1/ The godfather of climate change reporting is Bill McKibben, and he has done his best to make us all aware of the dangers of doing nothing for 30 plus years, so this article in the New Yorker is especially relevant. He summarises where we are now, and looks realistically at what he thinks will happen politically.....and it ain't good news folks, but read it anyway....if you aren't informed you can't protect yourself and your family.....
Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence—and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man.
I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. In 1988, George H. W. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality.
2/ SNL's cold open with Kate McKinnon as Laura Ingraham.....five amusing minutes....
Saturday Night Live opened up their latest show with another Fox News spoof with Kate McKinnon‘s Laura Ingraham front and center.
“Hello, again. I’m Laura Ingraham and you’re watching The Ingraham Angle which re-airs on Telemundo as La Madre del Diablo,” McKinnon as Ingraham began. “Later in the program, celebrities in California are whining about some tiny wildfires, while our heroic president is under constant attack from rain.”
The SNL Ingraham further made an outrageous claim about voter fraud before opining, “You can’t dismiss that idea simply because it isn’t true and sounds insane. In fact, let’s add that to our list of ‘feel’ facts. Which aren’t technically facts, but they just feel true.
3/ Andrew Sullivan with an interesting column.....
It’s been quite a while now that the phrase “cold civil war” has been bandied about. And it’s useful, so far as it goes. Polarization has now become tribalism, and tribe is now so powerful a force it is beginning to eclipse national loyalty. The two nations, to borrow Benjamin Disraeli’s description of 19th-century Britain, stand facing each other, without blinking, faces flush, equally matched, on trigger alert for offense or another set battle. What we don’t quite know is if this tenuous, balanced equilibrium is sustainable indefinitely, the system careening from one party’s bitterly contested rule to gridlock and back again, until our tribal tensions are somehow exhausted.
4/ Seth Meyers with "A Closer Look" at Trump, Hannity and other topics.....a pretty good 8 minutes....
On Wednesday night, Late Night host Seth Meyers mocked President Donald Trump‘s reported frequent phone calls with Fox News personality Sean Hannity.
During a segment called A Closer Look, Meyers started by noting that during an interview with Fox News, Trump basically said he doesn’t really have a decision-making process.
5/ Hmmmmm.....
6/ Time for another look at the original [2015] "Alien Abduction" with Kate McKinnon, one of the funniest skits ever.....watch Ryan Gosling and indeed all of the cast lose it....
In the first of the five sketches, we’re introduced to the basic premise that would later serve as the outlier of the sketches to come: McKinnon’s Ms. Rafferty, Cecily Strong’s polite Southern broad, and another Southern bumpkin played by the host (here, Ryan Gosling) are being interviewed by two NSA experts tasked with learning about their respective experiences. (Aidy Bryant has been in all five, while Bobby Moynihan was in the first three, with Mikey Day replacing him when he departed the show.) “Close Encounter” deals with the trio being the first verified case of an alien abduction, and within a minute, Gosling begins to crack when McKinnon pontificates about how the aliens instructed her to urinate.
7/ Matt Taibbi with commentary on the evil Amazon and why it located it's new HQ in Virginia and New York.....
The Washington Post seemed happy about Amazon’s decision to divide its new headquarters between New York and Crystal City, Virginia, outside of D.C., noting the amazing benefits both communities will receive by the arrival of the web-retail behemoth. The company expects to create 25,000 jobs in Northern Virginia by 2030, and generate $3.2 billion in tax revenue, in addition to investing $2.5 billion.
Who better to trumpet the virtues of this job-creating, capital-investing deal than the richest person in modern history, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos? He sounded pleased as heck to be part of all the wonderfulness.
8/ Tom Tomorrow with "Trumpie Bear"....
9/ Stephen Colbert on form....a very good eight minutes....and some Trump comments from his Fox interview you probably haven't seen before....
Stephen Colbert kicked off the new week on The Late Show by running through a list of President Trump‘s most roast-able moments throughout the weekend. Of course, there was no way Colbert could pass up a chance to talk about Trump’s very juvenile (accidental?) insult for Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA).
There’s been a lot of confusion lately since, as Colbert noted, many people couldn’t tell if Trump made a typo or a deliberate insult yesterday when he referred to the upcoming House Intelligence Committee chair as “Little Adam Schitt.”
10/ While Trump trolls the media with outrageous tweets etc, the real damage to our country is going on behind the scenes......read what the EPA is doing and NOT doing under the quiet but deadly Andrew Wheeler.....scary....
If you could design the ideal character to assure the continuing domination of Big Coal and Big Oil in America and to reaffirm their faith in their God-given right to cook the climate in pursuit of profit, that character would look a lot like acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. And the odd thing is, if you met “Andy,” as his many friends call him, at one of his popular Halloween parties at his brick house in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, you would probably think he was a great guy. He’s 53, gray hair, glasses, a stout Midwesterner with a warm and friendly manner. He is unfailingly civil to everyone, no matter if you are right, left, enviro or Oklahoma wildcatter.
11/ I'm in two minds about putting in this skit from SNL, with Steve Carrell as Jeff Bezos, making Bezos out to be a good guy and he's not, quite the opposite....
But it trolls Trump cleverly....three minutes...
By the time you read this article, you’ve probably also read a tweetstorm from President Trump about this sketch. It seems designed in a lab to achieve that precise response. SNL continues its recent Season 44 streak of talking about Trump rather than actually portraying him onscreen with this pre-taped segment that feels like a “Weekend Update” segment transferred to film. Carell’s Bezos purposefully waits after each “dad” joke he delivers, delighting in the sarcasm he unleashes toward the president over the location of his new offices, the new delivery option (AmazonCaravan), and the sheer wealth gap between himself and the president.
It’s worth noting, however, that this sketch is positioned as a David vs. Goliath fight. In fact, it features one of the richest people in history and glosses over what is by, most accounts, an incredibly unfair deal for the citizens in New York City and northern Virginia. Aside from a brief mention at the outset that literally no one besides Bezos seems thrilled with how the headquarters lottery went down, the sketch plants the Amazon CEO firmly on the side of anti-Trumpers.
12/ Excellent column from Andrew Tomasky in the Times.....
Think 2020 Will Be Better for Senate Democrats? Think Again
Without a smarter approach to rural America, liberals will be stuck in the minority for a long time.
13/ Bill Maher's season finale opening monologue was a good one.....six funny minutes.....
In the season finale of HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher began his monologue by thanking his “head writer” Donald Trump, and explaining how he just really “needs a fuckin’ break from this guy,” hence the two-month hiatus (the show returns on Jan. 18).
The political satirist then lashed out at the president for his ugly response to the wildfires that have ravaged California, decimating entire towns and leaving over 66 people dead as well as hundreds more missing.
“Of course, Trump’s response—you saw that—was to blame the victims, threaten to withhold federal funds,” said Maher. “This is what he does every time there’s a disaster. Wildfires? ‘You mismanaged your forests.’ Mass shooting? ‘You should’ve been armed.’ Hurricane? ‘Your island is very inconveniently located.’ His response to every tragedy is, ‘How can I hurt?’ He is to empathy what food courts are to ambiance.”
14/ Occasionally, just occasionally the rich bastards screwing us get what they deserve.....so this story about the secretive Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, the opioid makers is a good start....
Members of the multibillionaire philanthropic Sackler family that owns the maker of prescription painkiller OxyContin are facing mass litigation and likely criminal investigation over the opioids crisis still ravaging America.
Some of the Sacklers wholly own Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, the company that created and sells the legal narcotic OxyContin, a drug at the center of the opioid epidemic that now kills almost 200 people a day across the US.
15/ Interesting story from Matt Taibbi about the crisis that is hitting Russia, and how their issues are our issues too......
On Thursday, the Russian Duma held its first reading of a new bill: “On the Citizenship of the Russian Federation.” According to the newspaper Kommersant, the government has prepared a paper representing a “first step toward a serious review of immigration policy.” Included is the idea that:
Russia should be open not only to Russians and Russian speakers, but to anyone who is loyal and willing to integrate into Russian society.
Russia, you see, has a serious problem with population decline. They’re expecting a 28 percent plunge in women of childbearing age by 2032. Their population peaked at about 148 million, in 1991.
16/ Lady Gaga with the beautiful "I'll Never Love Again" from "A Star Is Born"....
Todays 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 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 roomful 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...
Todays hunting joke
