1/ An excellent column this week from Andrew Sullivan, with three thought provoking stories....from the left wing of the Democratic party - opportunities but also dangers, why we are collectively numb to climate change, and a eulogy for a Congressman ....all three worth reading.....
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Watching Congresswoman Ilhan Omar this past week has been, shall we say, illuminating. In some ways, I find myself inspired. Finally in 2019, we have one of two Muslim women in the U.S. Congress, proudly wearing a hijab, and immediately destroying any stupid stereotypes of Muslim women as subservient or silent. We have a seemingly fearless and often charming woman of color with the temerity to interrogate the overwhelmingly white and male foreign policy blob in the heart of our political system. We have a refugee from Somalia as a young congresswoman, a hard-left analogue to the great Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
This, if you need reminding, is America in 2019.
2/ Yeay - John Oliver is back, and he gives us an amusing and informative recap of the week's news.....11 minutes....
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight made its raucous return to HBO on Sunday night after a three-month hiatus, quickly bringing viewers up to speed on all the news the show had missed:
– Every single person is now running for President
– Jeff Bezos told us all to keep an eye out for his dick pic
– The President has been very busy.
Among Trump’s accomplishments of the past few months, he famously posed for a feast of 300 hamburgers, or as he put it in a tweet “over 1,000 hamberders,” Oliver said.
On Christmas eve he told a little girl on the phone that her belief in Santa Claus was “marginal” at her age – “perfectly on brand” for Trump, given his talent for “f*cking up” children, Oliver said as a photo of Trump’s kids aired.
But the “major drama” during Last Week Tonight’s break was Trump’s ongoing effort to get Congress to fund
3/ The SNL cold open with Alec Baldwin as the idiot in chief announcing his emergency.....this is the skit Trump angrily tweeted about and threatened Baldwin's family....six amusing [painfully amusing] minutes...
4/ You may have seen this week how Amazon paid zero, yes zero taxes on it's $11 billion in revenue.....but this isn't the only way this monster [who we all use] is crippling America....interesting story from Nation of Change....
Capitalism is failing in America, and Amazon is both the cause and beneficiary of much of the breakdown. Jeff Bezos said, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” He might have added three capitalist practices familiar to his company: (1) Pay no taxes; (2) Drive competitors out of business; and (3) Exploit workers. https://www.
5/ David Wallace-Wells in the Times with a story on climate change titled "It's Time To Panic".....how scientists are finally
speaking up....
The age of climate panic is here. Last summer, a heat wave baked the entire Northern Hemisphere, killing dozens from Quebec to Japan. Some of the most destructive wildfires in California history turned more than a million acres to ash, along the way melting the tires and the sneakers of those trying to escape the flames. Pacific hurricanes forced three million people in China to flee and wiped away almost all of Hawaii’s East Island.
We are living today in a world that has warmed by just one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)
since the late 1800s, when records began on a global scale. We are adding planet-warming carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere at a rate faster than at any point in human history since the beginning of industrialization.
6/ A British view of Trump.....well written.....
Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?"
Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:
"A few things spring to mind.
Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all. He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
'My God… what… have… I… created?
If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set."
7/ I love Bill Maher - he really cuts through the BS, especially politically correct nonsense....this "New Rules" is one of his better ones....
At the end of his show Friday night, HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maherripped Democrats for “swiping left” on good candidates.
He started off by saying that nearly 45 million Americans now identify as Democrats and “all of them” are running for president.
Maher then said this, drawing applause: “This time, let’s give them a chance. Let’s not eat our own, the way we nitpicked Hillary [Clinton] to death over her emails and other bullshit.”
8/ Paul Krugman with a column about how Trump is hiring the worst economists to run our institutions....scary stuff....
U.S. political discussion has been dominated by the issue of Donald Trump’s wall — an issue on which Trump's irrationality keeps surprising even his critics. So I don’t imagine that many people have heard about Trump’s nomination of David Malpass, currently an under secretary at the Treasury Department, to lead the World Bank. But it’s a story worth following.
For one thing, while the U.S. traditionally gets to choose the World
Bank’s president (Europe gets the International Monetary Fund), there will be a lot of opposition to Malpass, who has a history of being hostile to international institutions. Furthermore, the Malpass nomination highlights the remarkable character of Trump’s economic appointments.
Remarkable in what way? Well, remarkably bad.
9/ John Oliver with one of his brilliant comedic reporting segments, and this one is where the UK stands with Brexit. His summary is excellent and informative, and if you watch this 21 minute video you will be up to date with the disaster that is likely to happen....
John Oliver kicked off the sixth season of Last Week Tonight on Sunday night by checking in on Brexit, which, you will perhaps not be surprised to hear, is still an enormous clusterfuck. To give his viewers some sense of the enormity of the clusterfuck in question, Oliver had to use extreme methods: a Churchillian address about how steadfastly the U.K. has committed to fucking itself, a mug reading “You’ve Pretty Much Fucked Yourself With a Rusty Piece of Rebar,” and most shockingly of all, a music video from a boy band called the Breunion Boys urging the U.K. to remain in the European Union.
10/ The 8 most controversial late night moments from 2018 with the clips.....and I'm delighted to say DDD had five of the eight for you.....
The one I didn't that I should have is below.....James Corden with Paul McCartney.....wonderful!
And especially in 2018, it seemed, the late-night men and still-too-few women frequently struggled to find the best ways to joke about this president and the madness that surrounds him. The daily onslaught of crazy from the White House, combined with a viewing public increasingly eager to call out any perceived transgression on social media, led to an unprecedented level of outrage, often of the “faux” variety.
Here, in chronological order, are the most controversial late-night clips of 2018.
11/ Believe it or not Australia's government is a climate denier, but read how extreme weather is crippling Australia, from droughts, fires to flooding.....
The river is the Darling, just south of the Menindee Lakes in northwest New South Wales, and the fish are Murray cod, native, iconic and endangered. Given their size, these two could be more than half a century old. Behind the men, who are close to weeping, thousands more fish drift belly-up, asphyxiated in a cold snap that killed the blue-green algae blooming along the river and deprived the water of oxygen. Unprecedented summer temperatures and low water levels produced the algal bloom, which can itself be an indication of a waterway under stress.
12/ New York Magazine's Vulture with the 100 best movies on Netflix right now.....you might want to save this article....lots of great films you haven't seen yet....
And 10 points if you know which movie this is from....
With thousands of movies to choose from, and a navigation system and algorithm that don’t always make the right choice easy to find, it can be difficult to know what to watch on Netflix. That’s why we’re here, breaking down the 100 best movies on the service at this minute, with regular updates for titles that have been removed and when new ones are added. We’ve done the hard work, so now the only thing you have to do is sit back and, uh, watch all 100 movies.
Todays video [finally] - James Corden and Paul McCartney....23 charming and amusing minutes....
Todays blond jokes - male versions!
A friend told the blond man: "Christmas is on a Friday this year." The blond man then said, "Let's hope it's not the 13th."------------------------------------
Two blond men find three grenades, and they decide to take them to a police station.
One asked, "What if one explodes before we get there?"The other says,"We'll lie and say we only found two."------------------------------------
A woman phoned her blonde neighbor man and said: "Close your curtains the next time
you & your wife are having sex. The whole street was watching and laughing at you yesterday."To which the blonde man replied: "Well the joke's on all of you because I wasn't even
at home yesterday."------------------------------------
A blonde man is in the bathroom and his wife shouts: "Did you find the shampoo?" He answers, "Yes, but I'm not sure what to do... it's for dry hair, and I've just wet mine."------------------------------
A blonde man goes to the vet with his goldfish."I think it's got epilepsy," he tells the vet.The vet takes a look and says, "It seems calm enough to me".The blond man says, "Wait, I haven't taken it out of the bowl yet". ------------------------------------
A blond man spies a letter lying on his doormat.It says on the envelope "DO NOT BEND ".He spends the next 2 hours trying to figure out how to pick it up.
------------------------------------
A blond man shouts frantically into the phone"My wife is pregnant and her contractions are only two minutes apart!" "Is this her first child?" asks the Doctor."No", he shouts, "this is her husband!"------------------------------------
A blonde man was driving home, drunk as a skunk. Suddenly he has to swerve to avoid a
tree, then another, then another.A cop pulls him over, so he tells the cop about all the trees in the road.The cop says, "That's your air freshener swinging about!"------------------------------------
A blonde man's dog goes missing and he is frantic.His wife says "Why don't you put an ad in the paper?"He does, but two weeks later the dog is still missing."What did you put in the paper?" his wife asks."Here boy!" he replies.------------------------------------
A blond man is in jail. Guard looks in his cell and sees him hanging by his feet. "Just WHAT are you doing?" he asks."Hanging myself," the blond replies."It should be around your neck" says the guard."I tried that," he replies, "but then I couldn't breathe".------------------------------------
Todays religious joke
A 65 year old wealthy widow had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital. While on the operating table she had a near death experience. Seeing God she asked "Is my time up?"
And God said, "No, you have another 33 years, 2 months and 8 days to live."
While crossing the street on her way home, she was killed by an ambulance.
Arriving in front of God, she demanded, "I thought you said I had another 33 years? Why didn't you pull me from out of the path of that ambulance?"
God replied: "I didn't recognize you!!!!!"
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