Thursday, June 5, 2025

Davids Daily Dose - Thursday June 5

 

1/. Awww.....the bromance is over......we'll wait for the bombs to drop!

Donald Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk appeared on the precipice of devolving into bitter personal acrimony on Thursday as the onetime special adviser publicly assailed the president for being ungrateful for the millions he spent to get him elected.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” Musk said in a post on X. He added: “Such ingratitude.”



2/. The last panel on this Tom Tomorrow toon is so true - the MSM ignores the plain and obvious signs of dementia....



3/. Really interesting story comparing the US to other countries that gradually slipped into dictatorships.......
We are in danger having the daily outrages normalised.....

In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv.

We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one’s country, one’s city, one’s skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase.

And then the show goes on.                                           https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/opinion/trump-danger-normalization-shock.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShar



4/. Does anybody's life matter?



5/. Ho hum.....yeah yeah yeah, more of the same.
Warnings everyone ignores....it's the frog in slowly boiling water syndrome....

There is an 80% chance that global temperatures will break at least one annual heat record in the next five years, raising the risk of extreme droughts, floods and forest fires, a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has shown.

For the first time, the data also indicated a small likelihood that before 2030, the world could experience a year that is 2C hotter than the preindustrial era, a possibility scientists described as “shocking”.

Coming after the hottest 10 years ever measured, the latest medium-term global climate update highlights the growing threat to human health, national economies and natural landscapes unless people stop burning oil, gas, coal and trees.

The update, which synthesises short-term weather observations and long-term climate projections, said there was a 70% chance that five-year average warming for 2025-2029 will be more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.                                                                                                                                                                                              https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/28/global-temperatures-break-annual-heat-record-next-five-years-world-meteorological-organization?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other



6/. And among the consequences of these record heat waves is the collapse of our insect biodiversity..... 
Another very depressing story on the way our planet is being destroyed.....


Daniel Janzen only began watching the insects – truly watching them – when his ribcage was shattered. Nearly half a century ago, the young ecologist had been out documenting fruit crops in a dense stretch of Costa Rican forest when he fell in a ravine, landing on his back. The long lens of his camera punched up through three ribs, snapping the bones into his thorax.

Slowly, he dragged himself out, crawling nearly two miles back to the research hut. There were no immediate neighbours, no good roads, no simple solutions for getting to a hospital.

Selecting a rocking chair on the porch, Janzen used a bedsheet to strap his torso tightly to the frame. For a month, he sat, barely moving, waiting for his bones to knit back together. And he watched.

In front of him was a world seething with life. Every branch of every tree seemed to host its own small metropolis of creatures hunting, flying, crawling, eating. The research facility lay in a patchwork of protected rainforest, dry forest, cloud forest, mangroves and coastline covering an area the size of New York, and astonishingly rich in biodiverse life. Here, the bugs gorged, coating the leaf litter with a thick carpet of droppings.



7/. A classic - Will Ferrell on the Colbert show......very very funny.....



8/. Conservatives are VERY sensitive......



9/. Not all, but almost all billionaires are dreadful people.....

It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution.

What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.                                                                                                                            https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-billionaire-hoarding-plague-how-8aa?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=164595228&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=2cwgv&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email



10/. "My Work Here Is Done"



11/. Now even LEGAL immigrants are being victimised - without a Social Security number you can't work in this country.....
This is Obergruppenfurher Steven Miller's handiwork.

Millions of legal immigrants may be left unable to work after the US Social Security Administration quietly instituted a rule change to stop automatically issuing them social security numbers.

The Enumeration Beyond Entry program is an agreement between the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, where US Citizenship and Immigration Services would provide social security with information from applicants for work authorization or naturalization.

The program began in 2017 under the first Trump administration.

Without any public notice, on 19 March, the program was halted, affecting millions of immigrants every year and burdening Social Security Administration offices, as those applicants will now have to visit a Social Security Administration office and apply separately to receive a social security number.                                             https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/03/social-security-program-quietly-frozen-musk-immigrant-claims?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other



12/. "Mountainhead" - I recommended this to you last week, and watched it last night.
Although a lot of what Goldberg says is true about the plot and how dangerous these billionaires are, the characters are incredibly annoying and stupid.
It's good, especially the first half [in my opinion], but not THAT good.....
OK - a must see - "Mountainhead".....
Michelle Goldberg in the Times describes the movie....on HBO May 31.

In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premieres on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, “a feeling of nowness.”

He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villain



13/. Accessories for our new SS Brownshirts Corps....




14/. Ever heard of Mr. Beast? 
Thought not......a long but really interesting article about the biggest Youtube star in the world.....

Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/03/mrbeast-jimmy-donaldson-youtube-videos-star?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other


This is the Mr. Beast video the article says to start with - "I Bought A Supermarket"....



15/. Bob Lefsetz on "The Brutalist".....

“You think you’re better than us.”

I get this e-mail on a regular basis. Now I’m wondering if it’s antisemitism.

That’s what resonated most with me in “The Brutalist.” The subtle antisemitism. It’s one thing if someone calls you a “kike.” Says grossly antisemitic things to your face. But oftentimes there are comments that only a Jew can really decode.

You’re too loud. You’re not one of us.

That scene in “Radio Days,” where everybody’s talking over one another at the dinner table… That’s how it is with Jews. Can sometimes be that way with non-Jews, but if you’re a Jew at a Christian table and you don’t know your place, know not to talk too loudly or too often, you’re going to be bad-vibed.

Which is why the characters in “The Brutalist” want to move to Israel. To be with their own.

Don’t conflate what is going on in Gaza with Judaism. For millennia the Jews have been the other, the root of all evil, and they know it. People will deny it, but that’s usually because they’ve overlooked the signs, they’re too busy fitting in.


16/. "Dept Q" on Netflix has an excellent review in the Guardian.....
We are watching it, and it's really good....

It must be so galling for an actor to be blessed with just the right face for one kind of part. Galling for good actors anyway. Pretty sweet for the others – “You need a face someone would definitely kill for? Put this useless hunk/babe in there and just move the scenery round them.”

Matthew Goode is, nomenclaturally and otherwise, one of the former, but cursed with a face best described as “modern patrician” and has therefore been the first port of call for just about every period drama there has been for the last 20 years. He’s been in everything from Brideshead Revisited (as Charles Ryder) on the big screen, to Downton Abbey (Henry Talbot) and The Crown (where at least he got to play that bounder Lord Snowdon) on the small one. Judging by the relish with which he seizes the chance to play contemporary and ignoble in his new outing, the psychological thriller Dept. Q, he must have been going quietly mad with frustration throughout.

Goode takes the part of detective Carl Morck in this excellent adaptation by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, plus innumerable hit films as a credited writer or uncredited rewriter) of the Danish crime novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen’s bestselling series of the same name



17/. "Pernille", a Norwegian dramedy about a single mother with two awful kids - awful meaning just typical teenagers....
Here's the Times review, and Bob Lefsetz also mentions it.....

The Norwegian dramedy “Pernille” (in Norwegian, with subtitles, or dubbed), on Netflix, is about as lovely as shows get, endearing but mercifully resistant to treacle.

Henriette Steenstrup created and stars in the show as Pernille, a single mom to two of the most ungrateful — realistic — teens on TV. She is reeling from her sister’s death six months earlier, and she still leaves her sister voice mails, sometimes chatty and sometimes wrenching.

Pernille’s older daughter, Hanna (Vivild Falk Berg), is histrionic and capricious and suddenly dragging her feet about a long-planned gap year in Argentina. The younger, Sigrid (Ebba Jacobsen Oberg), is a ball of rage, surly beyond measure but still young enough to be read to at night and get tucked in sometimes. Pernille’s nephew, Leo (Jon Ranes), is also living with them while his father recovers from the accident that killed his mother. The show kicks off with Pernille’s widower dad (Nils Ole Oftebro) announcing that he is gay and ready to live his truth.

The show is, in all the good ways, a lot like Pamela Adlon’s FX dramedy “Better Things,” which was also about a single mom, her aging parent and her indulged, difficult daughters.



18/. Like SciFi? Seven series to watch with a decent grounding in science. 
I personally recommend "The Expanse"....excellent.

Science fiction has always been where imagination meets possibility, but not all sci-fi TV shows are created equal. While some shows bend the rules of physics for flashy drama, others dig into real scientific theories and technological dilemmas that actual researchers debate in labs and lecture halls. When scientists sit down to watch TV, they aren’t just looking for entertainment, they’re drawn to stories that challenge the mind, reflect ethical dilemmas, and explore what humanity might become. These seven sci-fi TV shows aren’t just popular with fans. They’ve earned praise from astrophysicists, biologists, computer scientists, and engineers for how they tackle everything from quantum theory to artificial intelligence. Whether the science is meticulously accurate or provocatively speculative, these series reflect the kinds of questions real experts are asking right now.




Today's video - the getaway shootout from my second favorite movie "Reservoir Dogs".....



Today's lawyer joke
A New York attorney representing a wealthy art collector called his client.

"I have some good news, and I have some bad news."

The art collector replied, "I've had an awful day. Give me the good news first."

The lawyer said, "Well, I met with your wife today, and she informed me that she just invested $5,000 in two pictures that she thinks will bring a minimum of $15 million to $20 million, and I think she could be right."

Saul replied enthusiastically, "Well done! My wife is a brilliant businesswoman! You've just made my day. Now I know I can handle the bad news. What is it?"

The lawyer replied, "The pictures are of you and your secretary."


Today's marrieds joke
One lazy Sunday morning the wife and I were quiet and thoughtful, sitting around the breakfast table 
when I said to her unexpectedly, “When I die, I want you to sell all my stuff, immediately.”
“Now why would you want me to do something like that?” she asked.
“I figure a woman as fine as yourself would eventually remarry and I don’t want some other asshole using my stuff.”
She looked at me intently and said: “What makes you think I’d marry another asshole?”

Today's puns
                                                                                                    What type of shoes do spies wear? Sneakers.
                                                                                        Smaller babies are always delivered by stork, the larger ones by crane.

I invented a sandal for people with one leg. It was a flop.

You’re fat. Don’t sugarcoat it because you will eat that too.

I like to practice my knock-knock jokes, I just adoor them.

When people ask me if I have fun washing clothes I have to be honest and say loads.

What do you call a president that has to do a lot of laundry? Washing-ton.

I was going to tell you a joke about a blunt arrow but really there is no point.

Thieves broke into my house and stole everything except my soap, shower gel, towels and deodorant. Dirty crooks.

I used to go out with a girl the was secretly obsessed with graphs. She was always plotting behind my back.









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