1/ Frank Rich on the impeachment and what it means for Republican Senators....interesting as always....
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell makes his way to the Senate floor on Wednesday, January 22, 2020. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
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 value of the Senate impeachment trial, the Democrats’ response to an impeachment “witness trade,” and the New York Times’ televised dual endorsement.
Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial has so far proceeded along party lines, with Democrats’ requests for additional evidence blocked by Mitch McConnell’s Republicans. Assuming that partisanship continues and the outcome is locked in, does this trial still have any value?
The prospect that the Senate’s Vichy Republicans will convict Trump is as remote as the zombies in the Charles Manson cult bolting from their dear leader’s compound in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
2/ Bill Maher with his monologue on his first show in two months...6 minutes, quite funny....
3/ Funny Super Bowl car commercial.....for Bostonians....one minute...
4/ There are scary stories about the future [mostly climate change], but this future story is already here....how the death of privacy
happened, and how we are one big step closer to a police state.....
Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.
Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.
His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app.
5/ Sam Bee on the Impeachment of Trump, including some background on Lev and Trump's crack
team of lawyers....a good six minutes....
6/ Matt Taibbi on how the media is piling in on Bernie like they laughed at Trump.....he argues no
wonder most people don't trust the news....
Just a few elections ago, the national press policed the boundaries of both Democrat and Republican politics. You couldn’t sniff either party’s nomination without media assent.
After more high-profile crackups, including a few over the weekend, the press might be months from being pushed all the way to the outside of a general election campaign. Having declared war on Donald Trump and his voters years ago, news outlets are committing to a similar pile-on of Bernie Sanders.
Maybe this will end as an inspirational unity story, like Independence Day, when an invasion of gross aliens brought America together. At present, it just seems short-sighted https://www.rollingstone.com/
7/ SNL cold open from last week....Dershowitz in hell....pretty good, about 8 minutes....
8/ Funny Alexa ad from Ellen....one most amusing minute.....
9/ An in depth story from the Times on the man that quietly runs the Middle East....Mohammed-Bin-Zayed of the UAE...
ichard Clarke was in Abu Dhabi one morning in 2013 when his phone lit up. “You busy?” a familiar voice said. It was a rhetorical question. The caller was Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates and one of the most powerful men on Earth. “I’ll send a car,” he said, and hung up. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar, was working as a consultant for M.B.Z. (as he’s mostly known outside his country) and had gotten used to impromptu calls like this. M.B.Z. rarely explained what he had in mind.
10/ Tom Tomorrow with "The Unbelievable Trump"....
11/ One vision of a future that's slowly coming true.....the internet will take us back to acting like medieval peasants,
beholden to our digital overlords.......
In late August, a black-sailed ship appeared in the harbor carrying a 16-year-old visionary, a girl who had sailed from the far north across a great sea. A mass of city-dwellers and travelers, enthralled by her prophecies, gathered to welcome her. She had come to speak to the nations of Earth, to castigate us for our vanities and warn us of coming catastrophe. “There were four generations there cheering and chanting that they loved her,” the writer Dean Kissick observed. “When she came ashore, it felt messianic.”
I can’t have been the only person who felt, when Greta Thunberg
12/ The Russian internet trolls on FB and Twitter etc. have become much smarter, and their goal is less crude than it was even 4 years ago.....interesting and scary story....
Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.
Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously
13/ The Weekend Update lads with 4 minutes of jokes....
14/ Over 60? Read this story.....you'll like it!
I’m 62 years old as I write this. Like many of my friends, I forget names that I used to be able to conjure up effortlessly. When packing my suitcase for a trip, I walk to the hall closet and by the time I get there, I don’t remember what I came for.
And yet my long-term memories are fully intact. I remember the names of my third-grade classmates, the first record album I bought, my wedding day.
This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.
15/ "Star Trek - Picard" review from Rolling Stone.....says it's really good!
“Engage.”
This was the simple command that Captain Jean-Luc Picard uttered so often throughout the seven-season run of Star Trek: The Next Generation — the final word before the starship Enterprise headed off on a new adventure. But engage is also what so many recent TV revivals fail to do. They don’t connect with the old material in any meaningful way so much as they strain to re-create it exactly as it was. They’re brand management more than they are storytelling — unapologetic bids for attention in an overcrowded TV landscape, little more.
Daved, over the years between seeing each other, it's great to see/hear/read that your wit and humor have not dulled! I hope everything is going well for you. Rick
ReplyDeleteWhat does that mean... "Unknown" in the previous post? This is your old friend and adversary on port calls - Rick Strunck
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