The Daily Populous Saturday March 1st, 2025 morning edition
Authored by esquire.com and submitted by OkayButFoRealz

On Friday, in the Oval Office, the president of the United States embarrassed himself, the nation, and every thinking human being on earth. He—and his vice president—berated Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in front of the press and public. Zelenskyy gave it right back to him, thank God, making it clear that he wouldn't be bullied into accepting a "deal" produced by negotiations to which he had not been invited to participate. The president of the United States reacted like an angry child, repeatedly calling the Ukrainian president an ingrate, relitigating the whole mock "scandal" regarding Hunter Biden and Burisma, apologizing to Vladimir Putin for the mean things that people like "Shifty Schiff" said about him during Impeachment 1, and, eventually, lapsing completely into angry incoherence while Zelenskyy looked to be on the edge of decking him right there on the carpet. Zelenskyy left town without signing the mineral-rights deal that the president had sought so enthusiastically.

TRUMP: You have to be thankful. You don’t have the cards. You’re buried there. Your people are dying. You’re running low on soldiers.... You’ve got to be more thankful, because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards. With us, you have the cards, but without us, you don’t have any cards. It’s going to be a tough deal to make, because the attitudes have to change…. You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out. And if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. And I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.

Vance chimed in like the good little lapdog he is:

I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems. You should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to this conflict.... Do you think it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that’s trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

Man, fck these people. I thought the Nixon tapes were the wildest things I'd ever heard out of the Oval Office.

It is considered axiomatic among cradle Catholics that adult converts are the worst. Too many of them are attracted to HMC because they have a sweet-tooth for ancient ceremony, imperial pageantry, and really big hats. None of these plush accoutrements have the slightest thing to do with the teachings of a young rabbi in first-century Judea, of course, and I continue to subscribe to Garry Wills's admonishment that Jesus did not create a papacy of any kind, let alone a garish and extravagant one. For that matter, he didn't create an institutional church, let alone one with its own secret archives, its own library, and a collection of art that is second to none. Yet too many adult converts see all of this incense-stained filigree as the real message of the gospels. And the American members of the species are also particularly interested in political power and the means to acquire it. Newt Gingrich, for example, was one of them, as was Sam Brownback and the late Robert Novak. Their public activities never demonstrated an affection for the beatitudes or for the 25th chapter of Matthew.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ ”

Does that sound like the mission undertaken in public life by Vice President J. Divan Vance? Yeah, not to me either.

On Friday, he spoke to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, and we have entirely too many of these things that the elected officials of our secular republic are expected to attend. Vance went long on the whole victimization thing.

I feel very confident in saying that between protecting the rights of pro-life protesters, between ensuring that we have an opportunity to protect the rights of the unborn in the first place, and importantly, protecting the religious liberty of all people, but in particular Catholics, I think that we can say that President Trump, though not a Catholic himself, has been an incredibly good president for Catholics in the United States of America.

He is, of course, the most upfront heathen ever to sit in the White House, a member of the Church of the Inverted Bible, but carry on, Second Banana.

Now we know of course the last administration liked to throw people in jail for silently praying outside of pro-life clinics. We know that they like to harass pro-life fathers of seven, very often Catholic fathers, for participating in the pro-life movement. And we know that the last administration wanted to protect taxpayer-funded abortion right up until the moment of birth. On every single one of those issues, in 30 short days, Donald J. Trump has gone in the exact opposite direction.

The last part is an outright lie, and Vance knows it, and so do most of the people who showed up to eat waffles and pretend that they're all not part of the Sanhedrin.

Any list of great Gene Hackman performances that doesn't include his spectacular—and uncredited—turn as the blind hermit in Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein is woefully incomplete. In it, Hackman demonstrated how brilliant he would have been in the 1930s and 1940s. (Part of this was the film's gorgeous black-and-white photography. Hackman's face looked like it came out of the great Eisenstein films Ivan the Terrible or Alexander Nevsky. He was the American Cherkasov.) And it is an incredibly funny couple of minutes in an incredibly funny film. I have missed him on the screen since his retirement, and his death this week came as a considerable shock, especially since the circumstances now seem to be quite weird. Maybe I should make an espresso?

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: "I Ate Up The Apple Tree" (Pin Stripe Brass Band): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: March 1 is traditionally St. David's Day, the feast of the patron saint of Wales. Here, from the 1910s, is the celebration. It seems to involve an impressive array of headgear. There is one little girl watching from the sidewalk, and she appears to be holding a footstool. I do not know what that's all about. History is so cool.

This weekend is the 70th anniversary of John B. Keane's pub, the great good place in Listowel in County Kerry. (My family comes from what we like to call the Greater Listowel Metropolitan Area. So do a great many sheep.) On my first visit there, Mr. Keane, the famous author and playwright, was working behind the sticks himself. He chatted me up about what I was doing in town, and he pulled me a pint. He then refused payment. "You're a writer," he explained. "You have no money anyway." I'm sure the craic will be running high this weekend. My kingdom for a personal jet.

Here's some stupid for lunch. From Politico:

The order, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Friday and confirmed by a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly, marks the first time the U.S. will have an official language at the federal level.

It rescinds a mandate from former President Bill Clinton, left in place by each subsequent administration, that required agencies and other entities with federal funding provide language assistance to non-English speakers.

Now, the White House says it is “unifying the American people” under the most common language.

Yeah, I look to these jamokes for unification at all times.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. From Popular Mechanics:

According to a translated statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism & Antiquities, a multi-year archaeological projected named “Reviving the Ancient City of Gold” has revealed the ancient gold mining operation. And the project didn’t stop at just finding the site.

Mohamed Ismail Khaled, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that the remains of a 3,000-year-old gold processing complex—which included a fully equipped facility for extracting gold from quartz veins and featured grinding and crushing stations, filtration and sediment basins, and ancient clay furnaces designed for smelting gold to create a pure product—showed off the highly orchestrated nature of the mining operation.

To make it all possible, gold miners eventually had an entire residential district on site. This space featured houses, workshops, temples, administrative buildings, and Ptolemaic Period bathhouses. Khaled said that the team identified architectural remains from both the Roman and Islamic periods. The evidence of the use of this space well after the creation of the initial encampment shows that it remained a popular option for multiple people groups.

The Branson of ancient Egypt! With gold mining! Steve Wynn is building a time machine as we speak.

Hey, Live Science, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Megaraptorids were a group of fearsome predators in the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). They lived in the ecosystems of Australia and South America, which were joined together via Antarctica as part of a massive southern landmass called Gondwana.

Study lead-author Jake Kotevski, a paleontology doctoral candidate at the Museums Victoria Research Institute and Monash University in Australia, described megaraptorids as a "hands first predator" with muscular forearms and long, curved claws for catching prey—they effectively bring their prey in for a "hug of death," he said in a video released by Museums Victoria.

The fossils discovered by Kotevski and his colleagues belonged to an unspecified 120 million-year-old megaraptorid that was 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 meters) long—making it one of the largest theropods (a bipedal group of mostly meat-eating dinosaurs) ever discovered in Australia. It also predates megaraptorids in South America by around 30 million years.

I am still grooving on the whole notion of "the hug of death." They just couldn't help living then to make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and by the crash in Washington, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, with winter coming on, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.

DChristy87 on March 1st, 2025 at 02:10 UTC »

I'm particularly impressed with the section of video where a reporter mocked Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit. Zelenskyy said maybe he'd put on a costume afterwards, like the reporters. Maybe nicer. And he was able to craft such a beautifully underhanded insult in a second language.

Zelenskyy conducted himself so well in such a hostile environment surrounded by pathetic and weak men that were attacking him at every turn.

Absolutely legendary man and I think it's neat that I'm living in the same time period as him. His people are lucky to have him.

NuevoXAL on March 1st, 2025 at 01:31 UTC »

A really frustating thing about the post-truth America is that the people that need to recognize this as an example of how bad the administration is will only see this filtered through layers of bullshit. Fox News is going to a solid week of primetime programming about how wearing a suit is the only thing that matters. Joe Rogan is going to do a 3 hour podcast "just asking questions" implying that maybe Russia is right. Your uncle on facebook is going to spread memes about how Trump is a strong man putting a dictator in his place.

The result is that Republican voters will still vote Republican next time around.

BukkitCrab on March 1st, 2025 at 01:25 UTC »

If Trump loves Russia so much, he should move there and rid America of his foul presence.