The other day I scrolled past this video on some social network. It’s from the NYPost, and if you don’t have the interest in clicking, it depicts Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Bezos partying in St. Barth’s. The cutline describes them as being at “celebrity hotspot” Nikki Beach, and sure enough, you can see them sitting in a booth as a howling DJ narrates a birthday parade of the usual crap — sparklers in a big bottle of something, presumably champagne, someone carrying a sign, etc. Mrs. B stands up on her seat and shakes her hips. Mr. B smiles broadly. What a good time they seem to be having.
The Bezoses were not alone in the Caribbean. There are apps that show the position of every vessel with a transponder, and apparently a bunch of billionaires and their yachts were spending New Year’s in St. Barth’s. So the Bezos were with their people. People who understand them, people who know their struggles, people who get them, because they’re the same.
And they spend their time at clubs where they stick sparklers into bottles of champagne. Honestly, I’d drown myself. Just go right over the rail into the warm Caribbean, hope an outgoing tide would carry me away.
I had my club years, don’t get me wrong. I remember yelling over the music, dancing, having fun. But — and this is key — it was over by my…27th birthday. I wasn’t 61 (as Bezos, aka Baldilocks, is) or 56 (as Lauren Sanchez, aka Beelzeboobs, is). Those two nicknames, which are perfect, are not mine, but I found them online and will use them forevermore.
Anyway, this observation dovetailed with something I read about the various photos included in the Epstein photo dump. Such ghastly rooms, where so much terrible stuff happened. No warmth, just weirdness. All that money and they can’t even hire an interior decorator?
How have we spent the last 50 years venerating the rich when they live like this? I ask you.
Onward. I swear, I keep clicking Unsubscribe on Semafor emails, but for some reason I keep getting it. In a recent issue, asking “what media leaders got wrong in 2025,” I read this, by Ryan Broderick:
This might be slightly premature to say, but I think the death of Charlie Kirk — and Trump World’s subsequent forced national observance of grief — is having the opposite effect of what I initially thought. If you had asked me in September what would happen, I would have said that Kirk’s murder was the American Reichstag fire, the moment the Trump administration and its great and powerful cyber army would finally conquer the information landscape and complete their authoritarian crackdown on free speech.
And a bit of that happened, sure, there was harassment, and doxxing, and people lost their jobs for insensitive posts about Kirk. But it didn’t last. Only a few months later, there is no bigger joke on the internet than Charlie Kirk. Every feed is full of Kirkified slop and AI brainrot mercilessly making fun of MAGA’s martyred influencer. The tail of history is long and these things always evolve, but, as it stands currently, Kirk is the Harambe of the 2020s and MAGA has never felt more cringe, old, and worst of all, boring.
Ain’t that the truth. And you know why? The widow Kirk. Everybody grieves differently, but when you’re taking the stage maybe a month after the assassination of your husband, wearing skin-tight leather pants, enough makeup to shame Tammy Faye and with pyrotechnics announcing your entrance, even true believers are going to be put off and perhaps ask, “Who are these freaks?”
Finally, in the ritual of closing the 2025 planners and starting the 2026 versions, I found the list of books I read last year. Nineteen, well under my goal of 25, but much of my fall was spent reading for the writing class I took, so: oh well.
That’s what fresh slates are for. Full speed ahead, and have a good weekend.
Peter said on January 2, 2026 at 8:04 am
I was at a New Year’s Day party yesterday, and a casual acquaintance told me that she watches Fox News a minimum of one hour a day. “Oh my God, why?” asked someone. “Because I need to study my enemy to keep my hatred sharp and pure”.
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Jeff Gill said on January 2, 2026 at 8:54 am
Meanwhile, back at Versailles:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DS-iRe7kZ5e/?hl=en&img_index=1
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alex said on January 2, 2026 at 9:19 am
If I want to know what the enemy’s doing, I don’t look to Fox. I already know that it’s pandering to the stupidest of the stupid. Instead I peruse the daily newsletter from Bari Weiss’ Free Press, which caters to people who aren’t necessarily stupid but also not what I’d consider well informed. They seem to fall for the faux journalistic gloss she puts on agitprop and her elevation of fringe actors.
Today Bari’s rag is validating YouTuber Nick Shirley and his sensationalized stories about day care scams in Minnesota. Of course, mainstream media are all complicit in shooting down his reporting. Poor “citizen journalist” just can’t catch a break.
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ROGirl said on January 2, 2026 at 10:22 am
Sparklers in champagne bottles — not a good idea
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c8xdxvj2qjdt?post=asset%3A57a9dd91-9564-4ac0-afca-0be3291de166#post
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Mark P said on January 2, 2026 at 10:29 am
All those rich people together in the same place at the same time? What a missed opportunity!
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Deborah said on January 2, 2026 at 11:06 am
Marco Rubio always looks miserable, especially when he smiles. Judge Winebox always looks drunk. What’s the deal with Mrs. Stephen Miller getting so much attention lately, what has she done besides marrying her horrific husband?
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Alan Stamm said on January 2, 2026 at 11:27 am
What was juvenile fun for some at a St. Barth’s beach club was deadly early yesterdsay at a Swiss ski town:
“Investigators said that sparklers attached to bottles of champagne were the likely cause of the fire that tore through a popular bar during a New Year’s celebration in the Alps, leaving 40 people dead and dozens badly burned.” — The New York Times
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tajalli said on January 2, 2026 at 11:50 am
How boring. Ticking all those mandatory boxes to prove you’re having fun. And as tastefully decorated as that snowmobile crusted over with barnacles and algae.
Gives new meaning to the line in the Buddhist Heart Sutra, “Emptiness is Form and Form is Emptiness.”
Or from the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, “like a fool putting on a performance in the midst of a crowd, looking everywhere outside himself to find himself” [meaning a mistaken behavior to be avoided].
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Icarus said on January 2, 2026 at 11:54 am
All those rich people together in the same place at the same time? What a missed opportunity!
Too hard for a surgical strike and carpet bombing would hurt the hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent worker bees.
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susan said on January 2, 2026 at 12:21 pm
Too hard for a surgical strike and carpet bombing would hurt the hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent worker bees.
Should have sent in Bloodmeal Team Six to set charges on all those boats.
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nancy said on January 2, 2026 at 12:45 pm
It was a missed opportunity for the orcas to do the human race a solid. Not to mention provide us with hours of shaky video entertainment.
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Dexter Friend said on January 2, 2026 at 2:33 pm
I used to swim way the hell away from shore in oceans, The South China Sea, The Atlantic and Pacific. Once I swam so far out from Isle of Palms, SC beach the horizon appeared to sink. Never saw a shark but I would never venture out like that again. I did see a water-krait off the Nha Trang coast before I knew they were extremely venomous.
I am going back to the previous blog post. I was never on a snow machine, called snowmobiles around here. It must have been 46 years ago when a work friend, Frank Stuckey, was killed on a snowmobile around one the lakes near Angola. Later my friend and our union president, Greg Ford, was severely injured on one of those machines. Then I have an old work pal, Greg Wagner, whose parents live on Houghton and he is always carting his machines up there and he and his son go sometimes over one hundred miles on Houghton Lake. He loves it. Just as I never gave a damn about golf, I just never even thought about getting on a snow machine.
To wit: the photo.
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Deborah said on January 2, 2026 at 3:06 pm
I’m looking forward to being in NM tomorrow where it will be a high of 53º in Santa Fe.
Today is LB’s birthday but we’re celebrating tomorrow. I was 24 when she was born so that makes her *mumble mumble*. I was a good decade younger than mothers with newborns these days, but that was normal back then.
Spending a lovely, lazy, sunny day in Chicago, although it’s cold of course, so happy not to have anything to do or anyplace to go until the crack of dawn tomorrow.
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Julie Robinson said on January 2, 2026 at 5:06 pm
Happy Birthday, Little Bird! May it be a wonderful day.
It’s in the mid-60’s and we’ve been out on walks everyday along with half our neighbors. Our little crunchy granola neighborhood is suffering teardowns like the one down the street. A behemoth is rising with a price of 1.8 million. Of course we’ll never meet these neighbors out for a walk; they’ll be working every available hour to pay the mortgage.
Rubio’s glossy wife needed to get him to a tailor for that tux. The sleeve length makes true the little Marco appellation.
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FDChief said on January 2, 2026 at 10:52 pm
I’m not so sure that the failure of Operation Kirk Wessel needed his widow to roll out as a rhinestone cowgirl. The bottom line always was that 1) Chuckles himself was always a “terminally online” wingnut sort of freak that the other terminally online wingnut freaks just assumed was “popular” because they liked him., and 2) when the normies were exposed to him post mortem the reaction was what you’d expect; something between indifference and loathing.
I’d seen a brief snip from one of his campus “debate” videos and my immediate reaction was “Christ, what an asshole.” My guess is that 95% of the non-wingnut viewers had a similar response.
So I don’t think it was as much a reaction to the grotesque Widow Kirk as the usual wingnut idiocy; assuming that normal people share their freakish obsession with things like trans people or immigration or DEI.
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Gretchen said on January 3, 2026 at 1:48 am
Mrs. B was in her seat until she remembered that she’s the “fun new wife” and had to act like the fun new wife and get up and dance on her seat. She’s in her 50’s but she’s hoping nobody will notice if she gets enough plastic surgery and acts fun enough.
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Gretchen said on January 3, 2026 at 1:49 am
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
— Kurt Vonnegut
Bezos, Musk, Ackerman, and the rest of them will never have enough
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alex said on January 3, 2026 at 7:47 am
So Tubby has abducted Maduro and will be putting him on trial here, and will be pounding his chest at eleven this morning. I don’t plan to watch.
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nancy said on January 3, 2026 at 8:47 am
Not only that, Tubby pardoned the president of Honduras, after he too was arrested and tried for drug trafficking. Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of the FIFA Peace Prize.
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Jeff Gill said on January 3, 2026 at 9:18 am
As @mattyglesias said on Xwitter:
Of course, I detest Maduro and stand with the people of Venezuela in their hopes for a better future.
But I’m concerned that pursuing regime change in this haphazard way undermines the credibility of the FIFA Peace Prize.
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Mark P said on January 3, 2026 at 9:50 am
The U.S. has gone rogue. I think a worldwide embargo on all trade with the U.S. would be an appropriate response. Maybe that would encourage regime change here.
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JodiP said on January 3, 2026 at 10:39 am
I am pretty worried about what the Project 2025 cabal will do as more people open their eyes. I see the kidnapping of Maduro and the bombing on the mainland partly as a distraction tactic for the Epstein files, and of course the pursuit of oil.
I have been pretty much out of the news cycle expect for my morning routine of listening to the previous day’s Marketplace and Market place Tech. I took the week off to get settled into my new house and have been listening to a lot of music.
Happy Birthday Little Bird! I hope you have a good year ahead.
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FDChief said on January 3, 2026 at 11:10 am
The Cheneyites learned the hard way that sometimes the initial invasion is the easy part.
Like much of the post-colonial world, Venezuela has never had a sustained period of decent governance. Maduro is a symptom , not the disease.
The “best case” from this for Felony Fats is a quiet coup that clamps down on local uprisings. Sad, and bad for the people there, but good for Tubby.
Christ, what a mess.
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basset said on January 3, 2026 at 12:19 pm
I’m shivering right now, in a camo folding chair partly concealed in the lowest branches of a big cedar, and wearing, for the first time, a St. Hubert medal that two of my Catholic friends gave me at the start of the current deer season. Hubert is the patron saint of hunters, dogs, and several other constituencies, and he was the original breeder of the dog that later became the bloodhound, possibly the basset too.
I’ve been carrying him in my wallet, but today I put him on a string around my neck to mark the end of the season and we’ll see if that makes any difference. Would be good to shoot one more that I can donate to Hunters for the Hungry; ideally, it’d walk by me while I can still feel my fingers.
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Sherri said on January 3, 2026 at 1:20 pm
And when the indictment of Maduro is thrown out of court in New York, or he’s acquitted in New York, what then? Gitmo?
With a normal administration, you could believe that they wouldn’t take such action unless they had a rock solid case with a bulletproof indictment. This administration, however, has demonstrated that they don’t have lawyers capable of doing such work.
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Sherri said on January 3, 2026 at 2:14 pm
We were told that blowing up the fishing boats was about fentanyl, even though Venezuela isn’t a source of fentanyl. We were told that the none of it was about regime change in Venezuela.
Now, we’ve kidnapped the leader of Venezuela and the indictment they dusted off from 2020, is all about cocaine. Pay no attention to the Honduran leader we just pardoned for his cocaine trafficking.
Trump wants to implement the Monroe Doctrine, with him in charge of all. He doesn’t care about any constraints the Constitution supposedly places on him. He doesn’t believe in constraints placed on him.
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Jakash said on January 3, 2026 at 3:53 pm
I’ve appreciated that Joseph Heller / Kurt Vonnegut anecdote ever since I first read about it, Gretchen @ 1:49 a.m.
I don’t want to exaggerate, but the ascendancy of folks who are so empty inside that they can never have enough, paired with an at-least 45-year-long crusade by Republican enablers to make sure that they can keep as much of what they get their grubby mitts on as possible, has more to do with what’s so fucked-up about this benighted nation than almost anything.
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Sherri said on January 3, 2026 at 5:54 pm
Rubio tries to claim that this was just a law enforcement action, with the support of the Department of “War”. Okay, if we are just arresting a fugitive and bringing him to justice, as he claims, why are we now going to run Venezuela, as his boss says?
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Dexter Friend said on January 4, 2026 at 9:02 am
The Rumsfeld saga, the neocons live!
I went crazy on Facebook as the details were unveiled. Illegal, unwarranted, dangerous.
Many Congress people only seem to have hurt feelings they could not have been the ones to approve this fiasco. Some, a few, condemned the operation. Colombia, next up. Cuba? Hints/promises of a blockade of all goods and oil into Havana Harbor.
Trump likely will not live until the next term; he looks and sounds “about goddam day-ed”. But damn, as long as he is half-awake, he is bound to destroy the nation and the hemisphere.
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alex said on January 4, 2026 at 11:46 am
I’m about to unfriend a stupid chud who posted this morning that liberals went from No Kings to supporting a Venezuelan dictator, ha ha ha.
I don’t know how you even begin to explain to someone so stupid just how stupid they are for posting something so fucking stupid. I suppose you don’t. You just ghost them and leave them guessing.
Today spending some time at our trashed rental property trying to figure out what to do next. I get so furious every time I look at it that it saps my energy and short-circuits my brain. Plus, we’re waiting for a fuller assessment of the collapsing slab and how much mud-jacking will be required to shore it up, and whether I’d be wasting time and money on cosmetic improvements before that work is done.
I’m finding my refuge in cooking these days. I have a big hambone off of a spiral ham and I’m going to make a lentil soup with it and make savory crepe filling out of what’s left of the meat. Can’t wait to get to those tasks, and then hosting dinner for family again.
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Julie Robinson said on January 4, 2026 at 3:03 pm
Yum, lentil and ham soup. We just had split pea and ham to use up the last of our ham. I could eat homemade soup every day of the year.
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