See, once it turned out that Obama had a birth certificate, nobody could trust birth certificates anymore. Because obviously Obama wasn’t American. You know, you have to be American to be a citizen. I can’t exactly define what that means, but I know it when I see it.
I mean, you better not have a Bank of America bank account if you’re not One Of Us.
And yes, I am specifically referring to the horrifically exploitative pre-code film Freaks:
In Hungary, there’s a tax on doing anything nice for immigrants.
There’s a new sexism scandal at a Tokyo medical school.
Chinese parents are furious as their expensive school district admits kids from poor regions. Solution: A “poor door” so the children of migrants don’t wind up in the classrooms of property-owners.
Big ideas
Francis Fukuyama tries to explain why history stubbornly refuses to end. His original prediction has become, at this point, a punchline more than an idea.
For example, StrongTowns has a great article this week on what they’re calling the “irrelevance of thingies,” by which they mean that the Internet of Things type hype is largely just hype. They contend that cities actually matter even more than they used to:
It’s been more than two decades since Frances Cairncross published his book The Death of Distance that prophesied that the advance of computing and communication technologies would eliminate the importance of “being there” and erase the need to live in expensive, congested cities. (It goes down, along with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Kevin Hassett’s Dow 36,000 as one of the demonstrably least accurate book titles of that decade.)
Cultivating joy
Cat is terrible dinner guest.
Cat is rude to marine life.
Swarm of very wrinkly little puppies.
Secretly Ironic 