The Biggest Loooooooooser

Who was surprised by the New York Times story which revealed that Fat Hitler is a terrible, TERRIBLE businessman? And now the New York state lawmakers have just voted to release his more recent state taxes. It's going to be REAL entertaining learning what tranche of funding is responsible for the $53-million-dollars-per-year income he makes on compound interest.

Maybe he has a joint checking account with Oleg Deripaska.

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I appreciate NPR but it so often fails this Republic in presenting the news fairly. For example, the following is an approximate conversation between Congressman Hakeem Jeffries and NPR host Alisa Chang that was broadcast today:

Chang: Do the Democrats intend to impeach?

Jeffreis: We need to get the unredacted Mueller Report before we make a judgement.

Chang: Yes, but is impeachment off the table?

Jeffries: It is neither on the table or off the table. We need to gather all the information first.

Chang: But will you impeach?

Jeffries: We cannot impeachment without an indictment and you can't have an indictment without information.

Chang: But impeachment!

Jeffries: Look, we can't...

Chang: IMPEACHMENT! IMPEACHMENT ! IMPEACHMENT!

It was clear that Ms. Chang REALLY wanted Jeffries to say the Democrats were going to impeach. This is not a sober journalist here. This is someone attempting to deliver talking points to Fox News.

Fuck you, Ms. Chang.

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It's alarming to think that "Avengers: Endgame" is a near-perfect allegory for the state of this country over the past 40 years or so. Ever since the Reagan presidency Conservatives have been accumulating stones of authoritarianism, beginning with the war on unions, then the War on Drugs, all the way through the PATRIOT ACT and into paperless/auditless voting. We're literally at the point where a snap of the Supreme Court's five conservative fingers could kill half of government that keeps us safe from the other half.

(Thanos' "kill half of all living creatures" idea is, horribly enough, a white supremacists dream because it's not the white half that would die. Ugh.)

Meanwhile, strong, thoughtful Democrats have been appearing almost like clockwork. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris, and our own "Captain Marvel", better known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie emerged from stasis to remind us that Captain America still lives while Nancy Pelosi has a lot of Nick Fury in her. Howard Dean was an early casualty. I miss him.

Trump isn't Thanos, though, because Fat Hitler, like all Hitler's, can be defeated. He can be voted away to dust if, by that time, we're still allowed to vote. What cannot be destroyed are the accumulators of vast wealth whose Big Picture viewpoint is what they can own, not what's left over after they've fucked it all up. No doubt, like Thanos, after they've "cleansed the world" they see themselves going back to The Garden (Oh, my gawd. Another Biblical metaphor.) to live out their lives in pastoral solitude. Wherever it is, it won't be among the shattered remnants of the America they destroyed.

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I finally went to see "Avengers: Endgame" last night. I expected nothing more that three hours of mindless pop-culture entertainment and, for the first fifteen minutes, it delivered. Then they started talking about quantum time travel and that's when I threw my Junior Mints at the screen.

Well, I wanted to, anyway.

A brief aside: Except for "Primer" any movie that attempts to seriously use time travel as a plot device is, in my humble opinion, a load of hot garbage. Disney may just as easily have ended the movie with "And then she woke up" and gotten the same result. Time travel is nothing but the tool of lazy writers.

Now for a big, fat spoiler regarding this time travel nonsense.

You know at the end, where Captain America appears as an old man? That means he was 90 years old and still grieving for his dead wife when the final battle with Thanos occurred. He did not wield Mjolnir and he did not cast lightning from his fingertips into into Thanos' nose and out his bung-hole. There is no other logical way that bullshit, tear-jerking ending could have happened. It was a shameless attempt to give the audience their quantum cake and let them eat it, too.

Furthermore, they didn't even TRY to explain the two Nebula's giving each other the evil eye. My head hurt just watching those scenes.

(Technical aside: If you perfect time travel you don't need spaceships, cars, or even elevators because it's space-time, too, baby. Fuck time travel stories.)

These are just two egregious examples. I could go on like this for hours. And it probably seems like I already have. Anything to not think about that fucking miserable Russian tool in the White House, I guess.

ARGGGHH!

There's a Youtube channel called "CinemaSins" which very cleverly lampoons this type of lazy writing. I can hardly wait to see what they do with "Endgame" because it offers no little ludicrous gristle to chew on.

So did I like the movie? No, because I'm an adult. I'm completely pissed that the creative teams spent ten years carefully crafting a 22-movie story arc that deliciously led up to a momentous conclusion and then said "Fuck it! Let's get paid."

God damn you, Disney. God damn you to Hell.

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And finally: Congratulations, Denver voters, for decriminalizing god's little mushrooms. You rock!

=Lefty=