1/. Thom Hartmann on Trump's war......but what he's really after is a 9/11 type attack so he can declare martial law.....
As he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, in 1999 about his plans for an Iraq war as a strategy to get himself re-elected in 2004:
“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.”
Is this the end of late stage capitalism?
Or to put it another way, is this equivalent of LET THEM EAT CAKE!
This affair is so tone-deaf. It illustrates the point that just because you’re rich, that does not mean you’re a fully rounded personality who can read the room, never mind society.
Example #1? Elon Musk. Tesla sales have dropped for the fifth straight month in Europe, they’re down by 28%, meanwhile, overall electric car sales are UP! People have had enough of the man from Africa. They’re saying “no mas.” This isn’t a judgment of the automobiles, but Musk himself. Who has run roughshod over the government and believes that the rules don’t apply to him while being a vengeful crybaby all the while.
Forget top hats and monocles, millionaires look positively middle class now.
Why it matters: The number of "everyday" millionaires — those with wealth between $1 million and $5 million — is soaring. But many of these folks don't necessarily feel rich.
By the numbers: There were nearly 52 million "everyday" millionaires in the world last year, per a recent report from UBS. That's four times the number in 2000.
- Even accounting for inflation, the number of everyday millionaires in 2024 was 2.5 times what it was in 2000. The wealth manager does not break down how many of these folks live in the U.S. But America has, by far, more millionaires than any other country in the world.
- New American millionaires were minted at a rate of about 1,000 a day last year. There are nearly 24 million millionaires in the U.S., 40% of the global total, and about four times the number than runner-up China.
For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles.
But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall.
https://www.theguardian.com/
Climate catastrophe.
Economic collapse.
Authoritarian backsliding.
I get it. It’s easier to slap a dismissive label on someone than it is to accept that they might be right. That we might, in fact, be standing on the precipice of something truly irreversible.
The mini-series “Families Like Ours” on Netflix has an attention-grabbing premise: An entire country, Denmark, decides to shut itself down before climate change can do the job for it. Six million Danes start looking for new homes. Relocation plans are drawn up with Scandinavian efficiency, but European neighbors look upon waves of relatively well-off white refugees with the same distaste they show for Africans and Middle Easterners. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/
With the latest instalments of the documentary anthology series Trainwreck, Netflix appears to be trying to grant us a brief summer pause from its usual run of true crime horror. Previous episodes included the Woodstock 99 riots and Astroworld festival crowd crush, in which 10 people died, including a nine-year-old child. Now, it has pivoted in tone.
https://www.theguardian.com/
Inever want to include spoilers, but sometimes they cannot be avoided. So, because I want you to stick with the new miniseries by Dennis Lehane, starring Taron Egerton (the pair reuniting after their great success with 2022’s Black Bird), and enjoy the myriad benefits it will reap, I urge you to ignore any misgivings you have about the first two episodes of Smoke. Most of them will fall away. The tonal inconsistencies, the apparent self-indulgence of Lehane with his protagonist’s hobby, the dabs of bad characterisation – just keep the faith. If you can’t, then Google the true crime podcast on which Smoke is based and work out what must be happening from there. I’m not giving you the title because you’ll be ruining a lot of fun for yourself. https://www.theguardian.com/
U.S. Marine Colonel was about to start the morning briefing to his staff.While waiting for the coffee machine to finish brewing, the colonel decided to pose a question to all assembled.He explained that his wife had been a bit frisky the night before and he failed to get his usual amount of sound sleep.He posed the question of just how much of sex was "work" and how much of it was "pleasure?"A Major chimed in with 75%-25% in favor of work.A Captain said it was 50%-50%.A Lieutenant responded with 25%-75% in favor of pleasure, depending upon his state of inebriation at the time.There being no consensus, the colonel turned to the Private First Class who was in charge of making the coffee and asked for his opinion?Without any hesitation, the young Private First Class responded,"Sir, it has to be 100% pleasure.The colonel was surprised and as you might guess, asked why."Well, sir, if there was any work involved, the officers would have me doing it for them."The room fell silent. God Bless the enlisted man.
