Firing squads, Oreos, Chicken Rentals, Florida Man returns
It's the Day of the Dude!
Observations by and for the vaguely disenchanted; information, essential and otherwise, for the day ahead.
Visit KGB Overset for the memes, cartoons, humor, news, and miscellany that didn’t fit in today’s newsletter. You can also follow KGB Report on Bluesky or Facebook.
Please like and share. It really helps!
Knee Deep in the Hoopla
The Trump/Musk firehose of folly continues, and it’s impossible to review all but the most egregious outrages here. The Associated Press, NBC, Aljazeera, and The Guardian are my picks for keeping up to date. Check out one or two, take a look, and come back here when you’ve had enough.
The Simpsons cartoon above accurately depicts me watching Trump’s speech last night. I can’t do it any more. More irritating (and frightening) was the sight of the Republicans cheering at each outrageous claim. Stephen Colbert described the event as “Filled with useful lies and applauded by useless idiots.”
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of the facts and evidence.”
-John Adams
Zachary B. Wolf and Curt Merrill of CNN deserve combat pay for annotating and fact checking a transcript of Trump’s speech last night.One way of dealing with the egg shortage: Rent The Chicken.
Elon Musk’s DOGE staffers have quite a nice salary—thanks to taxpayers. Wired reports that some software engineers and executives who are part of DOGE are drawing six-figure salaries, in some cases from the government agencies they are cutting. For example, Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer assigned to the General Services Administration who helped lead attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health, is pulling in $167,000 per year.
This is the biggest Trump-Musk scandal that no one’s talking about. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ushering in a new age of bribery, graft, and corruption to American politics.
Trump rips the mask off of John Roberts’ court in one sentence: “Thank you again, I won’t forget it.”
Trump is coming for Social Security. And he has a new “Big Lie” to justify it. (Video)
The US is killing someone by firing squad for the first time in 15 years. Here’s a look at the history. Convict chose firing squad over the electric chair or lethal injection.
More than you need or want to know about Oreos.
Florida Man returns! Florida man swallows nearly $1M in stolen Tiffany jewelry before arrest, Orlando police say.
Shirt of the day (click on image)
KGB Quote of the Day:
“Rules cannot substitute for character.”
--Alan Greenspan (Wikipedia link)
(More Alan Greenspan quotes from the KGB Quotations Database)
Among other things, today is- in no particular order of importance-
KGB REPORT STUFF! (Click on link) On This Day:
1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrived at Guam.
1808 – The first college orchestra in US was founded at Harvard.
1820 – The Missouri Compromise was signed into law by President James Monroe, which allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, and Maine as a free state. It also made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.
1834 – York, Upper Canada, was incorporated as Toronto.
1836 – Texas Revolution: Battle of the Alamo: After a 13-day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, were defending the Alamo were killed and the fort was captured.
1857 – The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 7–2 in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case that the Constitution did not confer citizenship on black people.
1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.
1933 – Great Depression: President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a "bank holiday", closing all U.S. banks and freezing all financial transactions.
1946 – Ho Chi Minh signed an agreement with France which recognized Vietnam as an autonomous state in the Indochinese Federation and the French Union.
1951 – Cold War: The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg began.
1964 – Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad officially gave boxing champion Cassius Clay the name Muhammad Ali.
1965 – The Temptations' single "My Girl" reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
1966 – SSgt Barry Sadler’s "The Ballad of the Green Berets" reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
1970 – An explosion at the Weather Underground safe house in Greenwich Village killed three.
1970 – The Beatles’ “Let It Be" was released as a single. It was the band's final single before Paul McCartney announced his departure from the group. (Video)
1975 – The Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown in motion to a national TV audience for the first time by Robert J. Groden and Dick Gregory. (Video)
1981 – Walter Cronkite signed off as anchorman of the CBS Evening News. (Video)
1987 – The first Lethal Weapon film was released in the US and Canada.
1990 – The last SR-71 Blackbird flight under the Senior Crown program set four speed records en route to the Smithsonian Institution. (Video)
1992 – The Michelangelo computer virus begins to affect computers.
2018 – Forbes named Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person, for the first time, at $112 billion net worth.
Read for free with Kindle Unlimited! Quotes by or about persons born on this date (Click on link after name for quotes):
1483 – Francesco Guicciardini, Italian historian and statesman (d. 1540)
1619 – Cyrano de Bergerac, French author and playwright (d. 1655)
1755 - Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, French poet, novelist and fabulist (d. 1794)
1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English-Italian poet and translator (d. 1861)
1885 – Ring Lardner, American journalist and author (d. 1933)
1909 – Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Polish poet and author (d. 1966)
1923 – Ed McMahon, American comedian, game show host, and announcer (d. 2009) (Video)
1927 – Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian journalist and author, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014)
1936 – Marion Barry, American lawyer and politician (d. 2014)
1939 – Adam Osborne, Thai-Indian engineer and businessman, founded the Osborne Computer Corporation (d. 2003)
1940 – Willie Stargell, American baseball player and coach (d. 2001)
1944 – Richard Corliss, American journalist and critic (d. 2015)
1947 – Rob Reiner, American actor, director, producer, and activist
1954 – Jeff Greenwald, American author, photographer, and monologist
1963 – D. L. Hughley, American actor, producer, and screenwriter
1972 – Shaquille O'Neal, American basketball player, actor, businessman, sportscaster, and rapper
Other birthdays:
1906 – Lou Costello, American actor and comedian (d. 1959) (Video)
1948 – Stephen Schwartz, American composer and producer (Video)
1959 – Tom Arnold, American actor, comedian, and television host (Video)
If you like KGB Report, please share with a friend.
Subscribers get all content for free. If you sign up for a paid subscription, you get my eternal gratitude, and maybe some occasional photos of the dogs and cats here at the South Park Casa de Pelaje y Cajas de Arena.
Old KGBReport.com archives (not the stuff here on Substack)
Current weather in South Park, PA (Personal station on Weather Underground)
KGB Quotations Database Search (KGB Quote-A-Matic)
DCL Dialog Online (an archive of my DCL Dialogue columns which appeared in DEC Professional (later renamed Digital Age) magazine from March, 1987 through December, 1995.)