Holidays are over, now it’s back to reality. Ugh. I’ve still got the plague.
Nicolás Maduro jailed in New York as Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela – live
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/jan/04/nicolas-maduro-jailed-us-attack-venezuela-donald-trump-reaction-latest-news-updates-live
Canadian officials say US health institutions no longer dependable for accurate information
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/canada-us-health-institutions-information
Miami mayor calls for Trump to ‘immediately’ reinstate TPS for Venezuelans
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/04/nx-s1-5666340/venezuela-nicolas-maduro-venezuelans-asylum-seekers-refugee
Stonks!
Stock futures are steady after U.S. attacks Venezuela, captures Nicolas Maduro: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/04/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
Belgian PM’s cat Maximus is social media star with ‘subliminal political message’
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/04/belgium-bart-de-wever-cat-maximus-textoris-pulcher-social-media-instagram
Have a great day!
…white house residents generally go canine…but belgium isn’t alone in the cats that way…larry at no. 10 used to be on twitter & now seems to be
https://bsky.app/profile/number10cat.bsky.social
…maybe,,,for the US…we say it’s jorts?
https://bsky.app/profile/jortsthecat.bsky.social
…but…instagram…it’s a foreign country over there…like…ummm…threads?
Threads is 100% the “Avatar” of social media: lots of people appear to be into it but I forget it exists until someone else brings it up.
I think anybody who has a Facebook account or an Instagram account is automatically “enrolled” in Threads, whether they use it or not (to use it, you have to create an account — but you can do that with Facebook or Instagram, hence my suspicion). Meta says that’s not true, but even if it isn’t, I think they’re lumping all the registrations together to plump up the numbers. I don’t trust them and I’m pretty sure there’s absolutely zero independent verification of numbers. They can claim any numbers they like.
If it were Meta claiming this I’d fully agree, but “active users” does suggest more than just a membership count. But that’s also notoriously hard to pin down, so I’m still skeptical as hell.
That said: Twitter’s usage has always been WAY lower than I think the average person realizes? It has an outsize effect because it often sets narratives that show up elsewhere (social media, regular media, your racist uncle’s screeds) but its user base, even in the heyday, was always muuuuch smaller than FB or WhatsApp. So it’s not shocking that something like Threads could surpass it even if it has basically zero cultural impact; it’s the “NCIS” that tens of millions of people watch but nobody writes about to the “Heated Rivalry” that maybe a million people watch but is inescapable in cultural coverage.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Threads feeds videos to my Facebook account so if I click on one, does that make me an “active user”? I suspect it does, even if I don’t have a Threads account.
When we are in Brussels (I cannot stop talking about this trip) I will have to go to Rue de la Loi and meet this cat myself. I will say that I am a Trump emissary and if you don’t let me meet the cat we will kidnap you and annex your country. If we did this we might FINALLY get edible chocolate in this country.
Didn’t Belgium recently not have a government for two years or something? They survived. I wonder if we could try that. Thoreau was right: “That government is best which governs least.”
We have had cats in the White House. Chelsea Clinton had Socks, betraying a distinct lack of imagination, naming a cat Socks, and tween Amy Carter, presumably not under the influence of drugs, had a cat called Misty Malarkey Ying Yang. It was the 1970s.
What the fuck is threads? How am I online in 2026 and have no recollection of another twitter knockoff existing???
Anyway, can’t comment much this morning. Last night my son forcibly removed my wife and I from our bed to stand trial on charges of not giving him enough cookies. Apparently he has placed the cat in charge at home. This is just how we live now.
Are you a Trollope fan? Because I am. I love novels that were written in the past and run to hundreds of pages. And Trollope was so prolific. I’ve read the Barsetshire novels (fictional county in the West Country, close by Hardy territory…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now
Is the cat named Little Marco?
I dunno, apparently my son wants to evict the neighbors now and install their dog as El Presdente. This is out of control!
…they should warn you at the registry place when you call them “calvin”
Is there anything that is not a grift w/ this guy?
…if that account is literally him…that might force some things to get looked at…but I don’t know who made that connection or how?
I sincerely doubt it was him, or even any of his people. (OK, maybe Barron.) But it speaks to the fact that yet again, it got out wide enough that someone could do it. Also why TF can you bet on that, though that’s a separate concern, I get it.
Where will Shitler try to attack next? Place your bets!
https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/trump-timeline-greenland-denmark-response-36497394
Greg is going to be on Thom Hartmann today talking about this…
https://www.gregpalast.com/when-venezuelas-president-delcy-rodriguez-banged-on-my-door-at-2am/
Comrade Zoh’s new tenant advocate has called home ownership “white supremacy!”
https://www.newsweek.com/zohran-mamdani-tenant-advisor-home-ownership-white-supremacy-11307264
I would advise her to take a trip to southeastern Queens, several areas of Brooklyn, parts of the Bronx, and my very own building to observe that non-whites can and do own their own homes in NYC.
Cea, if I can call her that, is whiter than I am. That’s saying something. She now lives in Crown Heights. That means she displaced an Orthodox Jew or a Black resident. Thirty, 35 years ago, that was 99% of the population. Google the Crown Heights riots. Now it’s Williamsburg East, home to twee fair-trade, organic tea and coffee shops and bars that sponsor art exhibits, some of them interactive, and Days of Action, which never seem to go anywhere. But my hat’s off to the new white Christian newcomers. They must have voted overwhelmingly for Comrade Zoh. The older/more traditional demographic, the Black folks and the Orthodox, no doubt went for Cuomo.
…it might be a bit like the “black people can’t be racist” thing…in that I can kind of see what someone might mean that would mostly make sense but it doesn’t really hold if you phrase it that way
…real estate is by far the largest asset most people ever log…& that does tend to produce a leverage effect when it comes to trans-generational wealth…so the extent to which the world moved on from “the landed gentry” to…say…the family trump…across a timeframe with a lot of redlining type hallmarks…you can kind of see where that sort of statement might be coming from even if it isn’t altogether accurate across the board?
Yeah, that relies on some technicalities/semantics of how you define “racism.” The interpretation that it’s exclusively built by and for white people would mean that, yes, a Black person by definition cannot be included. There’s some truth to that! But they can absolutely be bigoted against other minorities and minority groups, and Kanye West (or Kyrie Irving) being wildly anti-Semitic or homophobic, it’s like OK, yes those are other -isms but it’s not as dissimilar as I think some debaters would like it to be.
Or even more directly:
Well if you take a Libs of Tik Tok post seriously, then yes, she did tweet it and she’s also not wrong in the sense that one big reason white Americans are on average worth lots of money and Black Americans are not is because real estate lending practices made it difficult to impossible to build home equity over generations for one group and not for the other.
Ya don’t say?
https://popular.info/p/venezuela-raid-enriches-maga-billionaire
huh…found a wierd new thing on the interwebs…highlighted by oppo
https://opposite-lock.com/topic/133609/non-americans-screaming-at-us/2
seems a lot of people are getting kinda ticked off people are mad at them and theres nothing they can do?
i mean…wether or not yous can do anything aside….
why the fuck would we know how the states work?
the world would be a better place if people only had opinions about shit they understood…..but thats not how people work
and its a bit rich….that americans are complaining about loudly vocalized opinions that are wrong.