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/
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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/
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.
Today's video - another of our short horror movies......this one is "The Closet", and not for the faint of heart!
The Receptionist smiled smugly and asked, 'Yes??'
The Receptionist nodded approvingly and smiled, knowing he had taken her advice..
Mess with seniors, and you're going to lose.
A: God doesn’t think he’s Donald Trump.
A: Juan by Juan
A: Orange is the new black.
A: Donald Trump
A: He grows taller.
A: He wants to make America grate again
A: The Trump card
A: You could say we’re going toupée for it.
A: They both barely cover an assh*le.
A: He realized they already have a wall and fear of Muslims.
A: It wouldn’t be the first time he pushed a black family out of their home.
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