Just saw an old clip of Siskel & Ebert reviewing Alien in 1979. Damn, how good the world of 1979 looks from here.

RFK JR: the American Lysenko en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_...

Now would be a good time to inform people that a hotly contested primary is worth billions in ad sales and ad revenues, and guarantees book deals and TV time for the punditry. Presidential elections are the media's Black Friday, and they will spin their asses off to make them sellable.

Perhaps it's time to explore the possibility that Orange Man really is bad. 🤔

I had no idea how expensive smoking is. A pack of cigarettes costs, on average, about $10. Now, how many lives has that saved, and how much strain on the healthcare system has it reduced, as people smoke less simply because of the cost?

Afroman ✊🏾

As one of the most criminal people in the world, Trump sure calls for the death penalty a lot.

Trump's healthcare plan: 1) Suggest he might be in favor of Medicare for all, or something similar. 2) One of his kids creates a meme coin. 3) Insurance companies buy a $billion of the meme coin. 4) Trump stops talking about healthcare.

James Woods is leaving the Republican Party, the party of bombing, invasions, international kidnappings, mass roundups, and self-harming tariffs, because it isn't extreme enough for him. We live in an Onion article.

AI is becoming such a hot button issue that companies are calling it "large language models" instead of AI, to hide what they're doing.

Speaks for itself, in any language:

LITERALLY sanewashing Nancy Mace. Just wild. Crazy even. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Israel, the "shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East." It would be one of the greatest jokes in history, were it not one of the greatest tragedies in history.

I guess FIFA wants its "peace prize" back now?

Trump is, BY FAR, the highest paid entertainer in the history of the world. Nobody else comes close. He and his family make corrupt deals for billions, and in return the country gets a never ending series of spectacles. I wonder how many people think it's a good deal.

Imagine the kind of person to whom this is a clever jab, the kind of person who thinks, "Hey, those leftists don't care about what cartel hitmen do." There are literally millions of them. Lee knows his audience, but he also knows there's an audience even he has to be aware of -- sometimes.

Saw an add by some insurance company association talking about all the great things they are doing for people. Call it the Luigi Mangione Effect. Of course, they are spending insurance premiums on ads instead of on their policy holders, but never mind that!

The phrase "out of his gourd" is particularly apt, given his orange hue. There have been so many danger signals, and they are being allowed to pass by.

If the UK can arrest Andrew, surely the U.S. can arrest a far bigger criminal, a far worse traitor?

When I was a kid I used to weekly walk past some kind of country club-like place which was owned by the local newspaper. Employees of the newspaper were automatically members. They could afford this because owning a local newspaper was practically a license to print money. Now look at it.

The Bad Bunny Super Bowl thing is emblematic: A business wants to expand its reach into other cultures, and MAGA sets its hair on fire in protest. Meanwhile, right wing media, which knows exactly what is going on, fans the flames, while the MSM sits back and profits from televising the fire.

All the cutsey little nicknames, the ego-soothing rallies are gone. Now is the time for real grifting.

Erika Kirk looks hard, calculating, predatory. Nothing about her is sympathetic. What a character to have as a figurehead of your movement.

Looked at twitter for the first time in ages. Holy 💩, but it has become a cesspool where the scum of the earth fling poo around. I don't understand how anyone can look at that place and not realize just how UGLY the internet conservatives are as human beings. Just dreadfully nasty.

When I think about the future, it's endless iterations of stuff like this, but it just gets worse.

A multiple-accused rapist who is in the Epstein files made a documentary about the wife of an adjudicated rapist who is in the Epstein files, but also in the White House. What in the hell happened to this country?

A lot of the old "Tulsi Gabbard is the true progressive" crew ended up, like her, becoming Trumpists or Trump adjacenists. Which should surprise nobody who pays attention to such things. Extremist politics are always full of opportunists who have decided they can't compete in the mainstream.

The great crisis of our age is that there aren't enough people for whites to look down on. In some ways, you can look at immigrants as imported scapegoats.

Nobody reading this has been alive in a world without Dick Van Dyke in it. Have no idea what that means, but it sounds profound. 😐

Imagine being a member of the age cohorts that were handed the keys to the oldest democracy in the world, and are driving it into a wall.

I briefly worked in journalism, both print and broadcast, and it didn't work out for me. Over the years I've had many opportunities to be grateful, and today is another one. I do feel terrible for those people who have poured their lives into it and done honest, conscientious work, only to get /1

I remember in the late 90s how optimistic I was about the internet. I don't remember exactly when I lost that optimism, but it couldn't have been later than about the mid-aughts. The Howard Dean craze started it, but I think it was mainly just common sense coming to the conclusion that capital /1

It's instructive to see how the media covers the expectation that the Republicans are on track to getting their ass whipped, to the way they cover when the Democrats are about to. In the one case, they just state it. With the Democrats, it's endless blaming, how they do this wrong, that wrong, /1

All this stuff about Melania (the person) being "inscrutable" and so on is quite funny. In reality, there's simply nothing there to be scruted. It's an example of the media trying to project something onto someone to make them a fit topic for discussion.

I'm not religious myself, but if I were a practicing Catholic I would find the cover of this Reagan propaganda book off-putting. In fact, I find it off-putting anyway. But the idea the Church should be subservient to *the right kind of* secular Leader is modern Republicanism.

The fundamental lie that politicians tell is not about what THEY will do, but what PEOPLE are. And what people are means politicians have to tell that lie if they hope to get elected.

It's a sobering thought, but if this stain on the country is ever removed, there will be people who will miss him for the perpetual drama. Not just the media people who depend on it for business, but regular people, who like it. We ain't in this mess by accident.

AI slop, but funny. Bezos as Bond villain Blofeld is just perfect. youtu.be/v0YsZq0p5vQ?...

The last quarter century of American politics: hire a screwup to screw up a perfectly prosperous situation. The screwup screws everything. Hire a non-screw up to fix the screw up. Hire screwup to screw everything up again. Rinse, repeat. This might be one screwup too far.

This Melania thing, with a bunch of crooked mega-rich people sitting around in a gilded room watching a bad movie while making crooked deals, while armed thugs are roaming the streets terrorizing citizens reminds me strongly of the Hunger Games.

I had a girlfriend who would complain that she had no food in the house. Her freezer was stuffed with frozen meat and vegetables, but to her, that was -- and this is a direct quote -- "crap food." Good food to her came in packages, like frozen burritos, chips, stuff that today is called ultra 1/

They are everything we teach our kids not to be.

Never a big Bowie fan, but damn did he ever see the future here. www.youtube.com/shorts/-7Q3I...

Trump has given the money boys everything they wanted, and now he's becoming a political liability. What advantage do they have with him, vs replacing him with JD Vance?

BBC now paywalled. Damn, I miss the internet when it was good.

It's clear now that the 2nd Amendment kooks, when they talk about "defense against tyranny," mean the tyranny of gun control. In essence, in their minds they have guns to protect their right to have guns. All other forms of governmental oppression aren't tyranny.

Trump has turned ICE into a hate group.

It's too bad "For What It's Worth" has been played into the ground, because it's literally never been more relevant than it would be today.

There are ~350 million Americans. I would bet large sums that over a million of them watched Pretti's murder and pumped their fist, either shouting at their TV or thinking "That's what these liberals deserve."