1/. The fascists are here. Are Democrats even aware of this?
This is pretty much it, I would say: This is the moment we have long feared — or, from another point of view, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. If you think you know what I mean by “this” being “it,” you’re probably right. This is the moment to bust out clichés and make them sound authentic, the moment for “Which side are you on?” or “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” to stop sounding like antique rhetoric out of earnest postwar melodrama. Of course the moment has been more of a long, drawn-out process, and the premise that “it” can’t happen here has been slowly and gradually degraded and negated, somewhat the way Hannibal Lecter (“the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” as President Trump likes to say) keeps you alive and doped up on happy pills while he eats your brain. Still, though: Wasn’t there something like a moment for you? There certainly was for me.
2/. David Hogg on CNN......
He's 24! And wants to replace the Democratic oldies.....go for it!
Of course he just got reprimanded by the flunky who is the head of the DNC.....
3/. We're getting close to this!
4/. Liberals, again, are deluding themselves if they think Trump voters will change their minds as the tariffs etc etc start hurting them.
They don't care as long as their enemies [us!] are being hurt worse......
The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move? Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained popular through the first few months of Trump 2.0. But, according to a much-discussed segment by CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten this week, polling proves that the idea of “regretful” Trump voters is “more of a media creation than anything else”.
“I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, they regret what they did back in 2024. I’m here to tell you, uh-uh. Very few of them regret what they did back in 2024,” Enten said on Wednesday. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/18/donald-trump-voters-people-hate-politics-prices?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
5/. Tom Tomorrow on El Salvador......love how he nails JD Vance......
6/. Trump and his scum sycophants are out in the open now.......
Andrew Sullivan on their new favourite dictator Bukele.....
In some ways, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally-dressed foreign leaders. The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept his country free from total Russian domination. The second was with Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America.
So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it? They humiliated Zelensky while lavishing Bukele with encomiums for his collaboration in providing an extra-territorial, extra-judicial, concentration camp for whomever in America Trump wants to grab off the street, bundle into an airplane, and get Stephen Miller to call a terrorist. What’s not to like? https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-bukele-playbook-trump-is-following?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61371&post_id=161396397&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=2cwgv&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
7/. Really interesting 60 Minutes segment - on AI at Google's DeepMind Lab.....
8/ Not often we post an essay, but this story is wonderful. It's a celebration of an America that's gone, memories and a tour of the US of yore.
Good writing, it really makes you think.....
The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.
You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.
The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.
9/. This is the Democratic elites to a T!
10/. Are you in the travel business? Oops.....
Overseas travel to the United States has declined sharply since President Donald Trump returned to office.
Industry experts say some of the reasons are plain to see: Reports of detentions and deportations, including the weeks-long lockup of European tourists, have sowed fears of bad experiences at the border. Some countries have tightened travel advisories, and Trump’s whiplash tariffs have ratcheted up international tensions.
11/. Coming soon to Fox.....
12/. Remember Q-Anon? It's still here, stronger than ever....
If you've got one in your family or friends, write them off. They are gone....
In 2020, Dan’s wife lost a pregnancy. When Dan, a 41-year-old from Minnesota, told his parents about the loss, his mother said that the Covid vaccine was responsible for the miscarriage (though multiple studies found that it did not increase risk). In the months leading up to that, she had posted memes featuring slogans like Save the Children and Where We Go One We Go All. But when she blamed vaccination for the loss, it was the last straw. He started searching online for a way to combat his mother’s conspiratorial thinking.
In that search, he found r/QAnonCasualties, a subreddit for people whose loved ones have fallen down the QAnon rabbit role. Dan scrolled and posted and commented, hoping to find the resources to guide his mother out of her Q-pilled beliefs. “Learn how to steer them back to reality and heal yourself,” reads the sub’s description. Five years later, Dan — and many other subreddit members — no longer believe that’s possible. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-family-reddit-lost-1235322518/
13/. Thom Hartmann with Trump's corruption.....
Want to take down Trump? Demonstrate how corrupt he and his oligarch buddies are.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life doing international relief work for a nonprofit based out of Europe. From the mass slaughter in Darfur to the famine following the Civil War in Uganda to deeply impoverished rural Russia and Southeast Asia to hunt clubs in Colombia where young men shoot “feral” children for sport, I’ve seen horrorsfew can even imagine, much less would want to live through.
The one consistent and defining characteristic of the countries where I’ve lived and worked is the corruption.
I had a meeting with the Haitian Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population, the equivalent of our HHS Secretary, about our organization building a facility there for orphaned children; his first request, within ten minutes of our meeting, was for a $15,000 cash bribe (I passed). https://hartmannreport.com/p/will-trumps-corruption-be-the-fatal-5db?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=161569555&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=2cwgv&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
14/. The MAGA epidemic.....
15/. China just won the trade war.......here's how....
China just turned the tables on Donald Trump. In fact, China just made the smartest move out, and she has revealed just how way ahead of the curve she is. Of course, if you have visited China, and if you have seen their buildings, their transport systems, and the quality of their goods, you would already know that. Most people, however, have not been to China, and they do not watch videos or read information about China, so they go on being robbed blind by western business.
If you’re on Tik Tok, you know that the Chinese government just gave permission for all its manufacturers to reveal the real cost of manufacture (what people like Hermes pay China for the Birkin bag), and it is mindblowing. Hermes pays China $1400 and charges the end user $38,000. https://tessaschlesinger.medium.com/china-just-won-the-trade-war-with-america-bd8d6924a38b
16/. Vanity Fair ranks all of Quentin Taratino's movies......a surprising #1 too!
While we wait for the famed writer-director’s supposedly final film, we decided to take a look back at all 10 Quentin Tarantino movies and rank them from worst to best—just as we did recently with Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. Tarantino’s resumé is a bit shorter than Spielberg’s, but it nonetheless contains some seismic, seminal American classics alongside a few smaller curiosities. One note: we have decided to count the Kill Bill films as separate movies, as they are distinct enough in style to register as their own entities. We realize some, including Mr. Tarantino, might disagree with that decision.
17/. "Warfare"......read this review, then watch the trailer.....wow!
it's up there with the first 23 bruising minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Elem Klimov’s harrowing and relentless Come and See. This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare, by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/apr/20/warfare-review-alex-garland-ray-mendoza-iraq-war-2006-will-poulter-d-pharaoh-woon-a-tai-joseph-quinn-cosmo-jarvis-kit-connor-charles-melton
18/. Movies to look out for this summer!
It’s been almost two years since the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon brought summer movies back in a big way—and the box office has yet to reach those same heights. But that could change in the summer of 2025, when multiplexes will be filled with crowd-pleasing wannabe blockbusters that promise new takes on old properties (and maybe some movies that will land on our “best movies of 2025” list too). We’re going to see James Gunn step up to the plate with a reimagined Superman; Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn suit up for a new, hopefully more successful take on the Fantastic Four; and Tom Cruise take his final (?) bow as Ethan Hunt. There’s even a chance we see an eventual Oscar contender emerge from the dog days, between Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing.Grab some popcorn, then peruse this list of the 25 summer movies—that is, releases between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend—we’re most excited to see.
And especially this one - 'The Phoenician Scheme" from Wes Anderson
Today's video - the full collection of "Trunk Monkey" commercials......hilarious......
Today's moral dilemma joke....
A moral dilemma for our times…
At the end, this test only has one question, but it's avery important one. By giving an honest answer, you will discover where you stand morally. This test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation in which you will have to make a difficult decision.
Only you will know the results, so remember that your answer needs to be honest.
THE SITUATION:
You are in Florida, Miami to be specific.
There is chaos all around you caused by a hurricane with severe flooding.
This is a flood of biblical proportions.
You are a photojournalist working for a major newspaper, and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster. The situation is nearly hopeless.
You're trying to shoot career-making photos.
There are houses and people swirling around you, some disappearing under the water.
THE TEST:
Suddenly you see a man in the water.
He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris.
You move closer.
Somehow the man looks familiar.
You suddenly realize who it is.
It's Donald Trump!
At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him under forever.
YOU HAVE TWO OPTIONS:
You can save the life of Donald Trump or you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzer Prize winning photo, documenting the death of one of the world's most powerful Republican men hell bent on the destruction of America.
THE QUESTION:
Here's the question, and please give an honest answer.
"Would you select high contrast color film, or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?"
Today's French joke.....
This actually happened to an Englishman in France who was totally drunk. |
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A French policeman stops the Englishman's car and asks if he has been drinking. With great difficulty, the Englishman admits that he has been drinking all day, that his daughter got married that morning, and that he drank champagne and a few bottles of wine at the reception, and many single malts scotches thereafter. Quite upset, the policeman proceeds to alcohol-test (breath test) the Englishman and verifies that he is indeed totally sloshed. He asks the Englishman if he knows why, under French Law, he is going to be arrested. The Englishman answers with a bit of humor, "No sir, I do not! But while we're asking questions, do you realize that this is a British car and that my wife is driving on the other side?" |
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Today's little girl joke....
Here's a truly heartwarming story about the bond formed between a little 5-year-old girl and some construction workers that will make you believe that we all can make a difference when we give a child the gift of our time.
A young family moved into a house, next to a vacant lot. One day, a construction crew began to build a house on the empty lot. The family's 5-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in the goings-on and spent much of each day observing the workers.
Eventually the construction crew, all of them 'gems-in-the-rough,' more or less, adopted her as a kind of project mascot. They chatted with her during coffee and lunch breaks and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important. At the end of the first week, they even presented her with a pay envelope containing ten dollars. The little girl took this home to her mother who suggested that she take her ten dollars 'pay' she'd received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.
When the girl and her mom got to the bank, the teller was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own pay check at such a young age.
The little girl proudly replied, "I worked last week with a real construction crew building the new house next door to us."
"Oh my goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"
The little girl replied, "I will, if those assholes at Home Depot ever deliver the fuckin' sheet rock."
Kind of brings a tear to the eye - doesn't it?
