AGAIN, THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: In other news, 9th Century tribesmen. Are acting like it’s the 9th Century.
January 29, 2026
THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Fraud Concerns Spread From Minnesota to Ohio. Anti-fraud efforts were already underway in Ohio, officials say, long before outrage over Minnesota Somali fraud spread suspicions to the Buckeye State.
Expect unrest to follow, since the unrest is designed to hide the fraud.
IT’S ENTIRELY POSSIBLE YOU CAN’T HATE THEM ENOUGH: No Matter How Much You Hate the Media. You don’t hate them enough.
January 28, 2026
SHE’S BEEN DOING A LOT OF WORK ON THIS: Morrigan’s Mercantile! Shiny, Sharp, and Stylish…
OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Birds Aren’t Real.”
The New Hotness?
i owe all the schizophrenics an apology for doubting them https://t.co/2NirkkRq0d
— ໊໊ (@juniorkingpp) January 27, 2026
DUCKWORTH V RUBIO AND IT WASN’T EVEN CLOSE:
There have been few times when I could ever say I’d learned something from a Senate hearing – most instances turn into a partisan grandstanding shriek-a-thon, like Duckworth’s did.
But today has been informative and has had some humor, too.
We are very lucky Marco Rubio told Trump he’d take the jobs…and the next one…and then that one…and that.
Oh.
And the other one.
JD Vance shouldn’t believe he has the 2028 nomination in the bag just yet.
THE B-57 IS A 75 YEAR OLD JET: NASA research jet makes fiery ‘wheels-up landing’ after experiencing mechanical issue.
RICK MORAN: Iran Has Entered a ‘Doom Loop’ Thanks to the Internet Shutdown.
The government claims about 3,100 dead protesters, including hundreds of security personnel. The UN claims 14,000-20,000 dead. Reports emerged in mid-January that the sheer number of casualties in Tehran and other major cities exhausted the supply of body bags, with authorities reportedly using semi-trailer trucks to transport the dead.
The protests have quieted, largely thanks to security personnel shooting or arresting anyone who dares protest. More than 40,000 people have been arrested. How many of those poor souls will emerge from captivity is unknown.
The internet in Iran is still down, and authorities are terrified of reinitializing it. Their vast internal intelligence networks are telling them that the people are not going back to blind obedience to the regime.That’s because with the internet down, commerce in Iran has come to a screeching halt. Store shelves are empty. People aren’t working. In a nation sitting on an ocean of oil, most gas stations are closed.
This has led Iran into a “doom loop.” Commerce has slowed to a crawl, meaning the conditions that led to the economic protests in the first place have only worsened. It’s inevitable that this will lead to more protests and another crackdown.
How much longer the regime can last is an open question.
Related: How Trump could use his ‘beautiful armada’ to crush Iran.
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Starfleet Academy Sucks — And We’re To Blame.
After joking, “Wait, do they still exist?” the Drinker quotes from an article last week at the Mary Sue which claims: Those Dudebros Mad at ‘Starfleet Academy’ Aren’t Actually ‘Star Trek’ Fans.
Time and time again we’re confronted with “fans” of something who continue to miss the lessons within the media they’re consuming. We’ve seen it with Star Wars, our superhero stories, and it has become an increasing problem with Star Trek “fans.”
More recently, men like The Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic, known for hating anything that seems to be left leaning, have been dogging on the Paramount+ slate of Trek shows. The issue with these Right Wing figure heads talking about Trek is that they miss one important detail about Star Trek: It was never for them.
From the start of Star Trek way back when (60 years ago, to be exact), the series set out to do one thing: Change the world. And that it did. It made history for its inclusivity, including being the first interracial kiss on television in “Plato’s Stepchildren.” The kiss was between William Shatner’s James T. Kirk and Nichelle Nichols’ Lt. Uhura.
It really wasn’t: Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nancy Sinatra got there first, a year earlier, in 1967. Similarly, Star Trek was envisioned right from the start as a show for a mass audience, which by its nature means people from all sides of the aisle. The words “mass audience” were used explicitly in the writer’s guide of the original series, which aired on NBC from 1966-1969:
YES, THE STAR TREK FORMAT IS ACTUALLY THAT SIMPLE. IF YOU’RE A TV PROFESSIONAL, YOU ALREADY KNOW THE FOLLOWING SEVEN RULES:
I. Build your episode on an action-adventure framework. We must reach out, hold and entertain a mass audience of some 20,000,000 people or we simply don’t stay on the air.
II. Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry. Joe Friday doesn’t stop to explain the mechanics of his .38 before he uses it; Kildare never did a monologue about the theory of anesthetics; Matt Dillon never identifies and discusses the breed of his horse before he rides off on it.
III. Keep in mind that science fiction is not a separate field of literature with rules of its own, but, indeed, needs the same ingredients as any story — including a jeopardy of some type to someone we learn to care about, climactic build, sound motivation, you know the list.
IV. Then, with that firm foundation established, interweave in it any statement to be made about man, society and so on. Yes, we want you to have something to say, but say it entertainingly as you do on any other show. We don’t need essays, however brilliant.
If anything, Star Trek: The Next Generation, performed even better when compared to other syndicated TV series, as the L.A. Times reported in 1988:
It has taken no time at all for an audience apparently made up of hard-core Trekkies and more recently won devotees to embrace the new “Star Trek” family. In first-run syndication, which means it airs on different days at different times on each of its 210 stations (locally on KCOP-TV Channel 13 Sundays at 5 p.m., repeating Saturdays at 6 p.m.), the new show has earned a national 10.6 Nielsen rating, which translates into an average weekly audience of about 9.4 million households.
While that total audience is about half what Top-10 network shows, such as “Growing Pains” or “60 Minutes,” produce each week in prime time, it is about equal to such network prime-time staples as “Spencer: For Hire” and “The Disney Sunday Night Movie.”
Playing mostly out of prime time, those numbers, Harris said, exceed Paramount’s initial expectations.
And demographically, the raw data that is used to set advertising rates, the show’s numbers are even more impressive. During the February sweeps, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was the most watched show in its time period among Los Angeles-area men 18-54, according to Don Searle, KCOP’s research director, even beating the Winter Olympics.
The demographics were so good that Paramount’s share of the advertising revenue generated from the series each week is reportedly close to $1 million–greater than the approximately $800,000 license fees the networks generally pay for a one-hour prime-time program.
Those shows succeeded because the story came first, before the messaging, as the 1966-era Trek writer’s guide demanded. All of the modern-era streaming Trek are woke messaging first, story second (or third). Why, it’s as if:
If you read through the press materials it’s clear everyone involved thinks the most salient part of Star Trek was that it was a political show about the 60’s. And in that one misunderstanding you can see why everything has gone wrong https://t.co/1x4qtRYnp5
— George MF Washington (@GMFWashington) January 16, 2026
MEDIAITE: BBC Confirms Authenticity of Viral Video Appearing to Show Alex Pretti Kicking Agents’ Car 11 Days Before Shooting. “The BBC confirmed the authenticity of the video in their 10 p.m. GMT news broadcast. Reporter Ros Atkins said the man in the video ‘has the same coat, facial hair and gait as Alex Pretti and a facial recognition tool suggests a 97% match. We see him shouting abuse at the agents.’ Separately, a spokesperson for the BBC confirmed to Mediaite that they reviewed the footage and verified its team did use facial recognition technology on the video.”
UPDATE: This is CNN:
Last night on CNN.
Ana Navarro: Alex Pretti was the perfect guy. He's the guy that you want to date your daughter. He's the man you want your son to be. They can't malign him because we have the videos.
Turns out Ana didn't have all the videos. pic.twitter.com/M7s3zBS8JQ
— MAZE (@mazemoore) January 28, 2026
I DON’T NEED TO READ ANY FURTHER: Study finds meat eaters are more likely to live to 100.
HMM: Doctors May Be Missing an Early Heart Warning Window for Men. “Past research has consistently shown that men tend to develop heart disease earlier than women. In recent decades, however, common risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and diabetes have become more similar between men and women. Because of that, researchers expected the gap to shrink. Instead, the difference has remained.”
VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D can help protect you from flu, study reveals.
DATING IN 3,500 BC: The origin story of syphilis goes back far longer than we thought.
LOOK FOR TROUBLE, AND YOU’LL USUALLY FIND MORE THAN YOU WANTED:
🚨 LEFTIST HOAX DESTROYED 🚨
New video shows Alex Pretti violently attacking federal officers and destroying federal law enforcement vehicles. His firearm is fully visible in the footage.
This video PROVES that Alex Pretti was not an ‘innocent bystander’ or ‘legal observer’
He… pic.twitter.com/hFiNfkKRik
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 28, 2026
From the replies: “Just a hospital nurse. Out running errands. Handsome guy too.”
YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE PAST, BUT YOU CAN MAYBE STOP IT FROM REPEATING: FBI Raid Vindicates Georgia Election Concerns — Even If It Changes Nothing.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why New Cars Look So Huge: We’ve always had big cars. So why do new ones look so gargantuan?
CHRISTIAN TOTO: All Jimmy Kimmel Does Is Lie (And Cry). “He’s the King of the anti-Trump Resistance. Comedy? Laughs? Merriment? That’s no longer his prime directive, and it hasn’t been for some time.”
BOMBSHELL: Video Shows a Man Who Looks Like Alex Pretti Spitting at, Confronting Federal Agents. Not to mention “kicking the tail light of their vehicle on January 13:”
MUST WATCH: Footage of an a man who looks like Alex Pretti with a gun in his waistband, spitting on and attacking federal law enforcement officers and kicking the tail light of their vehicle on January 13.
Bombshell report from the BBC.
Important context: Pretti was not a… pic.twitter.com/snzEO8rU8w
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 28, 2026
“If this video is verified as accurate, and more information comes forth, then it further cements the veracity of recent reporting that Alex Pretti was no peaceful protestor or innocent bystander. Pretti was an anti-ICE activist who sought confrontation and did what MN Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan encouraged: he put his body on the line.”
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