FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: I'D LIKE TO THANK THE LITTLE PEOPLE EDITION.

Look, they can't all be winners.

One of the neat things about human beings is, we can be suffering through horrific political and societal collapse and still find fun and excitement in stupid diversions. For a lot of you it's sports -- for me it's the Oscars, which gets me to watch a bunch of movies at the beginning of the year and, when the awards are imminent (they're on Sunday night), puzzle over possible winners. I'll have those predictions by Sunday afternoon -- meantime if you wish you can pursue my reviews of the ten Best Picture nominees:  Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, One Battle After Another, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sinners, and Train Dreams. 

Also our first ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie this week is related; it's one of our Fun Friday, audience-participation things -- what are some of your favorite awards show moments? (BTW there are a lot of All Best Picture Winners Ranked lists out there, but let us never forget that Gone With The Wind is the absolute worst.)

OK, coffee break over, everyone back on your heads! The week in America was the absolute worst too. In Operation Epstein Fury, we killed a bunch of Iranians of all ages and some of our own servicemembers while Tubby yammered whatever contradictory ideas about what's going on went sloshing through his brain, his mouthpiece Drunky Pete snarled at the press for not printing his preferred bullshit, and Israel threw in extra war crimes for shits and giggles. Oh, and Tubby threw Putin a piece of the action. Trumpwar: Like regular war only stupider.

American conservatives are doing their part for the war effort by intensifying their usual demands that all Muslims be thrown out of the U.S., with Somehow Senator Tommy Tuberville taking the lead. (Why NPR calls Tuberville's ravings bigotry-in-quotes rather than just plain bigotry is beyond me -- haha, kidding, we all know why.) Some, like Erick Erickson, try for a Daily Double by blaming some crimes by Muslim-Americans on Democrats because they refuse to fund the DHS/ICE death machine, though it's hard to see how their ham-fisted immigrant hunts would have stopped these citizens and legally-present residents anyway -- I know their goons attack those people too, but it's a hell of a roundabout way of get at them; I guess their hope is that Tubby will just authorize outright racial pogroms, so that white people will be the ones committing all the crimes in America instead of just most of them.   

Oh, and here's your fuckface of the week, Nathan Cavanaugh, the smug little DOGE shit who fucked up the National Endowment for the Humanities for "DEI" content that, his recently released testimony in a lawsuit reveals, he identified simply by the presence of buzzwords offensive to Tubby ("because it explicitly says LGBTQ"). He said under examination that he had been made qualified to judge such material, despite no relevant experience, by "reading books and being well-informed outside of traditional experience"; under further questioning about the books that so educated him, Cavanaugh admits "there were no books." So it's fair to assume he just listened to Joe Rogan and took part in typical Young Republican edgelord chats until Elon Musk recruited him for his wrecking crew. Nuremberg II is gonna be lit. 

Oh, yeah, there's another ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie, about AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood; it starts with a rundown of some of my more measured commentary on the LLM scam, which is fortunate because by the time I got to addressing the insane video they sorta-created to promote this slop-hologram my rage was incandescent and not necessarily coherent. But see what you can make of it!