Before I get into the   Condé Nast   article, a few items of import today: Congress is in session, and the House is scheduled to vote on their rules package tonight.   This bit of legislation simply provides the  rules of the House . This will not be covered like those 14 Speaker voting embarrassments, for who really knows, this could also go on into several attempts. Chances are, though, that they'll succeed on vote #1. But, over the next two years you can expect gridlock, government closures, full court presses to gain revenge over Biden, the January 6 House Special Committee and the Judiciary Department, for, guess what, Rep. Jim Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee. Yet, Republicans can't be really that stupid.  Sure, ignore country, world, Democracy and sanity, but will their highest priority be for Republicans to dominate on 5 November 2024?  Will that happen?  Doubt it. The same thing that jolted our nation on 6 January 2021 in DC is currently  occurring in Brazil ,

Odd-numbered years tend to be transitional.  No Olympics, no national elections in the U.S.  From mostly  Wikipedia : January. 1:  Croatia will adopt the euro and become the 20th member of the Eurozone.  First new entry since Lithuania in 2015. 1:  Luis Lula da Silva will be sworn in as President of Brazil. 3:  Republicans take over House of Representative with either: Kevin McCarthy as speaker with a bare majority vote. Kevin McCarthy with only a plurality, which will make leadership an impossible task. No speaker at the beginning. Boy, are the Republicans screwed up. 5:  funeral for Pope Benedict XVI. February:  First light of the  Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile .  Also known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.  Vera Rubin is an American astronomer.  Will have the largest digital camera of any telescope. February:  Ukraine will host a UN-backed peace summit around the end of the month. April:  Voyager 2 will overtake Pioneer 10 as the second-farthest spacecraft from Earth.  V