  Books by Patti Liszkay available on Amazon: "Equal And Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888 "Tropical Depression" https://www.amzn.com/B0BTPN7NYY Coldplayed, Coldplaying, And More Fun To Come We now have more to thank Coldplay for than their vast and well-loved discography of poetic lyrics set to dynamic rhythms. For it's thanks to this iconic pop/rock group,  ...specifically thanks to their front man Chris Martin,  ...that the world discovered a new and wildly enjoyable past time which I'm officially christening (unless someone else has already beat me to it) as Coldplaying. Here's my definition:  For the sake of the two or three earthlings who still haven't heard of the incident to which the above definition refers, here's the recap: The male CEO of a big-name tech company was caught canoodling with the company's female chief of HR on the giant video screen, known as a jumbotron, that was sweeping the audience during a Coldplay concert. When the jumbotron landed, by wildest random coincidence, on the CEO and the HR exec locked in a sweet embrace, their reaction, along Chris Martin's reaction to their reaction, was so comical that it caused the scene to go viral on social media, which subsequently led to the two, who were married to people other than each other, being busted. Here's the now infamous - and infamously comical - video of the event: When it came out that the fleeing subjects were, in fact, cheating paramours caught in flagrante, the internet exploded with folks reenacting their own original and hilariously-spun versions of the Coldplay jumbotron video, which soon thereafter added another new word (this one made up by someone other than myself) to the lexicon:  In the days after the event went viral and Coldplaying became a thing, I found my Facebook page pretty much highjacked by reels and images created and posted by these Coldplayers - and I found myself LMAOing. The number of videos and images that continually popped up on my Facebook feed were legion, but here's just a small sampling:                And my favorite: Alas, the Coldplaying memes and videos have slowed to a trickle in the past few days, and I expect in a few more days they'll have dried up altogether. But I guess this kind of fun only lasts so long. Happily for us, though, there's some new fun in town. 
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 It's upsetting enough that the Republican Congress has cut a billion dollars in funding for the Public Broadcasting Service, our country's non-profit, publicly-funded educational television network, and eight billion more in American overseas humanitarian aid. The Americans who will be most hurt by the defunding of PBS will be those living in rural areas with poor internet and cell service, where publicly funded radio and TV stations provide a lifeline to local news, information, and emergency broadcasts. Also cut off to these more remote populations will be the quality television shows for adults,  ...and educational programs for children made available through public broadcasting.  Likewise gone will be the dollars that up until now have provided food, water, shelter, and healthcare for our poorest brothers and sisters on the planet.  But, in truth, even worse than the above outcomes is the fact that the money cut by the Republicans, both in the House and the Senate, was money that had already been appropriated by them, had already been voted on by bipartisan legislation to be spent on things that that both Congressional Democrats and Congressional Republicans had determined to be necessary for the well being of Americans and in line with our American world view. It is Congress that has control over government spending, "the power of the purse," as it's called. And once Congress has allocated money for a purpose, not even the President has any say over the matter of the money or what it is to be spent for. Or rather, that was the case until the Republican majority surrendered its power, control and independence to Donald Trump. The funding for PBS and for the humanitarian aid had been agreed upon by both sides and earmarked for those purposes. And once funds have been appropriated in that way they can only be unappropriated by a deliberate process of revocation called recission. But all it took for Congressional Republicans to initiate a recission and revoke the funding they themselves had voted for was a command to do so from Donald Trump. Just a word from Donald Trump and both John Thune, Senate Majority Leader and Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House,  ...abdicated their independence and their duty and performed like Trump's trained dogs.  Nor did it take more than a threat from Trump to set loose a primary opponent on any legislator who crossed his wishes for almost every Republican in Congress to turn into one of Trump's performing dogs, to betray their constituents and their consciences and vote to take back the money they had earlier allotted to fund PBS and overseas aid. And that is the real tragedy here, that the United States of America no longer has a Congress. Only Donald Trump and his troupe of trained dogs.   Monster Jeffrey Epstein is six years dead, but the stench of the corpse of his life still lingers.  As everyone who's not been living in a mushroom cave for the past ten years knows, Jeffery Epstein was the multi-millionaire financier, sexual predator, pedophile and sex trafficker for the rich and twisted, to whom he supplied hundreds of girls as young as 12 on his private Caribbean island or in his Manhattan mansion. Epstein died in jail in 2019, purportedly by hanging himself with a bedsheet. But, like some discorporate zombie that feeds on conspiracy theories, sustained outrage and media coverage, he is a thing won't die. It's mostly the followers of Donald Trump's MAGA ideology who have latched onto the two-pronged credence that keeps Jeffrey Epstein among the living dead. The first prong is the conviction that Epstein did not commit suicide but rather was murdered by, I don't know, somebody, for, well, I suppose any number of possible reasons, though the main reason, one would guess, being that at his trial he'd rat out the rats who'd availed themselves of his services. The second is that Jeffrey Epstein kept a list of his clients, believed to be a pool of elites, possibly celebrity elites. Possibly celebrity elites connected to the Democratic Party. Though the above theories run contrary to the findings of the FBI investigations of Jeffrey Epstein's death as well as his life, during Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign he ran on the promise to get to the truth about Epstein's death, publicly disclose all the files in the Epstein case and most importantly, reveal to the world the names on the Epstein client list. This issue of pulling back the deep state cover up of the Epstein files was apparently of paramount importance to Trump's base. And so Trump kept fixation with Epstein simmering among his faithful with his pre-election promises, and soon after his election with the much-ballyhooed declaration of his chosen Attorney General, Pam Bondi, that she had declassified the first batch of the Epstein files,   ...and that she, in fact, had list of Epstein's clients right on her desk. However, Pam Bondi's big reveal turned out to be information that was already public knowledge and insignificant in content. But then last week the Epstein simmer dialed up to a roaring boil when Pam Bondi, backed by the White House, released a memo stating that in fact Jeffrey Epstein did die by suicide and did not have a list of high profile sex customers. Furthermore, it now appears that Bondi's Justice Department is not going to offer any more Epstein reveals any time soon. And MAGA world is now ready to burn Bondi at the stake. And, strangely, Donald Trump's battle cry of full transparency of the Epstein files has suddenly changed to move along folks, nothing to see here. But Trump's base does not want to move along and, incredibly, those for whom Donald Trump is their personal representation of Jesus,  ...or for whom Jesus is their personal representation of Donald Trump,  ...are up in arms and seething over Trump's defense of Pam Bondi and his refusal to make good his promise to reveal to them every depraved detail ensconced in the Epstein files - especially the list of sex clients.      And so Jeremey Epstein, though dead, will likely continue to slither among us for a while yet, a soulless ghoul. Same as what he was when he was alive. References: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/what-to-know-about-the-jeffrey-epstein-saga https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/12/politics/bondi-epstein-investigation-trump https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9qxd2exqgno   Books by Patti Liszkay available on Amazon: "Equal And Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888 "Tropical Depression" https://www.amzn.com/B0BTPN7NYY
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"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY Archives
January 2026
I am a traveler just visiting this planet and reporting various and sundry observations,
hopefully of interest to my fellow travelers. Categories |
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