Category: Uncategorized

The other day I passed along some speculation to the effect that the New York Times keeps publishing irrelevant opinion pieces by the likes of Brooks and Douthat because they can’t admit that the American right has gone full Nazi, but still want a “conservative” voice to prove they’re “balanced.”

This weekend they are going ahead and printing an article about genetics and race science. 

Let’s all have a round of applause for the return of respectable racism everyone!

When the temple of the cat god Busbastis was uncovered in Egypt it included 350,000 mummified cats. The Empire-era Brits couldn’t leave it alone, which is how 350,000 cat mummies ended up THROWN INTO LOCOMOTIVE BOILERS AS FUEL.

Cat-powered train travel was a thing. Good night.

— Ed Burmila (NATO Reporting Name: Gin and Tacos) (@gin_and_tacos) March 23, 2018

WTF
Isopod phone case.

Cultivating joy
Ooonf.
“Not sick, just very, very dumb.”

While the “campus liberals are fascist” debates rage on, a Wisconsin high school is now banning discussion of privilege because a student-led workshop on Martin Luther King Day made certain white families uncomfortable. The principal has apparently been forced to resign.

The timing of the board’s edict, just weeks before the February resignation of Principal Joseph Moylan, has fueled speculation that Moylan was pushed out in part for allowing the student-led exercise during the assembly Jan. 15.

Moderators, please stand up
The New Yorker investigated social media moderation and toxicity, but found that Facebook and Twitter really didn’t want to show their inner workings. Only Reddit was willing to really open up. The resulting article is perhaps the funniest thing you will ever read about death threats, revenge porn, Nazis, and conspiracy theories. Describing a new rule banning revenge porn: “This rule is stupid and suppresses our rights,” u/penisfuckermcgee commented.  

Reddit is not known for being the best part of the internet, but in many cases it’s one of the best. If you remember Usenet from the pre-browser Internet, you’ll recognize Reddit: Self-organizing, self-moderating messageboards and comments, sometimes horrific and often absolutely brilliant.

Every subreddit is devoted to a specific kind of content, ranging from vital to trivial: r/News, r/Politics, r/Trees (for marijuana enthusiasts), r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts (for tree enthusiasts), r/MildlyInteresting (“for photos that are, you know, mildly interesting”).

Can you get excellent information and find a community willing to share your interest in labor law, plumbing, Filipino cooking, photography, gardening, nail polish, high-quality shoes, personal finance, your town’s local events, model trains, mental illness, endometriosis, gender transition or life after leaving your church? Absolutely. Can you also find a hive of scum and villany? Oh hell yes. 

In addition to funny, the article is truly insightful and shows us how tech giants are struggling to deal with human nature that can’t really be broken down into universal rules and clear bright lines.  

“Does free speech mean literally anyone can say anything at any time?” Tidwell continued. “Or is it actually more conducive to the free exchange of ideas if we create a platform where women and people of color can say what they want without thousands of people screaming, ‘Fuck you, light yourself on fire, I know where you live’? If your entire answer to that very difficult question is ‘Free speech,’ then, I’m sorry, that tells me that you’re not really paying attention.”

You’re not helping, traditional media
Vox has an in-depth rundown of the failures of the NYT opinion section: They think they’re aiming for “diversity of opinion” but have failed to represent any Asian or Latinx voices, or any actual leftists. Just as bad, their “conservative” voices don’t convey the racist dumpster fire that is the actual reality of the Republican party. You’d get a better idea of the reality of conservatism over at /r/The_Donald (The previous article warned you not to click on that…)

ACAB, Philly Edition
The original charge was brought by a police squad widely known for faking arrests (and robbing drug dealers with falsified warrants, and the blatant armed robbery of a string of bodegas). The arresting officer is on a leaked list of cops that prosecutors will not trust to testify under oath. Thousands of the squad’s convictions have been reversed, but not this one. The suspect served a few years for it, and was released on probation.

Every time it’s almost done, he winds up somehow locked up again, thanks to a judge who seems to have taken a particular interest in his case. Every time he releases an album she bars him from traveling to support it.  At one point she asked him and his girlfriend to sing an R&B song for her in her chambers, and got angry when he refused. She has repeatedly criticized his decision to fire an exploitative mobbed-up manager with local ties and switch to a national management company that seems less corrupt. 

The latest twist: a misdemeanor ticket, later dropped, for riding an off-road dirt bike on a city street. The District Attorney and his parole officer both said the infraction didn’t merit jail time, but the judge overruled them. He’s locked up for another 2-4 years.

Rapper Meek Mill has been in and out of prison since 2009, and it’s not clear he’s actually guilty of anything at all.

(Soundtrack: Amen, the song that got him a public scolding from his neighborhood minister for using church music in a decidedly profane manner).

Pithy
Gin & Tacos:  “Remember the final years of the USSR, when everyone in charge was 75, politics became sclerotic and incapable of action, and the government was little more than an unsustainably expensive army and a pension plan? Thank god we’re not like that.”

Tell the writers that this thriller is not at all realistic
White nationalist mosque-bombing suspect is contractor with bid on border wall.
White nationalist party collapses in love triangle and fist-fight among leadership.
White nationalist mass murderer’s kid sister arrested after bringing drugs and weapons to an anti-gun protest at her school, making racist statements about it on Snapchat.

I refuse to joke about Vanessa Trump bc it’s NEVER funny when a couple files for an uncontested quick divorce, one where assets can be swiftly transferred, on the same day an independent special counsel subpoenas their family business. People, this could happen to you someday.

John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) March 16, 2018

Cultivating joy 
A dude dressed as Disney’s Elsa helped get a police truck out of a snowbank. (Or do we get angry because why’s Queen Elsa selling us out to the cops?)
Dog trained as office courier.
Literal cat in literal hat.
This cat is not pleased by his guest.

Finally, an explanation
Why the Times and so forth keep regurgitating the “campus liberals are fascists” argument: all the other pseudo-intellectual conservative talking points are lost in the tsunami of filth that is Trump’s ascendance. They need, or think they need, a “respectable conservative” voice. And all that’s available in the “respectable” field is people complaining about how a handful of students at a handful of elite colleges are rude to conservatives. So, they’ll keep running that column, again and again, even though it’s obviously wrong and irrelevant and dumb. 

If they actually wanted to run a diversity of viewpoints, they’d bring in some actual diversity of viewpoints, like maybe some actual socialists. But no, they think Paul Krugman is as left as they can go, and David Brooks somehow represents mainstream moderates instead of a weird outlier in a party full of white nationalist zealots and gun fetishists. 

Lexicon of conservative language
Ann Coulter makes clear what she means by (((Globalist))).

Economics of subservience
Tipping considered harmful: “A significant portion of my income is how men feel about me that day,” says a waitress interviewed on the custom of tipping. 

A haunting photographic series of low-income America.

Meanwhile, in the province of wealth
Betsy DeVos did a predictably terrible interview in which she revealed that she doesn’t know how to do her job.

Betsy DeVos perfectly represents the modern American Dream, where all you need to make it is vast inherited wealth and no fucking clue what you’re doing.

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) March 12, 2018

Adjustments

SPRING FORWARD

FALL BACK INTO A TIME IN WHICH LIFE WAS SIMPLER AND THE WORLD CARRIED A FAINT GLOW THAT YOU’VE LOST AND MAY NEVER RETRIEVE

NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) March 11, 2018

Cultivating joy
Cream, The Cult, …. this guy, Danzig, Darkness… 

I’m helping! I’m helping! (he’s not helping)

These puppies are also not helping.

Just as I was sending last week’s newsletter about how absurd it is for
commentators to only now pretend to notice the racism and violence
inherent in the conservative movement, Joseph Epstein published, in the
Weekly Standard, an appallingly vile piece of garbage titled “Chicago, Then and Now.” 

It’s about how blacks are going to have to bootstrap themselves up out
of this bad spot they’re in, just like the Jews and Italians and Irish
did back in the day, bwah bwah bwah you’ve heard this one before. 

This is a mainstream Republican “intellectual.” An icon of the movement. A respected scholar.

Sure, you may write off his statement that “homosexuality is a curse”
because he said that years ago, right? But what of his claim this month
that “with the advent of the pill and the sexual revolution, nice girls
have all but put prostitutes out of business?” That, tossed off as an
aside on the way to his real point, that “few people are likely to note
any valuable advances in [black] culture over the past 60 years.”

The Weekly Standard brands itself as an upstanding, respectable sort of
conservative journal, but they feel no qualms whatsoever publishing an
article to the effect that “negroes haven’t improved themselves enough
to merit my respect.” 

And of course, that’s just one facet. The rot is pervasive. EPA chief Scott Pruitt, of “I can’t fly coach because average Americans hate me so much” fame, has recently told the Christian Broadcasting Network that he thinks coal-burning is part of Jesus’ plan for America.  (If this were a network TV drama, we’d complain that the writers are repeating the 1980 James Watt storyline.)

Good news, everyone
Headline: The 99 Best Things That Happened in 2017.
A lot of good things got overshadowed by disaster. But we’re making
some important progress: Public health, carbon emissions,
conservation… There’s some good stuff in here.

“We tried to tell y’all.”

– Ancient African-American proverb

— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) December 3, 2016

Cultivating joy
Bucket o’ Panda
This dog seems to have lied on its resume
Also this cat
PLOS has a scholarly study on the competitive advantage conferred by athletes grunting.

Jeff Bezos is creating a planned economy, with algorithms instead of a politburo. Amazon seeks efficiency and growth more than profit, and the result is this juggernaut. It’s optimizing something… but it’s optimizing away humanity.

(See also articles previously mentioned: AI has already taken over; it’s called the corporation, and Dude, You Broke the Future. See also classic Slate contrarianism in which Reihan Salam thinks Amazon is awesome.)

I am not making this up
China wages war on funeral strippers.

Mainstream media
Noted Republican intellectual, National Review contributor, convicted electoral-finance felon, and AOL subscriber Dinesh D’Souza is going whole-hog on insulting the survivors of the Parkland, FL shooting. 

Everyone is focused right now on the fact that Dinesh D’Souza is a horrible person, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that he’s also not very bright.

Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) February 21, 2018

Bari Weiss, the New York Times opinion journalist who first came to fame after being outraged that Twitter would be rude to her over a minor gaffe, is shocked, shocked, at how quickly conservative intellectuals have fallen to the level of Dinesh D’Souza: 

I know I should be over it, but the speed at which the organized conservative movement became the ideological home of Marion Le Pen, Seb Gorka, Nigel Farage, Dinesh D’Souza and their ilk remains shocking to me.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) February 22, 2018

Of course, this has been their swamp for a very long time. As Jeet Heer and many others point out (again and again and again and again, to no avail) D’Souza is and has been a mainstream conservative intellectual since he was an undergrad at Dartmouth in the 1980s writing appallingly racist articles about affirmative action and outing gay students. Fascist sympathies? Here? In the … wait, the National Review endorsed Franco, didn’t they? Yes, they did. 

“Mainstream media,” although that term has been smeared to meaninglessness by the right, confuses neutrality with objectivity. And in trying to remain neutral they forget that there are, in fact, evils in this world. And that the Republican party has sided with them again and again for decades. Why are random teens better at asking questions of Marco Rubio? Because they’re not afraid to sound biased when they ask Marco Rubio what he plans to do to keep them from getting shot to death.

Meanwhile, Rebel Media, a right-wing outlet, have started their own investment fund, because of course they have. And Milo, his “feminism is cancer” t-shirt sales flagging, is now hawking supplements on Infowars. As Jeet Heer notes (again and again and again, to no avail), “Much of North American right-wing politics is best seen as a grift rather than an ideology.”

Wait, what now?
No, “vagility” isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds. Still important, though.

A fascinating study of religious belief and its impact on WAIT YOU DID A RANDOMIZED HUMAN TRIAL OF WHAT?

DIY gene modification a bad idea, says DIY gene modification pioneer.

New York Fashion Week, but with WAY better captions.

Steadily growing influence of left-wing criticism
Another review of Kids These Days… 

Cultivating joy
Chinese pupper appears to be flying.
This is kind of gross but also wonderful: there is a rare species of pink slug.

So, here we are. Another week, another mass murder. We’re at 18 so far this year.  

So we’re going with “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of children?”

— Helen K (@helenpremium) February 15, 2018

Fox thinks it’s because we took religion out of schools. Of course

You’ve banned god, mocked people who believe in Jesus, and you think guns are the problem?

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) February 15, 2018

I suppose it’s true that a lot of people are mocking him. But they’re not mocking him for his religion. They’re mocking him for being a dipshit.
(And what is it with right-wingers wanting the state to teach their children about Jesus, anyway? I thought they were all in for personal responsibility and families inculcating children with their own moral values?)

Meanwhile
McSweeney’s: To Keep Our Editorial Page Completely Balanced, We are Hiring More Dipshits
Rolling Stone: Charity is not a substitute for policy (and if Bezos wanted to make an impact and not issue a press release, he could offer health insurance to Amazon’s warehouse workers)

Why?
Why are some sports for “ladies” and others for “women?” Well, a lot of
historical baggage, of course. In some cases it’s actually a result of the translation stylebooks used by different French-dominated international sports federations.

Why are some people enraged by an explicit rejection of white supremacy?

Why is Paul Allen serving 40 months for a $3.9-billion-dollar fraud, while a homeless man is serving 15 years for stealing $100? (This sounds like an urban legend but numerous sources confirm it.)

Damn you, autocorrect (or possible Photoshop prankster)!

How to…
How to understand America.

How to understand the president’s selective love of due process.

How to interpret the apparent conflict between deregulating payday lenders while choosing groceries for the poor.

How should we interpret the fact that the parents of Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson have each donated the maximum allowable amount to his opponent?

How to interpret stories of inspirational perseverance as an indictment of the American economy and the media’s obsession with “perseverance porn.”

Cultivating joy
Puppy!
“Oh come on, just smile in your photo for once.”
Dogs on ice.

The International Olympic Committee is corrupt, as we all know. And the national-level organizations… well, pedos and doping are the most recent headlines, but we all know FIFA’s dirty, and the NFL’s dirty, and every stadium funded by taxpayer money is dirty, so let’s go ahead and assume that all sports management is in some way crooked. 

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2001 New Yorker article “Drug Store Athlete” was the first to introduce me to what turns out to be a line from Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” (It’s also cited in Modern Sports Law: A Textbook, which … hey, there’s a textbook about sports law.) But it’s not a surprise. We know it’s sordid.

We know that fandom is simply the way that managers and owners hack the human need for belonging and identity to siphon our dollars while they distract us from our daily boredom.

We know that large public events are an opportunity both for terrorists and the global panopticon. This year’s celebration will feature drones with facial recognition software to identify malefactors, and also drones with drone-recognition software to identify drones that aren’t supposed to be there. Yes, anti-drone drones. 

We know concussions and CTE and plain old injuries are inevitable in our love of the game. We watch athletes cheat death to do incredible things knowing that one of these days, an Olympian snowboarder or ski aerialist will land face-first and die on camera, and when it happens we’ll be complicit in that death. 

We know that winter sports in particular are the domain of rich white people. But we can’t look away. We love sports. We love ice skating. As Patricia Lockwood (a name you must remember, a brilliant writer) notes in her profile of Jason Brown: 

At … points, onlookers burst into the spontaneous laughter of babies. I love that laughter. It happens when the viewers overlap so completely with the athlete, with one another, that they don’t know where their own bodies end anymore. We watch sports for these moments. They’re why, every two years, the planet stops spinning and everyone turns their eyes to the spectacle of the Olympics.

Sport is metaphor, ideal, goal, inspiration. Even curling. I mean, the Finland/Korea mixed-doubles match, which took place on Wednesday, was as thrilling a shuffleboard-on-ice match as you’ll ever see. 

Tonight I’ll be eating Korean takeout and drinking soju and watching the Parade of Nations to celebrate the fact that the Republic of Korea has gone almost 100% over budget and blown 13 billion dollars on this beautiful, corrupt display of glitz and fireworks and human toil. It’s wasteful and terrible and beautiful and inspiring and I love it. 

Also Korean-style fried chicken is delicious af.

Cultivating interest
New Orleans topography is a long long story.

The persistence of paper jams is fascinating (also: the first recorded fatal paper jam happened in 1867).

Smart homes are really dumb: Your vacuum can now ask you to help it clean your house. Your bed will only make you coffee in one kind of coffeepot. Your vibrator is keeping track of your orgasms. And your TV is definitely watching you.

A lengthy eulogy for Lil Peep, who seems to be taking a place in the generational pantheon like ODB and Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse — gone far too soon, and on the verge of so much more, undone by his own fuckups and his self-destructive persona and the monsters of fame and addiction and mental illness.

Our dumb news cycle
Trump administration sidelines drug policy experts when making drug policy.

On-campus white supremacy propaganda is up 258% this year.

An actual Illinois Nazi is a likely Republican nominee for congress. (See also: More Nazis).

Here’s a real example of illegal immigrants marrying for citizenship and bringing their talentless family over to mooch off the government: Melania Knauss and her parents. 

VP Mike Pence is lying about his prior anti-gay advocacy while arguing with a gay figure-skater. He’s leading the US Olympic delegation, with the support of approximately none of the athletes.

Cultivating joy
If you really lay it on thick, you may be able to get as many puns into one article as  The Economist has in an article titled Margarine sales: Investors can’t believe they’re not better. 

This dog has majestic ears.

Girl Scouts of America trying to decide whether it’s OK to sell cookies outside marijuana shops.

Crowdfunding project creates votive candles for Robert Mueller and the distribution of the Trump pee tape.

My friend Jodi is a guidance counselor at a school in Brighton, and she recruited me to help out in the writing lab today. As it goes every time I come into a high school these days, I was intimidated by the metal detectors, impressed by the school’s devotion to anti-bullying and anti-prejudice posters, and not entirely sure which young adults were the students and which were the teachers.

Then a diminutive young woman said EVERYONE, IF YOU ARE NOT HERE FOR WRITING LAB IT IS TIME TO GO and a bunch of people who looked just as old as her, many of them twice her size, scrambled to leave or sit down at their desks. One young man needed a couple quick bits of grammar and style advice before an orthodontia appointment. Another was dawdling on his phone until I tried to talk to him, and the threat of having to have a conversation with some random adult was enough to get him to turn to his homework. Then I helped a girl revise an essay about going to visit family in Somalia and the perspective on privilege and language that she’d gained from trying to attend a Somali school for a few months. After about an hour, Jodi asked us how we were doing. My student was justifiably proud of her work: “Miss Jodi it’s going great, I want you to read my essay!”

Miss Jodi replied immediately with “I wanted to read your essay last month when it was due.” Lesson: do not waste Miss Jodi’s time.

Before I left, I introduced myself to a couple more students and told the I’d be around if they had any writing questions. One asked me if I had any advice about researching the history of hip-hop and dance music, since you’re not supposed to use Wikipedia as a primary source. He may have been trying to test whether I was actually hip enough, and he may have actually wanted to know. I advised him not to cite Wikipedia, but to look up the books that Wikipedia cites, because they are valid sources. And then I told him to check WhoSampled.com, because I love that site.

For example, the Notorious B.I.G’s still-popular track Juicy owes a huge debt to Mtume’s 1983 Juicy Fruit, a song remembered less for its quality or enduring popularity than for how many different artists sampled it.

I have only ever heard Juicy Fruit once outside of samples, but was a #1 hit.

On Billboard’s “Hot Black Singles” chart.

“Hot Black Singles” was a chart category from 1982-1990 on Billboard.

It’s now called Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

And that’s a good topic for a research paper on the history of hip-hop and dance music.

Sad!
Health insurance in America: Rationing insulin, dying.

Policing in America: Cops in Baltimore kept toy guns on hand in case they shot unarmed people and needed to frame them.

Missouri AG: Sexual freedom is sexual slavery.

Media Commentary
The NYT is like Charlie Brown, continually surprised that Lucy keeps pulling the football away at the last minute.

Ex-Great America PAC staffer, Trump appointee, banned from Uber after Islamophobic, racist, threatening comments to driver. 

Krugman tweetstorm on hypocrisy.

Stephen Miller photos + Ted Bundy quotes… kinda works.

Jacobin on poverty and surveillance (the first big data set in government hands was the eugenics commission…)

JustSecurity on The Memo.

Healy, Kieran (2017). “Fuck Nuance,” Sociological Theory vol. 35 no. 2, p. 118-127. Delivered at the symposium “What is Good Theorizing?” 

Cultivating joy
Oh no, kitty!
Local news coverage of the Boston Blizzard of 1978, featuring some great accents and hair.
Hilarious list of made-up NYT Bestsellers.

I was going to do an entire short essay on sports allegiance and I just don’t have the energy. Please proceed to the links section. Go Pats. Roll Tide.

These things are actually happening
Trump tried to fire Mueller last June. It took the Times seven months to figure it out because they believed every lie coming out of the mouths of manifest liars:

Asked why it took seven months for this to come out, @maggieNYT, who broke the story, says, “I’m a little surprised at how effective people in the White House were at lying to us…” — Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 26, 2018

Susan Collins had to haul out an actual “talking stick” to make conversation possible.

The Trump/Kobach “voter fraud” sideshow requested data on every Texan with a Latin-sounding last name.

Trump reiterated his designation of CNN staff and journalists as “fake news” while ignoring an earthquake and tsunami alert. And also a guy threatening to murder CNN staff for promoting fake news.
Republicans basically don’t like government or governance, so a shutdown for them isn’t a disaster. For Democrats, who believe that the government actually does important work when it governs, brinksmanship is much harder. 

NY Police livid at restrictions on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards they’re allowed to issue to friends and family. This is a real thing that is actually happening in America.  (See also: The insular social world of police officers is bad for America).

ICE is targeting activists.

Man spends almost 7 years in jail awaiting trial on marijuana charges.

The United Nations issued statements of concern about the deliberate cruelty of US policy on homelessness.

Cognitive dissonance

Today a woman told me she didn’t approve of building affordable housing in Millbrae because it was “too much change, too fast.” She was wearing a shirt that said ALL IMMIGRANTS WELCOME HERE.

Let’s welcome them by building affordable homes. — Leora Tanjuatco (@leoraorlee) January 21, 2018

Lies my teacher taught me
Remember the WWII push for Victory Gardens? We needed them for food shortages. We had food shortages because of Japanese internment. Japanese farmers were the backbone of California’s agricultural skill and knowledge, but we locked them up because we thought they were unpatriotic. One of the key forces behind the drive for internment was… white farmers groups!

In 1905, Swiss patent office clerk (3rd Class) Albert Einstein published 5 papers in academic journals, 3 of which combined, without hyperbole, to change the course of human history. In 1906 he applied for an entry level university lecturer position and was rejected. Non-academics would say this is baffling. But in the university’s defense, what else did he have in the pipeline? Who were his letter writers?

— Ed Burmila (@gin_and_tacos) January 23, 2018

Reassurance
Rumors that fentanyl and carfentanil are so dangerous that mere skin exposure can kill you are urban legends. Avoid hysteria. The opioid crisis is bad enough without it.

Cultivating joy
When only some letters burn out in an illuminated sign, it can be incredibly funny.

Someone has set the horrors of H. P. Lovecraft’s poetry to the tune of Piano Man. I leave the judgement of quality of both artists to the reader.

PUPPY.

With the government on the verge of yet another partial shutdown, funding for children’s healthcare funding running out, the number of uninsured Americans spiking, and a poorly-vetted tax bill hurtling toward implementation of unknown loopholes, The New York Times devoted its editorial page to letters from Trump supporters yesterday, demonstrating yet again its commitment to allowing everyone to have their own personal set of facts rather than focus on actual reality. They also did a feature piece on the folks in western Oregon who support armed takeovers of wildlife reserves, think that the government is out to get them, and cannot process the fact that their well-documented armed takeover of federal buildings ended in acquittal for no apparent reason.

(For contrast, recall the 1985 MOVE standoff, in which police burned a city block to the ground and shot anyone trying to escape the fire).

I don’t know why I keep reading the Times or giving them money. They’ve “both-sides-ed” themselves into a hole, and won’t stop digging. 

I finally understand Bitcoin

update: she has explained bitcoins in a way I now understand. bitcoin is math beanie babies. thank u. — łopatologia (@mslopatto) January 17, 2018

Nothing to see here
Trump Organization owes Deutsche Bank a lot of money. Trump Administration grants them waivers after criminal activity.

Education Department headed by Betsy DeVos grants contract to debt collection company tied to Betsy DeVos.

To defend the president, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security just said under oath that she does not know if Norway is predominantly white. — Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 16, 2018

The Department of Justice claims that 75% of terrorists are immigrants. They count as “immigrants” people who commit crimes overseas, are caught overseas, and are extradited to the US to stand trial. They also exclude white terrorists from the list of people counted as terrorists. The ADL issued a different report, noting that domestic terrorists are mostly white men.

PS: The word of the week is kakistocracy.

We’re all gonna die
Life goals: As chill as this dad in the face of a crisis. (Or as chill as Luke brushing his shoulders off).

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a push notification. — Jon Ostrower (@jonostrower) January 13, 2018

Also: Panopticon, Canadian edition, and Chinese edition.

Cultivating joy
Pigeons looking like they’re about to drop the hottest rap album of 2018.
Weather report gets a curious visitor.
I think this is some kind of longhaired beef in a field of flowers.
Seductive kangaroo.
Sadly, this extinct giant sloth is not known as the guacamoledon.