Matt Barrett

Former rock musician now writes about eating, drinking, traveling and living in Greece.

[Matt Barrett @MattinGreece]

@ekathimerini Where is it being held?

[Matt Barrett @MattinGreece]

How about a cruise where the boat stops and you can dive straight into the sea instead of waiting in line to get off the boat and having to take a bus or taxi to a beach? https://t.co/6CTqPOTR4M

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

Since Trump Took Office:

Gas +39%
Diesel +69%
Utilities +15%
Jet fuel +100%
Health care +13%
Ground beef +25%

Elon Wealth: +122%
Wall Street Profits +22%
CEO Pay: +14%
Real Wages: +.5%

Trump Wealth: Doubled.
Trump Cabinet: 8 members worth $100M+

Do you fucking get it yet?

[Senator Chris Van Hollen @ChrisVanHollen]

Trump is sending $2.8 BILLION of bombs paid for by YOU, the American taxpayer, to a govt led by a wanted war criminal.

All while Netanyahu keeps bombing Gaza & blocks justice for Americans killed on his watch. How is this America First?

We will work to stop it.

[Matt Barrett @MattinGreece]

I don't use tracking cookies or annoying popup ads and I don't collect e-mail addresses or use spy-ware or bombard people with junk mail. My GREECE TRAVEL GUIDES are simple and easy to use, like reading a book or a magazine. https://t.co/2qE76JGQW5

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Last night, Donald Trump, our pathological liar-in-chief, said:

“Every single promise I made to you as a candidate, I’ve delivered on. I’ve delivered on everything.”

Really?

Well, let’s go down the list.

Since becoming president again, Trump promised:

✅ $5,000 DOGE dividend checks. A lie.
✅ $2,000 tariff dividend checks. A lie.
✅ $1,000+ checks by repealing ACA subsidies. A lie.
✅ A 10% cap on credit card interest rates. A lie.
✅ “The lowest drug prices in the world.” A lie.
✅ $2 a gallon gas. A lie.
✅ An end to inflation “starting on Day One.” A lie.
✅ An end to “endless wars.” A lie.

And now, after all of those lies, Trump wants you to believe that he will give every American adult a $5,000 check - but only if the Republicans win the midterms.

No. I don’t think so. The Trump Administration is not about helping working families. It’s about giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1% and throwing 15 million Americans off the health care they have.

[Kathimerini English Edition @ekathimerini]

Athens, a year-round magnet for visitors https://t.co/ZjhdQ2qbcx

[Steve Schmidt @SteveSchmidtSES]

MAGA is in trouble.

[Matt Barrett @MattinGreece]

@horrormuseum Pretty weak

[The Pappas Post @PappasPost]

The Meltemi is the defining summer wind of the Aegean, shaping sailing, ferries, and island life. https://t.co/Srl3bih6YL #Greece

[The Happy Smiler ⏸️ @Articus_chad]

American culture clicked for me when I realized just how much of an intelligence disparity there is. Let me explain.

I've seen things in America that I've never seen in Canada: people getting in fights with cashiers, insane road rage incidents, fighting cops, and an overall incredible lack of reason. This varies based on where you're at but I'm sure most Americans relate.

In Canada, these things just don't happen. You can trust that most people will be on their best behavior and everything runs smoothly. Nobody is going to fight the drugstore security guard, etc.

This is solely because Canada funds schools at the provincial level. there is no such thing as a "bad school" in Canada. If you pull someone out of a
middle school in rural Manitoba and test them compared to someone in downtown Toronto, they'll perform around the same.

Most of America funds schools at a district level using property taxes. If a neighborhood is poor, the school doesn't get funded, which lowers property value, which means the school gets less funding, etc... This creates insane intelligence disparities within cities and neighborhoods.

You have people who are incredibly well educated and people who are totally undereducated interacting with each other all the time. This leads to low trust and erratic behavior as the undereducated have trouble navigating complex systems and the well educated don't trust the undereducated. The average American has far more vitriol for their fellow countrymen then the average Canadian.

You have a city like San Francisco which has a reading proficiency of 53% (the amount of K-12 students who meet or exceed reading standards), which is above the national and state average. Then 20 mins away you have Oakland which has a reading proficiency of 30%, nearly half the national average. Compare this to Toronto and surrounding cities, all of which hover around 70-80%, all while being the most diverse city in the world with 45% of the population speaking English as a second language.

There is a baseline level of social cohesion in Canada that I just don't see in America. I've travelled to the states 4-5 times a year for the past 3-4 years and it always puzzled me why I kept seeing people do insane things and act totally erratic. Maybe I'm off base and someone could add to this, but I feel this is why. It really does just boil down to education.

America could solve most of it's income and intelligence inequality in a single generation by mandating that schools must be funded at the state level.

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

COPS cheer a man who PARDONED men who beat and assaulted cops on Jan 6.

If ever a photo captured how completed F-UP the world is in 2026 it's this one.

No photo shows the brain washing of America better than this one IMO.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

This is Croatia right now…

Everyone needs to know what is happening in our world right now: Our planet has been experiencing the most extreme heat event in world history. This is the coldest summer of the rest of your life.

July was the hottest month in the United States since we records began in 1895—Washington, USA burned to the ground.

June was the hottest month in Europe, exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, shattering all heat records—caused over 25,000 deaths across the continent.

Venezuela, Columbia, Indonesia, and Malaysia earthquakes crashing. The planet has recorded exactly 10 major earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher—Earthquakes are not caused by CO2, but climate change can modulate them by secondary effects.

Rivers in China and Europe are drying up, reaching historically low levels—Just for perspective, the drying of these rivers will impact shipping routes, leading to a skyrocketing in the prices of food, fuel, and energy.

El Niño has begun, driving ocean temperatures to record-breaking highs—Nearly three decades ago, a catastrophic El Niño claimed 23,000 lives and inflicted billions of dollars in global economic damage.

Canada burned to the ground, and Greenland's ice sheet is collapsing—slowing down the overturning of heat in the North Atlantic, pushing the whole monsoon system down further south, causing droughts and forest fires over the Amazon rainforest.

The severity of this heatwave is truly hard to comprehend. What's going on there is a foreshadowing of our future.

Scientists confirmed that heatwaves driven by climate change. Climate change is not a "hoax." It’s real and it’s happening.

If you are not a scientist, and you disagree with scientists about science, it’s actually not a disagreement. You're just wrong. Science is not truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn't lie to you. It learned more.

This is no longer just a climate crisis. Climate chaos is inevitable. This is a humanitarian crisis. Just because you do not take an interest in climate change, doesn't mean climate change won't take an interest in you.

We should start naming heatwaves after fossil fuel and oil companies, and wildfires after arms and defense industries. And Could reporters stop asking if leaders believe in climate change and start asking if they understand it instead.

The world must remember that we live in a society, not an economy.

[Forecast Weather Greece @ForecastGreece]

Απτόητος ο γερό #Σκοπελίτης στο Αιγαίο με 8 μποφόρ

Βίντεο : Cyclades 24

[Carolyn Barber, MD @cbarbermd]

Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain's 2008 campaign for president, was interviewed on MSNOW. In response to a very general question regarding the Trump presidency, Mr. Schmidt spoke for two minutes and gave the most insightful and brutally honest response of what the Trump presidency has done to our great country: "Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is.

But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.” "When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile.

An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.” "It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City.

Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter.

We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk." @SteveSchmidtSES r/t Ron Tipton

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: EXACTLY! Hunter Biden enrages MAGA world by defending Democratic Socialism in terms so simple that even a Trumper can understand them.

Big political changes are quickly sweeping this country...

"You know, and I hate these labels, Democratic Socialist, you know, what's a Democratic Socialist?" asked Hunter. "All a Democratic Socialist is somebody who believes the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt believed and his cousin FDR believed. It's the same thing that Lyndon Johnson believed and JFK believed. It's the same key thing that George Herbert Walker Bush believed to some extent..."

"I look at Democratic Socialism as meaning that we should have a safety net in this country, that we should take care of the vulnerable when they cannot necessarily fully take care of themselves, and that it is all of our responsibility to make certain that we provide for the safety and security of our neighbors," he added. "That's the socialism that— I don't know why we have to label it within the party."

It really is that simple. Democratic Socialism is the very simple idea that the American government should help working-class people instead of funneling more and more wealth to the oligarchs.

It's the idea that you should be able to get healthcare without going bankrupt.

That you should be able to afford a house for your family.

That your kids should get a good education.

That we should spend our money here in the U.S. instead of wasting it overseas in support of genocide.

Predictably, the MAGA loons came out of the woodwork to attack Hunter as a "communist," which is the reheated, pathetic narrative that Republicans are desperately trying to push ahead of the midterms. They can't argue policy and have nothing to offer the American people beyond more corruption, more wars, and more shielding of pedophiles. So they're resorting to lazy red-baiting.

Politicians like Mayor Zohran Mamdani have proven that not only can Democratic Socialists win, they can thrive once in power. He's incredibly popular and is reminding his city what it looks like when a leader actually cares about improving his constituents' lives instead of enriching himself.

We're done playing their games. It's high time that America rose up and started demanding the things that every other civilized nation provides to its citizens.

Please ❤️ and share if you support the policies of Democratic Socialism!

[George Jarjour @GeorgeOnTap]

A Mets rookie jumped, kicked his legs apart, and slapped the grass after his first career strikeout, and half of baseball called it disrespectful to the game. Here's who he actually is, because once you know the story, "respect the game" starts to sound like the disrespectful part.

His name is Jefry Yan. He's a 29-year-old rookie. Read that again: 29, and a rookie, in a sport where most careers are over by then. He signed his first pro contract in 2013, at 16. Then he spent more than four years completely out of affiliated baseball. Out. Not in the minors, not rehabbing, out of the sport. The Miami Marlins rediscovered him pitching in a men's beer league in Arizona in 2021. A beer league. The kind you play in after your dream is supposed to be dead.

From there: Single-A, Double-A, a stint in Japan with the Seibu Lions, the Dominican Winter League, Triple-A Syracuse, and finally, thirteen years after he signed, his major league debut Wednesday night in Cleveland. He struck out the first batter he faced and did the celebration he's done at every stop of that thirteen-year climb.

Now the "unwritten rules" crowd wants him to tone it down. And here's where the whole "respect the game" argument collapses on itself.

The celebration isn't disrespect. It's the most respectful thing on the field, because it's the only honest one. Yan explained it himself: he wants to play like it's a kids' game, like he always has. This is a man who was told the game didn't want him, went to a beer league, and clawed back over thirteen years. The joy is not an act. It's the accumulated release of a decade of being nobody. Asking him to suppress it to look professional is asking him to pretend the climb didn't cost what it cost.

Baseball's "respect the game" ethic has always had this problem buried inside it. The unwritten rules police celebration hardest, and they disproportionately police the players who celebrate the way Latin players celebrate. Yan is Dominican. The flat-affect, act-like-you've-been-there ideal was built by and for a specific culture of the sport, and it has spent decades treating the expressiveness common in Dominican and Venezuelan baseball as a violation. Bat flips got the same treatment until the league finally realized it was marketing gold and started selling the highlights.

Here's the tell that the "disrespect" framing is empty. His own manager, Andy Green, said he doesn't fear teams taking offense, because Yan's reputation preceded him. The people inside the game aren't offended. The offense is almost entirely from the outside, from the guardians of an etiquette that was never really about respect. It was about conformity, dressed up as respect.

And notice what nobody's disputing: the man throws 101. He threw the eight fastest pitches any Met has thrown all year in a single inning. He earned the mound the hard way and the stuff is real. The celebration isn't covering for a lack of substance. It's sitting on top of a fastball that touches 101 and a story most players would have quit on at year three.

So the real question isn't why Jefry Yan gets a pass. It's why we ever decided joy needed one.

The game doesn't get disrespected by a man celebrating the thing he waited thirteen years and one beer league to do. It gets disrespected by pretending that celebration is the problem.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: Mary Trump exposes her Uncle Donald as a TOTAL FRAUD, reveals that he "didn't create anything" as a businessman and owes all of his supposed success to his father.

This truth bomb has MAGA pulling their hair out...

"Donald didn't create anything on his own. Before he went to Atlantic City, any project he did in Manhattan was funded by my grandfather's money, power, and political connections," said Mary Trump. "So Donald did nothing on his own."

"In fact, for the first few years of his so-called career, he was completely funded. He wasn't rich on his own merits. His chauffeur-driven limousine was paid for by my grandfather," she added. "His fancy apartment was paid for by my grandfather. So it is just laughable that anybody has ever believed that Donald was self-made or a brilliant businessman or anything."

Trump owes his entire political career to the carefully cultivated myth that he's some kind of genius businessman. Republican voters fell for his invented persona — ignoring the fact that he's actually a lifelong conman who had to repeatedly declare bankruptcy when his endeavors crashed and burned — and foisted this fool into the White House.

Meanwhile, a New York Times investigation discovered that Trump's claim that he built his fortune on the foundation of a "small loan" was a bald-faced lie. In reality, his father used a series of shady tax schemes, gifts, and loans to shovel more than $413 million into his pocket. With that kind of wealth just handed to him, Trump never had to work a real day in his life. He was able to fail upward, growing more arrogant and more arrogant while never growing more competent.

Some will ask if the truth matters at this point. Who cares if Trump was a business fraud since he's the President now? We need to care because the truth matters for future generations. When historians look back on this dark era and try to puzzle out how this stupid, pedophiliac monster seized control of the Oval Office, the myths that he constructed for himself will be crucial to that understanding.

If we're going to avoid repeating the Trump mistakes, we must have a full accounting of how it happened.

Please ❤️ and share to spread the truth!

[Zara Quinn @_Zaraquin]

If you can’t impeach a President for laundering money, War crimes, corruption, Market Manipulations, illegal Wars nowadays, what can you impeach them for?

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

If you want to know why the Senate hates the SAVE America Act, it’s because senators are lazy and have zero interest in doing actual work.

They believe the Senate, and their own voters, exist to serve them. This is why they never work and never accomplish anything. A three-day work week is almost unconscionable; asking them to work five days in a row is literal torture.

The Senate is a social club that allows them to travel around the world for free and to allow their spouses to buy all kinds of exotic foreign goods and bring them back without declaring them or paying taxes on them.

And when voters start to sniff this out and get sick of it, these senators accuse the tiny handful of people in government doing actual work of being AWOL.