Month: November 2024

Trump’s incoming FCC chair already putting TV networks on notice they’ll be punished for coverage Trump doesn’t like.

I ran across this Mozart motet a couple of weeks ago and saved it for later. I don’t usually care for “Operatic” style singing but in this case, I find Ms Richardson’s voice something I can listen to over and over. It is a beautiful way to begin the holiday season.

Enjoy, Jack

Exsultate, jubilate (Exult, rejoice), K. 165,  by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Suprano soloist, Nola Richardson

Elon Musk, DOGE, net worth $315.7b
Linda McMahon, Education, $3.2b
Howard Lutnick, Commerce, $2b
Doug Burgum, Interior, $1.1b
Scott Bessent , Treasury, $1b
Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE, $960m
Kelly Loeffler, Agriculture, $800m
Chris Wright, Energy, $171m

This feels like the Boris Yeltsin era, when Russia’s oligarchs took advantage of an aging & somewhat incapacitated leader to privatize the state for their own interests.

How far down he stoops no one knows.

Attribution: Trump Cabinet Pick Insanity by Dave Whamond, Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com

2025 version

The ‘mad egghead’ who built a mouse utopia | Science | The Guardian

As he summarised his results, Calhoun again befuddled his audience, telling them of a class of mice that had appeared after the rodent population bomb had exploded and the population had rocketed. These were what Calhoun dubbed “the Beautiful Ones” – mice that spent their time grooming themselves and eating and shunned all social behaviour. The Beautiful Ones, Calhoun told his audience, were “capable only of the most simple behaviours compatible with physiological survival”. In time, Calhoun came to believe that if we didn’t act to stop a potential human population bomb from igniting, we would see human parallels.