Month: April 2026

REVIEW: Euphoria (Season 3 Premiere)

I had mentioned in my post about Sydney Sweeney’s recent career that she made her big break in the Zendaya TV series Euphoria, where “it was announced that Euphoria will continue in Season 3, picking up on the characters years later as they moved through time (I don’t think ‘grew up’ is the right term for these people). “

Well, that finally came out on HBO last Sunday. Much like the Trump regime, it remains an depressing cycle of immorality and self-destruction. And much like the Trump regime, it is impossible to stop watching.

Zendaya plays Rue, a recovering drug addict who starts this season lost in the middle of Texas and gets rescued by a kind family of born-again Christians. She explains in retrospect that she got there when Laurie, one of her high school teachers turned drug dealer, tracks her down for a stash that Rue’s mom found and ended up flushing. Laurie tells her that with interest, the cost is several million dollars but she “rounds” it to $100,000 which she knows Rue can’t pay either. So Rue and her friend Faye get roped into being Laurie’s drug mules. Rue talks with her AA sponsor and tells him about her contact with the farm family, and he says that should inspire her to start thinking about a higher power. Rue ends up taking a shipment of fentanyl to “Alamo”, a strip-club mogul and likely pimp. But while Rue parties with Alamo’s girls, one of them dies from a bad batch and the guards accuse Rue of deliberately poisoning her. Rue says she certainly wouldn’t stay if she’d intended to poison anybody and maybe this whole thing could be God’s way of sending her a sign. Alamo likes her attitude and decides to test her with “the William Tell act.” He shoots an apple off her head successfully, but this sets up a conflict with his crime empire and Laurie’s.

Rue is not in contact with most of the cast, and in the premiere, most of them are mentioned only in passing. Their lives are more secure but they aren’t much happier. In Season 2, which I haven’t caught up on, Nate (Jacob Elordi) ended up choosing Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) over Maddy (Alexa Demie). Nate ended up inheriting his Dad’s construction business after he went to prison, and is now a breadwinner with cars, a fancy house and housekeeper. But his contracts are being held up by bureaucracy and he isn’t making that much money. He certainly isn’t making enough for Cassie, who wants to stage a romantic wedding that they can’t afford. So she tells him she wants to make her own money by posing on OnlyFans. Of course Nate is dead set against this but changes his mind when Cassie cajoles him by opening her blouse. Which makes sense. For most heterosexual men, if Sydney Sweeney offered to show us her tits, we’d assassinate the Pope.

The other member of this triangle, Maddy, has her own career inside Hollywood, but she isn’t making much money either, and the season preview indicates that she hooks up with Cassie again when Cassie asks to hire her as her agent for the OnlyFans project.

The fact that this had to pick up in real time five years later not only creates a gap in the story, it demonstrates that time has moved on, and probably left this show behind. Angus Cloud, who played the befuddled but beloved Fez, died of a drug overdose in 2023. In this season, Fez was written out by being sentenced to prison. Barbie Ferreria, who played Kat, one of the cooler characters, isn’t in Season 3 at all. There were rumors that the cast were in conflict with creator Sam Levinson over some of his decisions, like producing the even more negative and transgressive series The Idol. Alexa Demie has questioned whether she will be in Season 4, if there is one. And Zendaya, Sweeney and Elordi have all moved on to bigger and better roles that do not require their characters to suffer masochistic spirals of sex and drug abuse (well, Elordi was in Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff is slightly more masochistic than Nate).

In the meantime, the season is just starting, and the audience doesn’t know where it’s going to go or how fucked up it’s going to get. So again Euphoria is analogous to current events: It passed its age five years ago, but it’s still going on, it’s even more dysfunctional, we still keep watching and we don’t know why.

It’s TACO TUESDAY!

So. We have not started a nuclear war. Yet.

Just to recap: Easter Sunday, Our Lord and Savior, Donald Trump, rose from his bed to twit the following: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump”. Because this government is basically The West Wing as scripted by David Mamet and directed by Martin Scorsese.

“This made a lot of people angry and was widely perceived as a bad move.”

No less a right-wing whackjob than Marjorie Taylor made an extended post saying “Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness,” the former Georgia congresswoman responded on X on Sunday. “Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.” She also said “This NOT what we promised the American people when they overwhelmingly voted in 2024, I know, I was there more than most. This is not making America great again, this is evil.”

Bee itch, this is EXACTLY what you and yours voted for. You wanted a president who would remake the country in your twisted image and that required someone who was both shameless and oblivious enough to put himself above the law. And now you know what that means, but it’s too late now, cause you elected him God.

Same thing with Alex Jones: ““The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people!” Jones wrote on X, following Trump’s threats to eliminate Iranian civilization Tuesday. “Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!”

Things are really bad when you hope, “Gee, I hope Alex Jones can talk some sense into this guy.”

And as Trump ALWAYS does, he heard the feedback and decided to double down on stupid. Easter Monday they held the White House Easter Egg Roll and Trump decided to pontificate to children about how America was “dead” but thanks to him it’s “hot”, while flanked by his wife and the Easter Bunny (in the picture, the Easter Bunny is on the right). Overnight he twitted this winner: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” (He did not specify if he meant Iran or the United States.) This on top of his previous posts led to that many more calls to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from office for incapacity. Jones went further. On InfoWars, he asked his guest Robert Barnes, “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Barnes pointed out that under the rules for invoking the 25th, (Section 4) it’s actually harder to do than to get an impeachment conviction in the Senate. So Jones asked what else could be done and Barnes said they “tackle Trump and let him pretend he’s president and publicly report that he’s going through a health issue … It literally needs to be something like that. It’s that bad.” “I’ve known you for a long time,” Jones replied. “You’ve never called for an internal coup before.”

Republicans in Congress of course would not go that far, but Trump supporter and fellow Putin fanboy Senator Ron Johnson (BR.-Wisconsin) said Tuesday, “I do not want to see us start blowing up civilian infrastructure … We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.”

Meanwhile there were filmed events of Iranian civilians coming to key power plants to act as human shields or at the very least let American airmen know that they are ordered to kill non-combatants. To this Trump whined, “They’re not allowed to do that.” Thus expressing his inner five-year old. Which in his case is his outer five-year old.

Maybe that’s why, less than two hours away from Trump’s self-imposed 8 pm deadline to genocide, he agreed to a proposal from Pakistan to hold off civilian strikes for two weeks “subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz”.

TACO Two Weeks strikes again!

Only that level of shrewdness could have bankrupted six casinos!

Although as Andy Borowitz points out, this just means Trump is giving himself two weeks to come up with an even bigger distraction for the Epstein Files. ™

Basically somebody gave Our Very Stable Genius an out from an action that would have not just destroyed Iranian infrastructure but infrastructure in Israel, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere from Iran’s inevitable retaliation strike. It would have broken relations with our allies, leading to denial of military base access, a breakoff of relations, or even a very strongly worded diplomatic message. And given how much even Republicans are taking the 25th Amendment seriously, he might not have been able to maintain support in a Congress where Moscow Mike Johnson cannot spare any defections.

None of this changes the fact that while the current status quo is not as bad as Trump carrying through his threats (at least not as bad for Trump, which may be why someone finally got him to chicken out), it’s still pretty bad for the world. If the goal was to prevent a deranged lunatic from getting a nuclear weapon, well- way too late for that. It’s that much more likely that Iran will feel the need to get one, knowing that the US and Israel will not stop bombing them until they do. (The history of North Korea, or for that matter the history of Ukraine vs. Russia, indicate that Western attempts to stop the spread of nukes might actually be counterproductive to world peace and security.) That being the case, Israel will feel even less secure knowing that the Islamic tyranny in Iran, an anti-Semitic regime that has sought to destroy them for years, is an existential threat, and now knows that Israel is an existential threat to it. Whatever happens to the Strait of Hormuz, Iran gets a say, and the world’s fossil fuel supply is that much more under their control than before. The Gulf states that now host our military bases, mainly as a deterrent to Iran, are seeing those bases as more of a liability. And we have already depleted our military supplies to the point where we have less defense against future Chinese and Russian expansionism. Assuming that wasn’t the idea.

Again, rump promised on Tuesday that a whole civilization would die tonight. It wasn’t Iran, but in a way, it was the United States. Thanks to this clown, we and the rest of the world can no longer trust that the Americans are the good guys or that our leadership can be trusted. Because this is NOT a republic of laws, but a democracy of men, and far too many Americans actively chose this, or knew better but chose not to vote for Kamala Harris because she supported Israel too much. (You think Harris would have got snookered into Bibi’s new war, kids?) So before I conclude, let me just say to all you Trumpniks and “anti-Zionists”, as diplomatically as I can:

DIE.

Slowly and painfully.

Which is very likely given how many of you take your medical advice from RFK Junior.

While you’re at it, castrate yourselves. Just take out a butter knife and lop it off. Take yourselves out of the gene pool. If you’re really pro-life and you think that every baby has a soul and God intends them all to go somewhere, make sure they don’t go to stupid parents who will raise them to be stupid. You need to get flushed out of the body politic, the sooner the better.

As it is, it’s hard to see how we survive to the July 4 250th anniversary of the United States, at least if We, the People, are so passive and sheeplike that we continue to allow this feeb to keep misruling it. And it’s gonna be pretty hard to celebrate our revolt from British North America when most of us are looking at Canada and thinking “You know, maybe putting extra ‘U’s in words doesn’t seem that bad.”

Our President Addresses The Nation

My Fellow Americans, and All Our Ships At Sea,

We got a real serious situation in Iran, and to make sure everybody takes it seriously, I am addressing the nation on April Fool’s Day.

We are very close to achieving our military objectives against Iran, which is not a war, cause you gotta go to Congress to have a war, not like I give a fuck what Congress says, they’re all a bunch of sissy bitches who bend over when I say, just like I do with Putin. We are gonna hit ’em real hard, harder than anybody’s ever been hit before, right back into the Stone Age where we belong. They. I mean they. They being Iran. I’m real serious.

Also, next week is Infrastructure Week.

I got somethin’ to say to our so called “allies” who wouldn’t step up and help with the war I started without Congressional authorization, choking the world’s access to fossil fuel and wrecking the global economy cause it was my time of the month and also cause I needed the press to stop talkin’ about the Epstein Files. I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I? DID I MENTION I’M TERMINALLY SENILE AND HAVE NO INTERNAL MONOLOGUE??

To all those other countries, I’m telling you if you want that oil, you gotta take it. Cause I don’t care anymore. I’m bored. I’m like a five-year old on a sugar crash. Anybody who knows me, they knows I don’t care about nothin’ except me. You can just take it. Iran’s got no military. Just ask the people at that Saudi airfield who saw an AWACS get cut in half. You think Iran did that? It was Joe Biden! Or George Soros! Maybe both! PIZZAGATE!

You can just walk in and take it. Take it. They got nothin’. They got no cards. No cards! You can trust me. I’m an expert on playing cards. That’s how I bankrupted six casinos.

We’re gonna destroy Iran and it’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon! Just like I did a few months ago! You wanna know how! I’m not tellin’ ya! If we don’t know what we’re doin’, then neither will the enemy!

Nobody knows what I’m gonna do! Not even me! You wanna find out? You just gotta keep watchin’ the Trump Show!

BE THERE. ALOHA.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!