  He had to look for some other employer to bring in money to feed his family.  There were other options, I'm not sure why Marvel is the one he went with.  Perhaps they were the only place that would hire him.  He did return to DC a few years after Schiff had retired.

Sky Masters was finally cancelled in early 1961, which would be a couple months before he started working on Fantastic Four.  And even that came about because Marvel's publisher had the great idea of doing a rip-off of Justice League.  I really don't think Kirby was the total center of everything that was happening here but from creator's rights to company IPs to space adventures, it all does seem to have been circling around him.

And that's not even getting into the amount of authority DC had over Marvel.  As distributor and with potential lawsuits, they had as much knowledge and control as possible without actually owning the company.  And by extension, profited off of Jack Kirby's work when the company wouldn't even hire him.

DOJ Dropped Charges For Cory Booker Staffer Who Brought Gun Into Capitol Without a License
May 5, 2026

□ [“Man Accused of Starting Palisades Fire Was Obsessed With Leftist Ideas"]

His private journals and internet searches are indistinguishable from what we see on leftists sites or media.  They're all into this, some are just more capable of going through with it than others.  He also wanted to kill billionaires, that's no different than wanting to kill Trump.  There's the same thing with a Federal Aviation Administration employee in New Hampshire who was just arrested for doing internet searches on his work computer about 'how to kill Trump.'

This is just running all the way across the social ladder.  A magistrate judge just apologized to the attempted Trump assassin for the way he's being treated in prison, with no evidence there's anything wrong.  It's clear she sides with the wanna-be assassin and it's not even clear if she's the judge in his case.  If she is, she'll obviously set him free, like all these other judges releasing violent criminals so they can do it again.

I'm trying to figure out specific parallels with pandering for death but someone recently made a point about liberal accusations of "racism."  This poster compared to experiments with monkeys, where they get a treat for pushing a button.  Then at some point, the treat is stopped, as most people are sick and tired of being called "racist" for disagreeing with liberals.  The monkey's reaction is to push the button a lot more, which is what the left is doing here.  Something about this mindset seems to link directly to the advocates of violence getting louder and louder while ignoring their own part of the problem.

Florida AG Demands Impeachment of Judge Who Freed Pedophile Who Murdered 5-Year-Old Weeks Later
May 5, 2026