It's too cold to go out, so you might as well read something!
1/. Excellent article by George Monblot in the Guardian - a must read.
He details what has really happened to our country.....and you won't get this perspective from any of our legacy media either.
If you want to keep sane for the next four+ years, read this.....
Seldom in recent history has class war been waged so blatantly. Generally, billionaires and hectomillionaires employ concierges to attack the poor on their behalf. But now, freed from shame and embarrassment, they no longer hide their involvement. In the US, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, will lead the federal assault on the middle and working classes: seeking to slash public spending and the public protections defending people from predatory capital.
They have been recruiting further billionaires to oversee cuts across government. These plutocrats will not be paid. They will wage their class war pro bono, out of the goodness of their hearts.
Musk, with a fortune of more than $400bn (£330bn), has warned: “We have to reduce spending to live within our means.” But he doesn’t mean “we”, he means you. Trump and Musk want to cut the federal budget so they can slash taxes for the ultra-rich. This benighted class needs all the help it can get. Since 2020, the wealth of the 12 richest men in the US has risen by a mere 193%. Collectively, the poor dears now own only $2tn. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/19/donald-trump-elon-musk-class-war-uk-us-oligarchies-democracy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
2/. Weekend Update #1 - the boys get some good zingers in.....
Weekend Update #2 - Michael Longfellow defends TikTok....very amusing....
Weekend Update #3 - Nosferatu [Sarah Sherman] stops by to torment Colin Jost......very funny.....
3/. Great article - it says Democrats must make the next four years as painful as possible for Trumpism.....
But I can't see the Chuck Schumers and other old guard elites doing this at all......
What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.
Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.
Trumpism has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them. One can see manifestations of this in the congresswoman Nancy Mace’s deranged bullying of the congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride, the endless and deliberate mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, and the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the top fundraisers in the House of Representatives.
4/. And an excellent story on why the Dems lost Michigan......
The meeting was billed as an opportunity for the voters of Saginaw, Michigan to ask elected Democrats difficult questions about why Donald Trump, and not Kamala Harris, is moving into the White House on Monday.
Vincent Oriedo, a biotechnology scientist, had just such a question. What lessons have been learned, he asked, from Harris’s defeat in this vital swing county in a crucial battleground state that voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and how are the Democrats applying them?
As the town hall with Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, and the local representative in the state legislature, Amos O’Neal, came to an end, Oriedo said he was disappointed with their answers, which amounted to bland statements about politicians “listening” to the voters.
“They did not answer the question,” he said. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/18/democrats-trump-michigan-swing-voters
5/. This show gets cancelled this week!
The SNL "Immigrant Dad Talk Show"......amusing....
6/. With the assassination of their CEO one would think United Healthcare would maybe become a little nicer......
Nope, they are doubling down.....
At this very moment Luigi Mangione, who is accused of shootingUnitedHealthcare’s CEO last month, is sitting in a federal jail cell in Brooklyn. He’s got a barrage of court appearances scheduled and, once he has wound his way through the criminal justice system, he could be behind bars for the rest of his life.
Which, of course, is as it should be. While there are a lot of reasons that many people find the 26-year-old alleged assassin sympathetic, you can’t just gun a CEO down outside a hotel in Manhattan and face no consequences for it. And Mangione, who is, by all accounts, an extremely smart guy with an Ivy League education, should really have known better. He should have known that if he wanted to murder someone – and get away with it – there were far more socially acceptable ways of doing so.
Mangione could, for example, have got a well-paid job as a management consultant and helped supercharge the country’s opioid epidemic; chances are he would have faced little more than a slap on the wrist. He could have gone to Gaza and shot some Palestinian children in the head – in which case, not only would he probably face no consequences whatsoever, US lawmakers would probably go out of their way to shield him from accountability. And, of course, Mangione could have gone into the health insurance industry himself, and routinely denied life-saving care to desperate people in order to boost profits. That type of violence is perfectly fine.
7/. A Texas House member [D] warns about the two Christian nationalist billionaires who run the State....1 1/2 minute video.
Good luck with that!
8/. Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic thinks Trump's second term will be dangerous but not catastrophic......let's hope so....
ever since donald trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.
9/. Just about sums it up.....
10/. Very interesting article by Ezra Klein, discussing the very dangerous aspects of Trump and the oligarchs combining
to dominate social media and therefore the minds of the gullible, of which now there are a majority......
Most persuasive.....
I feel I have been watching two different presidential transitions take place.
There has been the official one, with all of its pomp and pageantry. The one we call the peaceful transition of power.
I watched Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the election she lost. I watched President Joe Biden welcome his successor, Donald Trump, back to the White House. I watched every living former president assemble under the Capitol Rotunda to honor Trump’s second inauguration.
What a difference from four years ago, when a mob stormed the Capitol, when Trump sought to upend the election results and, upon failing, did not attend Biden’s inauguration. This transition, the official transition of presidential power, has been orderly.
Here is the podcast version on youtube.....
11/. They voted for it, and it's coming!
12/. Wow - for me and most Westerners to live in Chongqing would be a nightmare.
I have not heard of this Chinese city of 32 million before, but Chongqing sounds astonishing and futuristic.....
They are so far ahead of us.....
Google Maps can be unreliable at the best of times when you’re travelling in China, but in the southern megacity of Chongqing, a map of any kind turns out to be almost entirely useless. Built across a series of impossibly steep mountainsides and vertiginous valleys at the dramatic confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers, it is an astonishing urban phenomenon to behold – a vertically sprawling city that can only be understood in three dimensions.It is a place where neighbourhoods cling to cliffs, connected by elevated roads 20 storeys up in the air. Metro lines emerge from tunnels through the mountains, only to plunge straight through the middle of residential skyscrapers, which themselves sprout improbably from the sheer slopes. Something that looks close by on the map can turn out to be tens of storeys above or below you. And getting there usually makes for an exhilarating journey.
This is a TikTok of a daily commute in Chongqing.....wow....
13/. Classic ad from SNL - "Annuale". Really really funny.....
14/. Chris Hayes [yes, Chris Hayes] on how our attention and what we focus on is the most valuable thing we have.......
And we're losing it to social media.
Very insightful article, which you probably won't read because we don't read much any more. We just watch.......
for more than a decade, I have hosted an hour-long cable TV show on MSNBC. When I got my own show, I imagined it as something akin to the experience of first-time car ownership. I could drive wherever I wanted to drive; although I would have to obey the law, I just had to figure out where I wanted to go, push the pedal, and go. I could cover whatever I thought was most important, whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted.
I learned quickly, it doesn’t work like that. A cable-news show is powered by attention. It has no internal combustion engine to make it go. Yes, you can cover whatever you desire, night after night, but if no one watches it, the show will be canceled. This is what almost happened to me.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/attention-valuable-resource/681221/?utm_campaign=one-story-to-read-today&utm_content=20250122&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=One+Story+to+Read+Today
15/. They want it all.....
16/. We guarantee the spineless media will be repeating this lie [that seed oils are poisoning you] once Kennedy is confirmed.....
Just read this and be prepared for the lies to come......even a major US salad chain has succumbed to the social media BS....
We repeat - this picture is a lie!
It’s January, season of resolutions and virtue, when Americans collectively decide to throw out the butter and sugar and booze and embrace grain bowls and bone broth. Most of these resolutions – 80%, according to some studies – will fade by February, Super Bowl Sunday at the latest, so advertisers pushing dietary health trends have to strike fast.
Earlier this month, for example, the salad chain Sweetgreen unveiled a new January menu that is completely free of “seed oils”.
“Our country is having a long-overdue conversation about food,” Jonathan Neman, Sweetgreen’s co-founder and CEO, announced in a post on X. “And it’s about time. From ultra-processed ingredients to artificial additives, there’s a lot on our plates that isn’t doing us any favors.”
Neman is wrong. Our country is always having a conversation about food. In particular, which food that we’ve always eaten has suddenly become “bad” for us.
The latest culprits are seed oils, liquid fats extracted from vegetables that are used in cooking.
17/. This is
definitely what they were thinking.....
18/. Book Review - "Money, Lies and God". A look at Christian Nationalism....
There is a “real and very, very present” threat to the US from a shadowy collection of rightwing leaders, a new book on the movement behind Donald Trump warns, with the aim being “an end to pluralistic democracy”.
Katherine Stewart, a journalist who specializes in the religious right, spent years researching the money and influence that has aided and encouraged tens of millions of Americans in their worship at the throne of Trump.
The result is Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, which sees Stewart explore the “antidemocratic movement” – an unholy mix of Christian nationalists, billionaire oligarchs and conservative ideologues who have seized control of the Republican party, and aim to fundamentally change the US.
“Money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system. Second, lies, or conscious disinformation, is a huge feature of this movement. And third God, because the most important ideological framework for the largest part of this movement is Christian nationalism,” Stewart said.
19/. "The Breakthrough".....sounds really good.....
Time is a main character in The Breakthrough, the lean, eloquent Swedish crime drama that recently powered into Netflix’s Top 10. It is a fictionalised retelling of a true story, about the huge and painstaking police investigation into a horrific double murder that took place in 2004 in the city of Linköping. It begins with a father teaching his eight-year-old son how to use his watch and over four episodes holds time up to the light. In The Breakthrough, time drags. A case that should have been cracked quickly goes unsolved for 16 years. Then, as technology catches up to the evidence, time lurches forward, setting an awful, tense and thrilling deadline for all involved. This is clever and sensitive crime TV that demands you watch it carefully and treats its subject matter with the respect it deserves. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/13/the-breakthrough-netflix-this-tense-true-crime-thriller-is-the-best-scandi-noir-in-years?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
20/. Are you watching this? I've never heard of it till I read this story......
The YouTube superstar Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson vowed to make his Amazon TV series Beast Games the “biggest reality competition show ever”, and by most metrics, he succeeded.
A little over halfway through its run, Beast Games has hit No 1 on Amazon in over 80 countries and is now the streamer’s No 1 unscripted show ever, with over 50 million viewers in just 25 days on the platform.
Though it borrows from Netflix’s K-drama Squid Game – echoing the show’s basic premise, its pastel color scheme, its numbered athletic uniforms and its gigantic pile of cash as constant motivation – Donaldson’s clone is louder, more insistently pick-me, and more stereotypically American than its Korean inspiration. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/19/beast-games-mrbeast-amazon-prime?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
21/. Rolling Stone rates all of the Star Trek movies......might be worth another look at a couple of them.....
Film. The final frontier. These are the movie voyages of the starship Enterprise — well, mostly. With this week’s debut of Star Trek: Section 31, the venerable sci-fi franchise finds itself exploring new territory altogether: the straight-to-streaming film. In this case, it’s actually the end result of a long, complicated development process where Section 31 — spinning off a Star Trek: Discovery character that Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh last played in late 2020 — was originally going to be an ongoing show, and now will be a Paramount+ exclusive-premiere movie. It’s the first of a potential series of Trek films made for the streamer, though Trek almost certainly still has a future on the big screen, whether or not plans to reunite the cast of the Chris Pine films comes to fruition.
Inspired by the arrival of Section 31, we’ve decided to rank all 14 Star Trek movies to date, this latest included, from worst to best. The Star Trek television shows are by their very nature uneven, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the films, too, have a wide range in quality, even within the various individual film series featuring William Shatner’s original crew, the gang from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the Pine reboot. There’s one spectacular film, a number of very good ones, several mediocre ones, and a few godawful ones.
Today's video - another of our short horror movies......this one is "The Closet", and not for the faint of heart!
You've been warned......
Today's medical joke
There is nothing worse than a Doctor's Receptionist who insists you tell her what is wrong with you in a room full of other patients.
I know most of us have experienced this, and I love the way this old guy handled it.
A 65-year-old man walked into a crowded waiting room and approached the desk.
The Receptionist said, 'Yes sir, what are you seeing the Doctor for today?'
'There's something wrong with my dick', he replied.
The receptionist became irritated and said, 'You shouldn't come into a crowded waiting room and say things like that. '
'Why not, you asked me what was wrong and I told you,' he said.
The Receptionist replied; 'Now you've caused some embarrassment in this room full of people.
You should have said there is something wrong with your ear or something and discussed the problem further with the Doctor in private.'
The man replied, "You shouldn't ask people questions in a room full of strangers, if the answer could embarrass anyone".
The man walked out, waited several minutes, and then re-entered.
The Receptionist smiled smugly and asked, 'Yes??'
'There's something wrong with my ear,' he stated.
The Receptionist nodded approvingly and smiled, knowing he had taken her advice..
'And what is wrong with your ear, Sir?'
'I can't piss out of it,' he replied.
The waiting room erupted in laughter...
Mess with seniors, and you're going to lose.
Today's blonde jokes.....
What can strike a blonde without her even knowing it? A thought
What do you do if a blonde throws a grenade at you? Pull the pin and throw it back.
What do you call a smart blonde? A golden retriever.
How do you make a blonde's eyes light up? Shine a flashlight in their ear.
What did the blonde say when she found out she was pregnant? "Are you sure it's mine?"
What do you call it when a blonde dies their hair brunette? Artificial intelligence.
How do you make a blonde laugh on Saturday? Tell her a joke on Wednesday!
Today's Trump jokes
Q: What’s the difference between God and Donald Trump?
A: God doesn’t think he’s Donald Trump.
Q: How’s Donald Trump going to get rid of all the Mexicans?
A: Juan by Juan
Q: What does Donald Trump tell Harris supporters he’s trying to win over?
A: Orange is the new black.
Q: Wanna hear a racist joke?
A: Donald Trump
Q: What happens when Donald Trump takes Viagra?
A: He grows taller.
Q: Why does Trump wants to ban the sale of pre-shredded cheese?
A: He wants to make America grate again
Q: What’s 18 inches long and hangs in front of an assh*le?
A: Donald Trump’s tie
Q: Minorities have the race card, women have the gender card, homosexuals have the gay card, but what do discriminatory white men have?
A: The Trump card
Q: America is going to suffer if Donald Trump becomes president
A: You could say we’re going toupée for it.
Q: What do a thong and Donald Trump’s toupee have in common?
A: They both barely cover an assh*le.
Q: Why did Donald Trump cancel his trip to Israel?
A: He realized they already have a wall and fear of Muslims.
Q: So Donald Trump wants to be president and move into the white house. Why not?
A: It wouldn’t be the first time he pushed a black family out of their home.
