Category: Uncategorized

Krampus is coming. This newsletter is more likely to be delayed, absent, or incomplete for the remainder of the month. (Traditionally, Krampus comes at the beginning of December, but let’s be real, we are living in an all-Krampus-all-the-time world right now. For evidence: the inevitable “Trump Scandal Year In Review” article  has arrived and it is long.)

Centrism is dead
More from Ed Burmila: Republicans fire up the base by giving them what they want. Their base wanted racism, false piety, and tax cuts, and goddamnit they’re getting that. Democrats, if they’re going to succeed beyond 2018, need to listen to their base and start giving them what THEY want: healthcare, progressive taxation, immigration, civil rights enforcement, and so on. At the very least, when you’re Doug Jones and you win an election on a wave of enthusiasm for keeping sexually abusive creeps out of office, don’t try and downplay the allegations against a sexually abusive creep.

Meanwhile in bad news: Alabama sheriffs, New Jersey medical examiners, California rehabilitation centers, water quality in the DC offices of the EPA.

Culturing culture
The Awl has a recurring Monday bit with kind of ominous trance music and it’s pretty good for when you’re in the mood for ominous trance music and a really bleak caption. 

Before consuming a cultural product, you can now check Rotten Apples to see if there’s a sex predator involved. (See also the service provided by Does The Dog Die? which allows you to avoid movies including any number of unpleasant things, including animal suffering, clowns, and seizure-inducing strobe effects).

Did your elementary school gym class ever contain square dancing? Is your state’s official dance square dancing? It’s probably because Henry Ford was an incredibly virulent racist and antisemite. I’m not kidding. He hated black people and jazz so much that he spent vast sums of money funding country music and square dances to promote white music. 

Cultivating joy
Cat being a jerk.
Boop.

Hurricanes happen even without global warming, even large ones, and we can’t be certain that the damage of any of this year’s storms was caused by human-driven climate change.

But at least three weather data points this year were so far outside the realm of normal that we can be reasonably certain that this particular weather isn’t just weather, but climate: The record-high global temperature average, the record-high summer temperatures in Asia, and the record-high temperatures of the North Pacific.

The good news is that it’s quite likely that many people alive today will be alive to see just how crazy the weather gets! We’re going to be living in some interesting times.

Fortunately, our leadership is up to the… no, wait. It’s not. The president filled out his absentee ballot wrong in last month’s NYC elections. Actually the whole family did: Jared forgot to mail his ballot, Melania forgot to sign hers, and Ivanka mailed hers too late. But the president got his own birthday wrong on the form. Don’t worry though, he’s got a very good brain. Best brain. Still good. Yes.

It’s OK though, because they dynamism of the American economy and the children are our future and here’s a must-read article titled FML: Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. “Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest,” says Jimmi Matsinger. “I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

This also goes a long way to explaining why anxiety and panic have replaced depression as the touchstone American mental illness these days. (Hey remember when it was hypomania? Those were fun times.) 

Twitter Interlude

Set Up Your Optimization Process. I Will Meet You There, In The Crack Between What You Want And What You Ask For. https://t.co/KtGrmHXKz6 — Moloch Chan (@MolochChan) November 23, 2015

These claims about the future implications of Go AI are {species_data(‘human’).adjs_by_target_state[:complacent].sample(2).join(‘ and ‘)}. — Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) March 11, 2016

Omg friends, TIL the term for ‘mansplain’ in French is ‘mecspliquer’.
Mec = bro
“expliquer” = to explain
“M’expliquer” is reflexive; it literally translates to “I explain myself.”
This is such a *delightful* portmanteau I can’t even. — Renée Stephen (@ReneeStephen) December 14, 2017

Takedowns
No, you dumbass, that’s not how fraud works.

Moar Politics
Mention Our Revolution, the group that arose from Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign last year, to a moderate voter, and they’ll say it’s terrible branding for a political movement. Revolution? Socialism? When are progressives going to realize that conservatives have 49% of the votes, more of the electoral college, and 99% of the guns? How can liberals be so out of touch?

Michael Tomasky argues that it’s Republicans who are out of touch, at least with the parts of America where innovation and opportunity happen. Hillary Clinton, he points out, may have won only 15% of the counties in the US, but those small physical areas contribute 64% of the US GDP.

Personal essays
Mimi O’Donnell on her marriage to Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Professional climber Beth Rodden on her personal journey of obsession and fear and love (the kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan is only part of it).

Cultivating hope
Alabama makes it really hard for poor rural black people to vote. Fortunately for Lowndes County residents, a former sharecropper named Perman Hardy has the almost superhuman energy and dedication it takes to overcome those obstacles, get voters registered, and get them to the polls.

Cultivating despair
You can now buy a Christmas-themed dummy surveillance camera to emphasize to your children that just like the cops, Santa is literally watching them at all times.

Cultivating joy
Elusive.

USA Today is the definition of a middle-of-the-road newspaper. They’ll give you some stats, some weather, some info, but they’re not known for a strong editorial platform. So when they start going HAM, something is very strange. So here’s the latest official USA Today middle-of-the-road moderate editorial board opinion about the president:

A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.

See also: Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) voted against Trump’s candidate Roy Moore in the special election this week, and even Jeff Sessions, the Klan-sympathizing right-wing lunatic and former senator who vacated the seat to bring injustice to the Justice Department, won’t say whether he was willing to put his vote down in Moore’s column.

A significant number of conservatives went with a write-in vote for University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. I can’t say I really blame them. Unlike Moore, Saban, who is both the best-loved and best-compensated public employee in the great state of Alabama, at least has some idea of how strategy, planning, and management work.

AI hype cycle
Botnik Studios has been posting some pretty hilarious AI-generated stuff over the past few months, including this Dear Abby video which advises us that “It is important to be ashamed of the members of your family.” But how much of this is actually neural networks learning to speak almost like people, and how much of it is clever marketing?

For a bit of perspective, let’s go to Actual Data Scientist and pal Alex Baker: 

I don’t doubt they use neural networks to generate word sequences, but I think that there is a lot of human curation, and I think they basically use their tech as a lightly-skewed die roll and cherrypick the best stuff from it and say “an AI made this!”

In general they’re very Buzzfeedy about how they put things. The clickosphere figures that saying “We used readily available tech to barf nonsense. Here’s the best nonsense we found.” didn’t generate enough clicks, so they label it as “We trained a typewriter to control monkeys, and the result’s better than Shakespeare!”

Pensive
How Chinese scholars view Western elite institutions, especially global views of the role of luck and hard work and merit.

If you like the sad/funny shows, the frequently animated adventures of guys (and it’s usually guys) like Bojack Horseman, Rick Sanchez, and Sterling Archer, you owe it to yourself to read this article in The Awl about comedic portrayals of depression, addiction, and dysfunction. 

Our willingness to believe that sadness in an intelligent affliction actually helps elide the fact that addiction is a perfect, classic sitcom trope: because addiction is a cycle, and the point of the sitcom is that nothing will ever change. The same cast of characters will have essentially the same conversations about different situations, perhaps in different settings. Archie Bunker will be racist; Rachel Green will want to go shopping; Rick Sanchez will be an asshole to his grandchildren and everyone else, too.

Cultivating optimism
The world’s top motorcycle racing competition has announced an electric motorcycle race series for 2019. It’s only a few races for the first year, and the bikes are a little heavy, but they go 0-60 in 3 seconds and top out at 140 mph, so it should still be real racing. Auto racing series Formula E is also making strides.

Why does this matter? If we’re going to decarbonize the auto industry, we need to go electric. Because racing is both a branding exercise and a technology testbed for manufacturers, a racing series is a pretty good sign that electric is coming. (For example, as motorcycle manufacturers began developing 4-stroke motors, MotoGP phased out 2-strokes, which accelerated a global switch to the cleaner 4-stroke combustion process).  

A successful racing series means more attention from consumers and more investment from manufacturers. If Moto-E and Formula E can eventually become even half as popular as MotoGP and Formula 1, that’s a really good sign for electric vehicle success and carbon output reduction.

Cultivating joy
Christmas dog!

Big dogs meeting little dogs: adequate replacement for therapy?

What was Doug Jones’ walkoff music as he finished his victory speech? “Teach Me How to Dougie.” (Errybody love me you ain’t messin’ with my Dougie).

Reminder: Christmas lights and palm trees don’t mix.

Volcanoes are amazing. Here are some photos.

What’s peak 2017? In the 2020s, what will we look back on as a emblematic of this tire fire of a year?

Was it the sort of year when you wonder how a white supremacist winds up as an EEOC compliance officer at a minority-owned company?

Was it the nostalgia for the merely terrible national discourse and leadership of the George W. Bush years?

I bet there was no point in 2008 at which you thought, “Nine years from now the leading voices in the GOP will make Joe the Plumber look like Voltaire.” — Ed Myrrh-mila (@gin_and_tacos) December 12, 2017

Was it when the Republican party started fighting with the American Bar Association because they disagree about whether judges should be competent?

Was it when an Army buddy of an alleged pedophile Senate Candidate tried to give an example of moral behavior and it still involved underage prostitutes? Or when the candidate’s wife tried to claim they weren’t prejudiced because they have “a Jew” as one of their attorneys?

Between Kayla Moore rebuffing anti-semitism by citing her “Jew” lawyer and the president rebuffing sexual assault charges by sexually harassing a sitting senator, this has been a great 12 hours for own-goals. — Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) December 12, 2017

Was it something more subtle, like this analysis from The Awl of what went wrong with Dilbert as Adams began to love the boss more than the worker, loving in Trump all the same things he used to mock about managers.

Or maybe Scott Walker wearing a festive Christmas sweater to celebrate the season of generosity while gutting the state’s safety net and drug-testing food-stamp recipients. 

Or the technological absurdity of Waze and Google Maps directing people down roads that are empty because they’re on fire.

Realistically it’ll probably be the constant drumbeat of sexual harassment being uncovered. The long-delayed acknowledgement of something that men have known about but not quite understood, and women have long understood but not been able to get taken seriously. The year when you see a male celebrity or professional role model mentioned somewhere and wonder if he’s dead, or just dead to you now. (Read the Ken Friedman rundown. It’s horrifying.)

That and the collusion. Yeah, that’ll be in there.

#RollTide
Reports from Alabama yesterday included active voters suddenly marked as inactive and voting machines breaking. And cops showing up to check voters for outstanding warrants. Yet somehow decency and the colossal strategic mistakes of the Republican party ran together and Doug Jones won the special election.

Cultivating amusement
Massachusetts Gothic: “Why is that field red? The children ask. It’s a cranberry bog, the adults repeat. Just a cranberry bog. The eyes in the bog do not blink.”

The 2017 Hater’s Guide to Williams Sonoma.

A collection of rejected New Yorker covers called The Not Yorker.

What if we made twee indie romances in the Star Wars universe?

What if you took a neural net and asked it to write a Harry Potter novel?

Cultivating joy
Snow day elephant

Unable to operate the straw on the iced coffee, a dog falls asleep with his nose in the cupholder.

Shoulder-mounted kitten.

(This whole newsletter is much funnier autotuned and sung to the beat of California Love)

The Alabama special election is today, so it’s worth taking a look back at a 2014 piece from the New Republic on how the accomplishments of the civil rights movement are being reversed, especially in Alabama. Basically, the Republican party is wrecking everything like some kind of right-wing parody of Social Distortion lyrics.

We have to go
The neighbors have complained
We have to go
The walls have all been stained
They have to know
They can’t stop us now
They have to know
We could burn this town

It’s almost comical how bad a candidate Moore is. At a recent rally, one of the candidate’s (very few) friends from his service in Vietnam told a tale of upright moral behavior: When Moore accidentally went to a brothel with underage prostitutes, he turned around and left. Didn’t shut it down or anything, didn’t stop other officers from going there, but, you know, he didn’t personally patronize that brothel.

See also – Why Roy Moore supporters can’t/won’t change their minds.
See also – Alabama makes it hard to vote. On purpose.
See also – UN officials tour Alabama, are appalled.
See also – what comedians are gonna do with this material.
See also – Judge preemptively orders Alabama not to delete any records or images of this election.

Education policy gets less boring

Even less/more boring: Network policy
For more than 100 million Americans, internet access is available only through companies whose adherence to existing net neutrality regulations has been… subpar. And the rules, such as they are, are about to get looser. Call or write your legislators. 

My milkshake brings the ducks to the yard
Anti-bullying campaign comes to screeching halt as victim’s family revealed to be racist as hell. #MilkshakeDuck never dies.

Twitter interlude

SOME CALL IT INTIMACY ISSUES

OTHERS CALL IT EMOTIONAL CAMOUFLAGE

EITHER WAY I AM NOT COMING OUT FROM BEHIND THIS BUSH PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE — NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) December 11, 2017

Cultivating interest
JStor celebrates obsolete words.

Cultivating joy
Steve Mnuchin is non-awful with this one weird trick.
This is the bravest, cleverest chipmunk.

Imagine working as a food inspector. And an air quality measurement expert. And a drug purity chemist. And a supply-chain HAACP consultant. Imagine doing all of those things every single day for everything you eat, breathe, swallow, or purchase. Imagine living in a country where the assumption is that at any point, you’re going to get cheated, and it might kill you. Imagine shopping like a regular civilian in China.

The people trying to cheat you only have to get good at cheating in one way, but you have to deal with dozens of people trying to cheat you all the damn time. The asymmetry means that one civilian food-safety enthusiast might catch the melamine in the milk and the industrially recycled grease in the cooking oil but will eventually miss the lead in the tea and the cadmium in the butter… and that’s just food. They’re playing this game in every aspect of their lives. 

It sounds exhausting and infuriating and terrifying. When you can’t trust anyone or anything, everything is a threat. 

It also sounds a lot like the experience of being a down-and-out opioid addict in the US. Except I suppose that in the US, you only have to worry about the purity of your street drugs. You can be sure that the bottled water you buy to shoot up with is actually purified, for example. The harm-reduction clinic down on Methadone Mile knows the needles it buys aren’t haphazardly autoclaved or pre-used and repackaged. The alcohol you buy to knock yourself out when you can’t get a fix isn’t tainted with lead and methanol. 

When you can’t trust anyone or anything, everything is a threat. 

One of the few other areas of American consumption that’s tainted by extreme levels of distrust is media. I gotta get my news fix, but I only trust Steve and Ainsley… And when Fox tells you nothing is trustworthy and you can’t trust anyone, everything is a threat. And when everything is a threat, and you’re living in fear, demagogues take power. 

I wonder whether, in coming to China, I have stepped into America’s future, not its past.

Most people do not realize just how deeply their expectations run, nor how profoundly they believe that they are universal. It is existentially shattering to find that this is not the case. These divisions about what we want our government to do have always been there, but they have led us to a peculiar place.

In conclusion, capitalism is destroying the fabric of social trust in communist China, and Fox News is the fentanyl of the masses.

Cultivating Despair
Once again, let me restate the wonders of the EJI Calendar of Racial Injustice. I’ve been looking up all my friends’ birthday injustice. Some of the dates are inspiring, especially if you get a birthday wrong by one day.

Yeah, turns out my friend’s birthday isn’t an initial setback in the fight for true love conquering all. It’s an incident where an entire town was destroyed in 1923, and nobody’s quite sure how many people were murdered because a mob just burned a mostly-black village to ashes and killed anyone who didn’t run.

Now who wants some birthday cake?

Serve and Protect
On Friday, an officer was acquitted in the shooting death of an unarmed man lying facedown on a carpet begging for his life. Video footage of what is somehow not counted as murder is public record.

Cultivating hope
This meditation on sperm whales: “And so they go on. Not because they are brave, or curious, or pioneering – but because evolution has simultaneously damned them to daily katabasis, and given them the monstrous power to overcome it.”

Cultivating joy
You can stop wearing deliberately ugly Christmas sweaters now, because NOTHING will ever top this one.

I guess this human is harmless, I’ll go ahead and lie down OH NOooooooooooo.

This giant cat bed has some drawbacks… Cat in cat-shaped cat-scratching cat-house… curly-haired  kitten.

Snowball-catching dog… puppy not quite coordinated enough to play.