by John Walters
Philip Finis
Prince Philip, whose story many of us became familiar with via The Crown, has passed at the age of 99. The Duke of Edinburgh, who married the future Queen Elizabeth in 1947 when he was 26 and she was just 21. Born in Greece into both Dutch and Greek royalties, he served in the British Royal Navy during World War II after being educated in England.
Some of our favorite episodes during The Crown‘s run revolved around Philip, particularly the one where he is off at boarding school. Possibly the best episode in the entire series.
Where Do We Go Wrong As We Grow Up?
It’s Right There In The Name
Let’s not forget that there remain plenty of senators worse than Democrat Joe Manchin. To wit, Mitch McConnell (The GOAT of sinister senators), Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. But with a name like Manchin (phonetically, please), maybe people should’ve realized he’s an elephant in donkey get-up.
Lately Manchin has said that abandoning the filibuster is a non-starter (he won’t even contemplate returning it to its talking filibuster requirement, which is going to make any updated version of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington a dreadful bore) and yesterday he said that the “the lesson” of January 6 is that we need more bipartisanship.
Wrong, wrong and wrong. The lesson of January 6th is that if you give bullies an inch, they’ll try for a mile. And that if you fail to punish them, they’ll only try again.
Is Manchin a dope? Or is he someone who simply doesn’t realize what he really is?
She Blinded Me With Science
Brazil
Yesterday 4,249 Brazilians died due to a variant of the coronavirus. What began as an epidemiological has morphed into a human catastrophe, as time and time again evidence has shown that governments ruled by narcissistic, ignorant alpha males (we used to call them “macho”) and whose populace put them in power due to a profundity of ignorance and nationalistic tendencies (read: fear of people who don’t look like them) wind up faring far worse than those nations led by intelligent, moderate people.
New Zealand? They’ve basically eradicated the virus.
Brazil, whose president Jair Bolsonaro has downplayed the gravity of the virus from the start, is now setting daily records while it eclipses 4,000 deaths per day. Then again, I’ve long thought that men like Bolsonaro and Trump really never worried too much about the death toll as they probably think it’s a way of ridding society of people whom they’d like to eliminate anyway. The old, the weak, the poor.
The Beauty of Twitter
When Luke Skywalker himself reacts to a post about Darth Vader. That’s a scene that was filmed 45 years ago.