Be kind, goddammit!

 

Would you believe it?  All that wasted electricity.

Who do they think they are?  Telling us how to think.

How much did that cost?  And where is the baby Jesus?

All this and more is doubtless burning through the haternet as Dr. Jill Biden unveils her first White House holiday decorations.  Some of us, however, are glad to say goodbye to the Tim Burton-inspired

"fucking Christmas decorations" of the recent past.  A small thing, but defiantly gladdening.

There's not much gladness on offer, what with the new super-contagious Omicron variant shutting down whole countries.   Israel closed its borders on the first night of Chanukah, which is upsetting, and don't even think about visiting Bethlehem this year.  Anthony Fauci has come in for a fresh onslaught of abuse from the usual gang of idiots who think they know more about respiratory diseases than someone who has fought them for five decades.  Am I wrong, or does he look younger and happier as their rants get dumber?  Fauci has remained apolitical his entire career but he's being dragged into it now, and he has a lot of anger stored up.  When Ted Cruz demanded he be prosecuted for lying to Congress about how he and China invented the pandemic, Fauci retorted, "I should be prosecuted?  What happened on January 6, Senator?"  No response yet from Cancun's most famous fugitive.  Keep asking, Doctor, the Thompson commission would like to hear his answer.

Most people have never heard of the FQMSP but they have the power to ruin breakfast for half the world.  The Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers take that responsibility seriously and are releasing 22 million kilograms of syrup from their strategic reserve to cover increased demand (all those people working from home while eating waffles) and make up for a shorter sap season.  I for one am glad we can still rely on the OPEC of sugary happiness.  Of course, the price will go up.

The price of everything is up, from gasoline to haircuts, and the wise pundits have already declared Joe Biden a one-term president if he doesn't wrestle prices to the mat.  Why isn't he on Twitter eleven times a day blaming everyone but himself, "your favorite president"?  Does he even know how to do the job?  

What's Kyle up to today?  He's taking an online nursing class at Arizona State and a campus alliance of lefty students wants him expelled.  "Our campus is already unsafe as is and we would like to abate this danger as much as possible," they wrote, on the assumption that one day the little shit will have to show up in person, nursing being a hands-on sort of training.  Is he crying yet?  Depends who's watching.

Here's something else I did not know:  For the previous four years there was a VPDB.  That's because Trump was so lazy, ignorant, uninvolved and just plain dumb that the Presidential Daily Briefing was usually delivered to Mike Pence.  The intelligence community just gave up on Agolf Twitler.  We came full circle from 1945, when Harry Truman took office without having heard of the Manhattan Project, among other things.  Jeez, even Bush II got a daily briefing.  He ignored it the day it was headed "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US," but he read it before he went fishing.  And now I'm thinking of the BBC I, Claudius, where Antonia wants to get word to Tiberius by concealing a letter in a book Claudius has written.  Her son demurs -- he's not happy with the copyist's workmanship.  "Fool!" she erupts.  "He's not going to read it unless it has pictures of naked women!"  I'll bet that would have made the PDB more intriguing to Trump.

George Orwell, player?  Orwell famously had little to say about his first wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who died during a hysterectomy.  He married Sonia Brownell on his deathbed.  The women in his novels, even Julia in 1984, tend to the forgettable.  But a cache of letters newly discovered reveals a man who wrote to two girlfriends throughout his short life and liked to share long walks and ice skating with them (one at a time).  His adopted son Richard Blair says, "He wanted a bit of an open marriage with my mother Eileen, but she put her foot down."  Well.  For me the most shocking fact is that "he wrote them almost identical letters."  Like Sir John in The Merry Wives of Windsor?  Yeah, women love that.

Who is Ron Filipkowski?  I kept seeing his name and I finally checked him out, finding a man who had a real road-to-Damascus experience last year.  He was a Republican, a prosecutor, appointed to the 12th Judicial Circuit Nominating Commission by Ron DeSantis.  Then Florida's top data scientist Rebekah Jones was fired and subjected to an early-morning armed raid for refusing to fudge the covid numbers.  Filipkowski was already an anti-Trumper but he didn't settle for signing on with the Lincoln Project.  He quit, became a Democrat and a defense attorney in Sarasota, and now tracks the right on Twitter (so you don't have to).  He bills himself as General Counsel for the Woke Mob.  There's hope for everyone.  Almost everyone.