Last month in their reporting about the demise of national chain Party City, CNN had dropped a vague but tantalizing anecdote about an ominous sign that had foretold of the company’s collapse, writing their “product development team was recalled two weeks ago from its yearly trip with vendors and told to return home immediately, according to a former Party City corporate office employee.The team was told the company believed the trip posed a safety risk, because Party City had stopped paying its suppliers,” emphasis ours on the threats of violence not typically associated with the normal course of operations in corporate America, even in a bankrupt shitshow.

National Zero found that particular detail intriguing and now finally CNN has followed up and explained that the product development team were actually in China at the time and yeah, that’s probably legitimately a safety risk if they owed money. “This was disgraceful. Don’t know how else to say it,” an employee who had been on the China trip told CNN. “I just can’t sit back and say this is OK. It was scary. We left our families for this company, and you sent us there and you left us out to dry.” The article contains nothing explicit about the threats, just an example of a sternly worded email from a Chinese-based Halloween costume supplier from September 7th saying “We have provided you all your orders in due time. You will make your money as you got your costumes. 50 percent of payment is obviously not enough to recover even only raw materials payments.”

“One of our agents in China suggested we leave,” another employee on the trip said. “He said ‘I think you should leave the country and not stay another night. It doesn’t sound good. It’s risky.'”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is expected to announce his resignation as leader of the Tim Hortons country’s Liberal Party – and thus the premiership – as soon as Monday, or at least ahead of the party’s big national caucus meeting on Wednesday, the Globe and Mail reports.

The imminent end of Trudeau’s nearly decade-long reign leading Canada is seen as direct consequence of convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s upcoming second reich and the threat of 25 percent tariffs that would seriously fuck up the economies of both countries. Even without Trump, Trudeau had been facing a revolt within his party over other economic matters like rebates and something called a “GST holiday,” with Tories claiming a shit ton of support in national polling.

“‘Home Improvement’ star Zachery Ty Bryan is sick of his fellow actors pushing their political views on their fans. ‘As an actor, I think one of the first things that you’re taught is it’s the fans that make you who you are,’ Bryan told Fox & Friends Friday. ‘And a lot of those fans are watching in Middle America.’ Bryan said he doesn’t understand why Hollywood stars think they are better than their fans just because they’re in the public eye. ‘I think there’s kind of been this narcissism created now that because you’re in the public eye, all of a sudden you know more than the normal Joe Schmoe which just isn’t the case,'” reported Fox News on August 17, 2018, following said Bryan interview.

“Bryan’s comments come in response to stars like Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick urging their fans to vote against President Trump and ‘be on the right side of history,'” continued Fox’s article promoting the above three minute, three second long-segment on their own channel that came as the country was entering the home stretch toward that ultra-heated midterm election.

Then on January 3, 2025, Fox News reported “Authorities arrested Zachery Ty Bryan for domestic violence on Thursday, Fox News Digital can confirm. The former child star remained incarcerated as of Friday, according to Horry County (South Carolina) Sheriff’s Office records. Bryan has been charged with domestic violence in the second degree,” and that this is his third arrest in under a year following a DWI in California last February and another in Oklahoma in October.

Up to 60 million people from Kansas to New Jersey were hit with advisories, warnings, and watches for heavy snow, sleet, and icy winds as Winter Storm X Æ A-Xii moved from the central US toward the East Coast Sunday into Monday, Reuters reports. Washington DC itself faced between six and 12 inches of snow on Monday, the day over 10,000 violent Antifa rioters being led by Deep State FBI and NSA agents arriving on ghost buses are supposed to sack the United States Capitol to prevent convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s victory from being certified by Congress.

The governors of Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Virginia all declared states of emergency, allowing FEMA to come steal their snowplows and road salt or whatever the MAGA conspiracy will be this time. At least the storm itself will again prove global warming is a hoax.

Like The Weather Channel does of its own initiative for no discernible purpose whatsoever, National Zero refers to winter storms by non-canonical names of our own choosing – such as “Wasserman-Schultz,” “Kitara,” and “X Æ A-Xii.” Those Weather Channel assholes are calling this one “Blair,” lol.

A covert HVAC contractor masquerading as a CIA agent found his cover blown on Wednesday when a Florida State Highway Patrol trooper saw he had activated the fake red and blue flashing lights mounted on his Ford F-150 and pulled him over on Wednesday, the Independent reports.

It’s not clear how long 61 year-old registered Republican Jorge Alberto Alfonso had been working undercover as a CIA agent or whether any actual personnel with the feared intelligence agency had been duped by the HVAC contractor, let alone ever even been in contact with him. The same goes for the US Diplomatic Security Service, Interpol, and the British MI-6 – agencies which Alfonso was found to be possessing various documents, patches, etc falsely identifying him as in service to.

The traffic stop, initiated after the trooper observed the lights on and a woman in the front passenger seat “waving her arms, appearing upset or distressed,” really went south for Alfonso when he “identified himself as a federal agent, providing a CIA Counter Terrorism Unit ID, a CIA emblem coin in a badge wallet, and an MI-6 [sic] ID,” according to the arrest report. Asked for his affiliation, Alfonso demonstrated the talent for deception and resistance to interrogation HVAC officials are known for, simply saying “federal.” The trooper then placed Alfonso under arrest.

A search of the vehicle at least a half-dozen firearms, assorted passports, including blank ones, federal agency badges, bulletproof vests, money, jewelry, and pills in unmarked bottles, according to the police report. Alfonso was booked on felony false personation of a law enforcement officer and misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance without a prescription. He hasn’t posted bond yet and remains in Collier County Jail pending a hearing on January 30th, unless maybe he uses his HVAC skills to find a duct wide enough for him to crawl out and escape from the joint.

Asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday whether it’s realistic to be able to deport millions of undocumented immigrants as convicted felon President-Elect Trump and his minions have pledged, new Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Sunday did not say no, but he wasn’t anywhere close to yes either, simply saying it’s going to take a shit ton of resources that aren’t there yet.

Starting Sunday drivers entering New York City’s Manhattan below 60th Street will be charged $9 from 5 am to 9 pm on weekdays and 9 am to 9 pm on weekdays – and $2.50 each outside of those hours – with the exceptions being the West Side Highway, the FDR Drive along the East River, and a street used to traverse to the Hugh L Carey Tunnel to and from Brooklyn, WCBS reports.

Jesus Dork Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Sunday told Fox News idiot Maria Bartiromo “the terrorism threat that would be obvious with an open border” was somehow responsible for the horrific ISIS-inspired attack that took the lives of 15 innocent people in his home state of Louisiana.

Then in the very next breath, Johnson added “We don’t know the direct correlation yet, the investigation is ongoing with how much this was involved with an open border, whether some of the materials etc came over that way. But we do know that this is something that reminds us again that the new Trump nominees for these important positions need to be in place as quickly as possible.”

Johnson also pledged to have a giant mega bill covering deportations, tax cuts, border security, and a whole bunch of other shit ready for the House by April, which is, uh, pretty ambitious.

“Amazon Prime Video has exclusively licensed an upcoming documentary film for both theatrical and streaming release that will give viewers an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at First Lady Melania Trump. The project is executive produced by Fernando Sulichin (New Element Media) and Mrs Trump – with Brett Ratner (RatPac Entertainment) attached to direct. Filming began in December 2024, with an anticipated release in the second half of 2025. Prime Video will be sharing more details on the project as filming progresses and release plans are finalized. We are excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world” says a press release from Amazon, not saying but making it clear “Jeff Bozo” is dedicated to Trump ballsuckery.

Also left unsaid in the statement is that this is former Hollywood big shot Brett Ratner’s comeback in the film business after seven years of semi-retirement, with his most recent credit from 2019 as a producer for Georgetown, the directorial debut of the utterly brilliant German character actor Christoph Waltz, that had been shelved for a year and a half after filming wrapped in fall 2017.

With that lone exception, Ratner’s list of credits, which included directing the Rush Hour trilogy of action comedies, Silence of The Lambs prequel Red Dragon, and X-Men: The Last Stand, and as producer/EP for The Lego Ninjago Movie and the two Horrible Bosses comedies, abruptly dropped off in 2017 when the #MeToo movement named him as a prolific piece of shit. Among Ratner’s “credits” in that line of work were a former talent agency staffer accusing him of rape, actresses Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge accusing him of other various acts of assault and harassment such as following an actress into a restroom and jerking off in front of a female production assistant.

The proprietor of a Florida “psychic” establishment can’t even divine which asshole threw an “object” through the front window of their business in the town of Pinecrest, let alone the identity of the person who even tossed it, causing over $1,000 in damages, WPLG reports.

The vandalism incident occurred at approximately 9 PM on December 23rd, according to local police and not the Professor X wannabe who’s supposed to be prescient enough to be there to stop the likely drunk son of a bitch from throwing an “object” into the front window of their business.

“We have a subject goes to the front of business as quickly as it happened and he leaves through alleyway. We want to be able to find this guy and hold him responsible,” said Pinecrest Police Chief Jason Cohen, using the collective “we” as in the police department and not the victim of the vandalism, whose powers are obviously pretty fucking useless when it comes to solving this crime.

You know how you and your friends might have preferred one McDonald’s franchise to another? Like the fries tended to be noticebaly fresher and the service quicker at one – or maybe there was a Taco Bell a little further away from a closer one that you drove an extra 15 minutes to because your dude’s older brother worked there and was extra generous with the cinnamon twists and nachos?

There’s one Little Caesar’s in Kansas City that’s kind of like that, except the thing that’s different about it is that there’s more gun homicides than the others. The Kansas City Star reports that the two men found shot dead in the parking lot outside the LC’s at 8700 Blue Ridge Blvd in the south side of town are the third and fourth victims of a crazy killing fest at the chain pizza joint that began with the October 25th, 2024 death of 48 year-old Reginald Lamar inside the location.

Cops believe Lamar was killed by an acquaintance who obviously didn’t want to be acquaintances with him anymore. The suspected shooter is still at large, but has not been named. Then on December 5th an unidentified man was shot dead in his car by an unknown assailant.

What sucks for the owners of this Little Caesar’s is that they could’ve had a reputation for more garlic parmesan sawdust stuff dumped onto the pizza or crispier pepperoni that’s burnt at the edges. Instead they’re stuck with this whole murder thing that’ll probably require them to hand out more coupons to attract customers willing to risk getting shot for 50 percent off crazy bread.

Outrage as Biden set to award Hillary Clinton, George Soros with Presidential Medal of Freedom https://t.co/ogxyKEFgzv

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 4, 2025

Fox News on Saturday reported that a wave of outrage has erupted in response to President Joe Biden’s announcement he will be conferring the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and foreign-born billionaire George Soros, among other prominent figures.

The implication that this was bad outrage was readily apparent in Fox News’s article, as the story led with foreign-born billionaire Elon Musk’s tweet condemning Soros for “doing things that erode the fabric of civilization,” actions which somehow stand in contrast to Musk’s recent public backing of the Alternative for Germany, ReformUK, and American Republican parties for reasons unstated.

Fox’s article then cited “Online commentator” Blake Habyan who wrote “What a joke – these people have done the exact opposite of what the award is intended for,” and that Natalie F Danelishen wrote that “the news could be a Babylon Bee story given how unbelievable it is,” and that Clinton and Soros are “Seriously, two of the worst people on earth.” It was not made clear if Danelishen is also an “Online commentator” or if she is simply a person posting an opinion in an online comment.

Jason De Leon, who’s more of an Indiana Jones than a Jonathan Turley-type academic, as in he actually puts his ass on the line instead of spewing nonsense “theories” in lame op-eds printed by The Hill, tells CNN that the guias (guides) who walk migrants across Mexico toward and into the US are thrilled convicted felon President-Elect Trump is returning to power as they see him as talking a big game but not doing shit to stop them, while at the same time they can charge migrants extra.

“Smugglers love Trump, because it’s a lot of bluster, and migrants don’t know that, so they can jack up their prices quickly. I would say Trump is good for the economy of undocumented migration,” said De Leon, a professor of anthropology and Chicano studies at UCLA, also the director of the school’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and author of two books about his time on the ground in Mexico spent interviewing guys in the migration industry. So he just might kind of know his shit.

“Smugglers are going, ‘OK, if you want to come now, the price has doubled, because it’s so much more dangerous now,’ even though it’s probably not. I remember having lots of conversations with smugglers, who would say, ‘I love Trump. He makes our job easier and makes it easier for us to justify higher rates,'” De Leon continued, adding he’s unsure what’s actually going to happen after the fat bastard solemnly perjures himself on the 20th. “I’m sure the rates are going through the roof right now. I think we’re going to continue to see that. Then (the question is) whether or not deportations will start in any meaningful way, that’s more unknown right now. I do think we’re going to see this uptick in migration rates, and probably in costs, until January, and then I don’t know.”

No need to copy and paste convicted felon President-Elect Trump’s ongoing tantrum over his upcoming sentencing on Truth Social, it’s the same shit over and over again. The “There has never been a President who was so evilly and illegally treated as I” line and admitting he paid off Stormy Daniels with a “legal expense” are kind of funny though. He really can’t ever be happy.

To the reader who urged this week’s selection to be Shaun of The Dead: I started actually making this a grand triple feature of Edgar Wright’s whole “Three Flavors Cornetto” trilogy, with my personal favorite Hot Fuzz on the top, then Shaun of the Dead, and then The World’s End at the bottom because it just wasn’t nearly as good as the other two, even before the bleak, depressing ending.

Then YouTube pulled a Youtube. Every R-rated movie is “Age restricted” and cannot be embedded on another website, something that wasn’t apparent until now since the previous two selections just so happened to be PG-13. That SERIOUSLY puts a crimp on how much further “Movie Night Friday” can go as it’ll be just weeks until freaking Jurassic World is the best selection available. Which is to say I am going to need a new regular Friday night open thread format far sooner than anticipated.

On that note, was anyone aware that Red Dawn is PG-13? On one hand 1984 was the year the MPAA introduced the medium rating in direct response to the closer-to-R-than-PG violence of Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom so it’s understandable if their content reviewers were still fine-tuning the exact criteria. On the other it isn’t a close call as to whether it would be rated R if the exact same movie, with the exact same level of violence were made today. The actual Red Dawn remake from 2012, the one where the chickenshit studio had to digitally edit it from a Chinese invasion to a North Korean one before releasing the movie, sucked for that and lengthy list of other reasons, a big one was its utter tameness compared to the savagery of the original Cold War classic.

Law enforcement officials in Las Vegas on Friday shared some choice clips from Elontruck self-exploder Matt Livelsberger’s manifesto somehow remained intact in the inferno outside the Trump hooker encounter experience in the city, with the now-dead fanboy pledging “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives,” the AP reports.

“Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans, TIME TO WAKE UP! We are being led by weak and feckless leadership who only serve to enrich themselves,” Livselberger also wrote in the letter, which was maybe, just maybe, hinting that he felt like Trump sold him out.

My bad on the spelling!

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) January 3, 2025

It’s not clear which 20th century family movie that millennials would have watched repeatedly on VHS – and/or had to read the book it was based on in elementary or middle school – best fits the experience of eight year-old Zimbabwean boy Tinotenda Pudu, who spent five days and nights in a nature preserve evading hungry lions and living off the land in Matusadona Game Park before he was rescued by rangers and returned to his home village 30 miles away, CBS News reports.

Yeah, the setting is totally The Lion King, but there were no people in the movie, which means it was set in the year 9745 AD, thousands of years after genetically engineered, hyper-sentient animals capable of speech rebelled against their human masters and either wiped them out or drove them off-planet, with one group of lions organizing a fascist, caste-based monarchial state in a remote part of New Mexico in which the flora had been altered to resemble that of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The state’s a caste system in which the herbivores willingly submit themselves for ritual sacrifice and consumption by their lion overlords, even bowing at the birth of their newest destroyer and – Oh yeah. The setting is like The Lion King , but unless the animals secretly spoke to Tino – or he thought they did because sometimes kids believe wacky shit – it wasn’t like The Jungle Book.

That one took place in India. Anyway, the CBS News article, based on posts from a Zimbabwean MP, seems to indicate that Tino wandered away from home on purpose, so it’s not really an African version of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The lad’s definitely got some Huckleberry Finn in him, as he lived off the land, eating fruit and drinking water he dug out from a dry riverbed.

Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan on Friday ordered convicted felon President-Elect Trump into court next Friday to sentence him on 34 felony counts for interfering in the 2016 election by unlawfully paying off pornstar Stormy Daniels to stay quiet about their two-minute sexual encounter.

Undeterred by the GOP logjam forcing his chosen Speaker of the House candidate into a second round of voting on Friday, President-Elect Donald Trump doubled down his unwavering support for Mike Johnson in a defiant early afternoon Truth Social post, writing “The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration. They think it’s so great, and are so happy about it because, in actuality, they don’t love our Country, they only think about themselves. Look at what they’ve done to our once GREAT America over the past four years – It’s a total mess! In any event, because of the death of President Jimmy Carter, the Flag may, for the first time ever during an Inauguration of a future President, be at half mast. Nobody wants to see this, and no American can be happy about it. Let’s see how it plays out.”

Huh. Nothing about Mike Johnson in there, actually. But there is another post before it:

“Biden gave Liz Cheney a Medal yesterday, even though she has proven to be totally corrupt. She, ‘Bennie’ Thompson, and the rest of the Unselect Committee, destroyed and deleted all evidence from their crooked investigation of January 6th. Cheney has the distinction of losing her Congressional seat by the largest margin in History! The people of Wyoming understood how bad for our Country she was, but Biden rewarded her only because she hated ‘TRUMP.’ She’s a Warmonger of low intelligence. All she wants to do is kill people in ‘Endless Wars,’ with no gain other than to defense companies. Liz Cheney, Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, Bennie Thompson, and the rest of these dishonest Thugs have gotten away with horrible things under the pretense of January 6th. Nancy Pelosi refused to accept the help which was offered for security. She is responsible, and admitted as much, for all to see, on her daughter’s tape. They have destroyed the lives of many people, and are rewarded by getting Biden Fake Medals. This is not America. January 20 cannot come fast enough.”

Well guess there’s nothing about Mike Johnson in that one either. Whoops.