“How Donald Trump Could Weaponize US Surveillance in a Second Term”.
“The Scottish woman who claims to be the inspiration for Richard Gadd’s hit Netflix “Baby Reindeer” has sued the streamer, seeking monetary damages of at least $170 million.”
“Republicans keep asking, completely dishonestly, why so much criminal suspicion surrounds Donald Trump. They say it’s all being orchestrated by Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. They insist it’s an effort to interfere with his election campaign. They say a lot of things, but if ever there was a case where Occam’s razor applied, it’s this one. Trump is surrounded by criminal suspicion because he’s a criminal.”
“For parents to believe that their kids are better off without a phone during a school shooting, they’d first need to believe that American schools know how to reliably protect students from guns. And that is one strand of magical thinking that parents seemed wholly unwilling to entertain.”
“Billions of dollars in infrastructure funding are flowing into cities and towns nationwide, nearly three years after Congress passed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan bill approving the cash. And some vulnerable House Republicans are tacitly taking credit for the local funds, despite opposing that bill.”
Something is going to happen to Paramount Plus. Not fully clear what just yet. Leave Star Trek: Strange New Worlds alone, that’s my main concern.
“When I hear people starting to complain about political correctness — and I understand why people might push back on it — but to me that’s a red flag, because it sometimes means something else. I believe being aware of certain sensitivities is not a bad thing. I don’t know how else to say it.”
“Ten players from the 1983 North Carolina State men’s basketball team that won the national championship have filed a lawsuit against the NCAA and the Collegiate Licensing Company for unauthorized use of their names, images and likenesses.”
“That said, I think we can all agree that the felony conviction should disqualify Hunter Biden from running for higher office. Certainly, three felony convictions should preclude him from running for President of the United States. Within the next five months, Congress should consider amending the Constitution to prohibit convicted felons from running for the highest office in the land. Such an amendment would certainly have my support.”
RIP, Mark James, Houston-born musician and songwriter whose works include “Suspicious Minds,” “Hooked on a Feeling”, and “Always on My Mind”.
RIP, Jerry West, basketball legend, longtime Lakers executive, inspiration for the NBA logo.
“A spokesperson for Major League Eating (MLE) told ESPN that [16-time champion Joey] Chestnut had chosen to “represent another hot dog brand” and therefore would not be allowed to participate in the [Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest] contest, which is held annually at New York City’s Coney Island.”
Some candle news, for those of you who are into that sort of thing.
The good news is that this means Ted Cruz can go back to liking post by porn stars again.
“The Southern Baptist Convention endorsed a statement opposing in vitro fertilization.” Your move, Senate Republicans.
“I just think people in power or people that have the power to make change should do it instead of the 17, 18-year-olds trying to do their work for them.”
“As we mentioned on Saturday, there’s a generation gap between white evangelicals whose earliest memories are the 1990s and those of us a bit older who can remember the 1970s and early 1980s. Millennials never experienced evangelical Christianity that was not shaped by and for and around anti-abortion politics, but Gen-Xers and Boomers did. We remember the Before Time, and we remember watching the transformation and redefinition of our faith take place in real time.”
“Duran Duran’s original ‘Rio’ girl, the Mona Lisa of the new wave age, finally found after 42 years”.
Another lawsuit filed by the adult entertainment industry against a state anti-porn law, this time in Indiana.
“Now the Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF.”
“The majority’s reading flies in the face of this Court’s standard tools of statutory interpretation. Today, the majority forgets that principle and substitutes its own view of what constitutes a ‘machine gun’ for Congress’.”
“Perhaps these public performances of dignity loss are so expected at this point that people take them as a given. But I think there’s a bit more to it than that.”
RIP, Robert hughes, legendary Fort Worth ISD basketball coach and the winningest coach in U.S. high school boys basketball history.
RIP, Lynn Conway, pioneering microchip designer. She was fired by IBM in 1968 for undergoing gender transition surgery. IBM apologized to her many years later and saluted her as someone who helped define the modern computing industry.
RIP, William Anders, NASA astronaut who took the famous “Earthrise” photo while on the Apollo 8 mission.
A brief history of Donald Duck, who just turned 90. He’s in a new short cartoon that was fun to watch.
Paul Pressler has died. He will escape accountability for his alleged crimes, at least on earth.
Donald Duck & his gang are the only characters in the Disneyverse that I ever really cared for; but my affections had nothing to do with the animated version. Rather, it was the imagination of Carl Barks, at the time anonymous creator of Donald, his three nephews with their Google-like Junior Woodchuck Guide, Uncle Scrooge, who went from Klondike gold miner to the World’s Richest Duck & perpetual nemeses the Beagle Boys, supernaturally lucky cousin Gladstone & brilliant Gyro Gearloose (with his own lightbulb muse), and all the exotic places they visited on Scrooge’s dime (which he only parted with painfully). Read these and you will know what’s missing from the Disney Soul.
My grandmother kept a ton of my uncle’s old comics from the 50s and 60s, which I read obsessively as a kid. The Donald Duck Extended Cinematic Universe books were indeed a ton of fun. And you didn’t even mention Grandma Duck. 🙂