1/ A most interesting essay on how America has become decadent, and the article explains exactly what that means and why it's worse than you might imagine.....
In The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon luridly evokes the Rome of 408 A.D., when the armies of the Goths prepared to descend upon the city.
The marks of imperial decadence appeared not only in grotesque displays of public opulence and waste, but also in the collapse of faith in reason and science.
The people of Rome, Gibbon writes, fell prey to “a puerile superstition” promoted by astrologers and to soothsayers who claimed “to read in the entrails of victims the signs of future greatness and prosperity.”
Would a latter-day Gibbon describe today’s America as “decadent”? I recently heard a prominent, and pro-American, French thinker (who was speaking off the record) say just that.
He was moved to use the word after watching endless news accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tweets alternate with endless revelations of sexual harassment.
2/ Frank Rich on the weeks news.....some badly needed perspective.....always insightful......
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: the fallout from Michael Wolff’s White House tell-all, the fall of Steve Bannon, and the politics of the Golden Globes.
Michael Wolff’s publisher is rushing to print more copies of Fire and Fury even as a chorus of journalists, politicians, and pundits — including Wolff himself — call its details into question. Once the dust settles, will this book actually have any lasting effect?
The only effect anyone really cares about, of course, is the bottom line: Is there a chance in hell that this book will at long last be the catalyst for Trump’s demise? After all the other turning points that failed to fell Trump, from his ridicule of John McCain’s war record to the Access Hollywood tape to his pat on the head for neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, it would be foolhardy to say it will. But it may be a not-insignificant step on this president’s path to implosion.
3/ Jimmy Kimmel has put together a "Lie-2-K" marathon to commemorate Trump's first year.....an amusing but enraging five minutes....
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel took a moment to acknowledge a “milestone” President Trump recently reached.
“Happy Lie 2K everybody!” Kimmel told his audience.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Trump had told his 2,000th lie since taking office last year.
“He’s averaging 5.6 false claims a day, which is impressive considering the fact he’s only working 2.6 hours per day,” Kimmel joked.
Kimmel then noted that throughout his lies, Trump insisted that everyone should “believe” him. And he played a lengthy montage of many of Trump’s “believe me” moments.”
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/wa
4/ A Fox News exclusive.....from Tom Tomorrow....
5/ Driving a truck is now one of the few ways a man without a degree can make a decent middle class living, but as this story says AI and self driving trucks are coming fast, and will decimate trucking jobs.
Is any segment of our government planning for this? Are you kidding? This is a slow rolling disaster coming within the next few years....
Automated trucking promises to improve road safety, reduce fossil-fuel emissions and put up to 1.7 million people out of work.
When Donald Trump sidles up to a semi truck, he's usually selling policy only a plutocrat could love. Campaigning to repeal the Affordable Care Act in March, Trump pinned an iTrucks button to his lapel and honked the horn of a Mack truck outside the White House. "Obamacare," he said, "has inflicted great pain on American truckers." In October, at a rally before the "proud men and women of the American Trucking Associations" in Pennsylvania, Trump touted GOP plans to slash corporate taxes by 40 percent and to end "the crushing, horrible and unfair estate tax." Behind him, positioned for the TV cameras, was an 18-wheeler – emblazoned with an unlikely slogan: truckers for tax reform. He vowed his America First agenda "means putting American truckers first."
In his stagecraft, Trump puts truckers on a pedestal. Behind the scenes, his administration is seeking to hasten a revolution in robotic driving that poses an existential threat to their livelihoods.
6/ Stephen Colbert with some commentary and clips from Trump's cabinet meeting.....a painfully funny four minutes....
7/ Paul Krugman with a good column on how the Republicans are caught in a trap, forced to support Trump even though they know he is completely unfit for office.....
I haven’t yet read Wolff’s book – do I really have to? — but the basic outlines of his story have long been familiar and uncontroversial to anyone with open eyes. Trump is morally and intellectually incapable of being president. He has also exploited his office for personal gain, obstructed justice, and colluded with a hostile foreign power. Everyone who doesn’t get their news from Fox has basically known this for a while, although Wolff helps focus our minds on the subject.
It seems to me that that the real news now is the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with this national nightmare: rather than distancing themselves from Trump, they’re doubling down on their support and, in particular, on their efforts to cover for his defects and crimes. Remember when Paul Ryan was the Serious, Honest Conservative? (He never really was, but that was his public image.) Now he’s backing Devin Nunes in his efforts to help the Trump coverup.
8/ Colbert interviews Melania Trump [Laura Benati].....a very amusing four minutes....
Everyone is still talking about Michael Wolff's explosive book on the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show. According to the book, nobody in President Trump's circle thought he would win the election, and nobody wanted him to. "In fact, it says that on Election Night, Melania was in tears, 'and not of joy,'" Colbert said. "First ladies — they're just like us." The White House says everything in the book is fake, and Melania's spokesperson said she was happy her husband ran and won. "Is anything in Wolff's book true?" Colbert asked. "To tell us, please welcome the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump." (Or, in this case, The Late Show's Melania impersonator, Laura Benanti.)
9/ And for the final and definitive word on the book "Fire and Fury", here is Matt Taibbi....
A quick note about Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, which upon a second pass still has, to put it mildly, some serious issues: As any art historian can pick out a forgery, veteran journalists reading this book will quickly spot an oversold narrative and perhaps unprecedented sourcing issues.
The tortured "Author's Note" preceding the prologue almost reads like a novel in itself. In fact, trying to follow Wolff's idea of what "off the record" means or does not mean is like trying to follow the hands of a three-card monte dealer. It just can't be done.
As a White House source put it, Wolff's narrative personality is almost like a comedy act in itself:
"He's like the old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live," the source said. "You know – 'Yeah, I went to Harvard, that's the ticket. And, yeah, I was on the couch in the West Wing for months, that's the ticket.'"
As a White House source put it, Wolff's narrative personality is almost like a comedy act in itself:
"He's like the old Jon Lovitz character from Saturday Night Live," the source said. "You know – 'Yeah, I went to Harvard, that's the ticket. And, yeah, I was on the couch in the West Wing for months, that's the ticket.'"
Fire and Fury is really two books rolled into one. The first is a compelling nonfiction book about the intellectual divide in the modern right, as candidly hashed out to Wolff by influential figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes and (seemingly?) Rupert Murdoch.
The second is a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House
The second is a Primary Colors-style novel about what goes on behind various closed doors in the Trump White House
10/ Good one eh....
11/ Excellent article from "The Atlantic" comparing the Weinstein scandal to Trump, which the new book has brought into the open - it's an "open secret" Trump is unfit....
Three months ago, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Timesunloaded their first big report about Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of sexual aggressiveness and abuse, the depth of detail made the story unforgettable—and as it turned out, historic. Real women went on the record, using their real names, giving specific dates and times and circumstances of what Weinstein had said or done to them.
Of the reactions that flowed from this and parallel accounts—about Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly in the Fox empire, or Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose in mainstream TV, or Kevin Spacey and Louis CK in the film world, or Michael Oreskes and John Hockenberry in public radio, or Mark Halperin and Leon Weiseltier in print and political media, and down the rest of the list—one response was particularly revealing. It was that the behavior in question had been an “open secret.”
12/ Sam Bee on "Fire and Fury", the new book......five funny minutes
Samantha Bee of TBS discussed how the revelations in Wolff’s book have distracted from the administration’s behavior.
“Last week was like a perfect storm of events designed to piss off our president,” she began. “It began with something he hates: bad press. And ended with something he hates more: women who don’t tolerate sexual assault.”
Bee then said that the week’s best piece of entertainment was Trump aide Stephen Miller’s appearance on CNN, where he had a contemptuous interview with Jake Tapper, who cut off Miller’s mic and told his guest he was performing for an audience of one.
13/ Cartoon from Taylor Jones
14/ The Golden Globes were last Sunday, but this basically irrelevant awards show had it's moments.....Rolling Stone summaries them for you....
Hollywood's big awards shows haven't been shy about wearing activism on their sleeves in recent years, ever since 2016's #OscarsSoWhite campaign took the Academy to task for its racism by omission. But never before has Tinseltown's admonishment of its own failings been so front-and-center than at last night's 75th Golden Globe Awards.
The specter of sexual harassment and abuse in the entertainment industry cast a massive, Harvey Weinstein-shaped shadow over the evening, and the night felt like an exorcism of those demons. The guests were even dressed for an exorcism: Almost the entire assembly wore black (or variants thereof – we saw those navy accents) in solidarity with Time's Up, a newly founded initiative dedicated to combatting gender inequality and sexual misconduct in Hollywood and beyond. And the night was marked by frank, politically charged moments from female presenters and honorees, most memorably a rousing, powerful speech from Cecil B. DeMille Award winner Oprah Winfrey and a thrillingly unscripted reproach from presenter Natalie Portman.
Though the awards themselves almost seemed like an afterthought, there was still plenty to talk about.
15/ A great article from the Times about how the subway is the the very essence of New York City, and how it is at the point of breaking down because of corruption and political mismanagement.....
Insightful, and thought provoking. A good read....
Long before it became an archaic, filthy, profligate symbol of everything wrong with our broken cities, New York’s subway was a marvel — a mad feat of engineering and an audacious gamble on a preposterously ambitious vision. “The effect it is to have on the city of New York is something larger than any mind can realize,” said William Gaynor, the New York mayor who set in motion the primary phase of its construction. A public-works project of this scale had never before been undertaken in the United States, and even now, more than a century later, it is hard to fully appreciate what it did for the city and, really, the nation.
Before the subway, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that New York would become the greatest city on earth. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution were arriving on its doorstep every year, but most of them were effectively marooned, herded into dark, squalid tenements in disease-ridden slums.
16/ Are you in your 70's and still taking a statin? You might want to read this, and make sure you read it all because the author makes some good points about polypharmacy [multiple meds interacting with each other].
Should a 76-year-old who doesn’t have heart disease, but does have certain risk factors for developing it, take a statin to ward off heart attacks or strokes?
You’d think we’d have a solid answer to this question. These widely prescribed medications lower cholesterol to reduce cardiovascular disease, the nation’s most common killer, and get much of the credit for the nation’s plummeting rates of heart attacks and strokes.
When they entered common use in the 1990s, “it was very exciting,” said Dr. Ariela Orkaby, a geriatrician at the Harvard Medical School and lead author of a new study on statins in older adults. “Suddenly you had a drug that could reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke by 20 or 30 percent or more.”
So current medical guidelines recommend statins for people in that no-heart-disease category, a strategy called primary prevention — but only for those up to age 75. Yet almost half of adults aged 75 and older take statins, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
Todays golf joke
Once, there was a preacher who was an avid golfer. Every chance he could get, he would be on the golf course swinging away. It was an obsession. One Sunday was a picture-perfect day for golfing. The sun was out, no clouds were in the sky, and the temperature was just right.
The preacher was in a quandary as to what to do, and shortly, the urge to play golf overcame him. He called an assistant to tell him that he was sick and could not do church, packed the car up, and drove three hours to a golf course where no one would recognize him. Happily, he began to play the course.
An angel up above was watching the preacher and was quite perturbed. He went to God and said, “Look at the preacher. He should be punished for what he is doing.”
God nodded in agreement. The preacher teed up on the first hole. He swung at the ball, and it sailed effortlessly through the air and landed right in the cup 250 yards away. A picture-perfect hole-in-one. He was amazed and excited.
The angel was a little shocked. He turned to God and said, “I beg your pardon, but I thought you were going to punish him.”
God smiled. “Think about it-who can he tell?”
Todays flight attendant joke
A businessman in the first class cabin decided to chat up the drop dead gorgeousflight attendant: “What is your name?”Flight Attendant: “Angela Benz, sir”Businessman: “Lovely name ...any relation to Mercedes Benz?”Flight Attendant: “Yes sir, very close”Businessman: “How close?”Flight Attendant: “Same price".
Todays Indian joke
A family was visiting an Indian reservation when they happen upon an old tribesman laying face down in the middle of the road with his ear pressed firmly against the blacktop. The father of the family asked the old tribesman what he was doing.
The tribesman began to speak… “woman, late thirties, three kids, one barking dog in late model, Four door station wagon, traveling at 65 mph”
“That’s amazing” exclaimed the father. “You can tell all of that by just listening to the ground”?
“No”, said the old tribesman. “They just ran over me five minutes ago!”
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