Secretly Ironic

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.

It’s not headline-making the way stars and celebrities and famous folks are, but the #MeToo Moment is giving  non-famous women more and more license to stop putting up with condescending banter, casual harassment, or simple failure to even consider the value of their interests, desires, or priorities. 

Victoria and I were in line at Starbucks and witnessed a break up that was amazing.

Guy: I don’t understand why people are mad Wonder Woman wasn’t nominated. It was just some model fighting in a swimsuit.

Girl: I’m done with you.

Guy: What?

Girl: Fuck off, Dan. *leaves*

🌈Mary🌈 (@sapphicgeek) January 8, 2018

Inspiring
There’s some good news out of North Carolina. 

Dutch journalists know how to do their jobs in the face of political obstruction. American journalists seem to be unable to coordinate this kind of action, but maybe they’ll be inspired to do so now.

The Lifetime Fitness gym has removed all cable news from its gym TVs. Nobody should watch cable news. (Just look at the recent charade of Jake Tapper inviting faux human Stephen Miller onto his show so he’d have a chance to look like a Very Serious Person by throwing him out.)

Ominous
Department of Justice has successfully revoked naturalization from at least one immigrant citizen. It’s not clear if the application anomalies cited as the reason for revocation were lies or simple errors.

A hint may be in the immigration proposals recently withdrawn by the administration, which would curtail and revoke skilled H1-B visa issuance. Because as much as immigration “reformists” claim to want skilled immigration and legal immigration, they are lying. They want reduced immigration and a whiter America. (See also this September story about flat-out rejecting expert studies on the benefits of immigration… and of course this week’s shithole story about our shitbird president. 

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang but with a gif.

Celia (@_celia_marie_) July 2, 2017

In other bad news, most addiction-treatment clinics do not provide the evidence-based treatments that are most effective. 

And it snowed in the Sahara.

Correction
Last week I sent a link to an article about a voter registration drive among Puerto Ricans living in Florida. It was an old article about a different voter registration drive. I should have sent this article or this one or this one.

Cultivating curiousity
A new paper argues that the Sicilian Mafia arose primarily as a result of market shocks related to rising demand for lemons after the discovery that they could cure or prevent scurvy.

TIL: Earliest known use of #shithole, according to OED, is this amazing line from the 1629 ‘Liber Lilliati’: “Six shitten shotes did I shoote in thy mowth that I shot from my shithole.” — Kristina Killgrove ☠ (@DrKillgrove) January 11, 2018

Cultivating joy
Soccer hilarity: 3 Japanese national soccer team players vs 100 school kids.
Mlem 13/10

I’ve now been unemployed for a week, and it’s been a roller coaster. I started an intensive business class and picked up a part-time job, and between homework and catching up on everything I need to know for a new project, I’ve had less free time than I did when I was working 40 hours a week. It’s kind of thrilling.

I haven’t lost all my cynicism, though. Filing for unemployment is a truly miserable process. A more conspiracy-minded friend of mine is convinced that the process is deliberately opaque to keep people from getting benefits. I blame incompetence rather than malice, but when the outcome is the same, the cause doesn’t particularly matter to the person struggling to pay rent.

I actually wrote to my state rep to ask if she knew how bad it was. Apparently, yes, she did: the system went into operation in 2013, several years late and several million dollars over budget, and was an immediate disaster. It’s a failure that’s still felt keenly around the statehouse. Deloitte Consulting was the vendor behind the debacle, although it didn’t seem to hurt them at all. (If I’ve learned anything from the first week of my project management class, it’s that nobody knows how to manage projects and they’re almost always disasters. The bigger and more important the project, the bigger and more horrific the disaster).

Collateral damage in the drug war
Jeff Sessions is reversing Obama-era guidelines that allowed states to regulate marijuana on their own terms. If it were not obvious before, this should underline the fact that “states’ rights” means only those rights that involve enslaving, incarcerating, abusing, and disenfranchising people of color. The drug war is not effective at stopping drugs. It’s effective at locking up and marginalizing minorities. That’s why Sessions likes it.

Meanwhile, cutbacks in opioid prescriptions have led legitimate chronic-pain patients to the black market. If only they could just smoke some weed… 

Fire & Aim
Everyone’s talking about it endlessly, but if you read only one take on “Fire and Fury,” j/k nobody’s gonna stop at just one. Hot takes are the opiate of the commentariat. Anyway, N+1 has a pretty good one, comparing it to the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Purloined Letter.” 

Cultivating deep thoughts
Trump’s botched Puerto Rico recovery efforts have meant that a lot of Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida. Voter registration drives aim to make sure their voice is heard in the 2018 elections.

Gin & Tacos linked to The Presidential Spectacle, which brings to bear on political science my favorite essay by Roland Barthes, about the spectacle of professional wrestling, how the outcome is preordained but everyone cheers it on anyhow.

58% of Americans over 65 watch cable news. Nobody should watch cable news.

The global population is making progress on poverty, literacy, disease, child mortality, hunger…  so, it’s not all bad.

Cultivating oddity
The Awl describes the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport as “The Most Homoerotic Little Archive In Texas.” They do not appear to be wrong. 

Tumblr user selects some of Buzzfeed’s best selected content ripped off from Twitter.

Scottish farmers to use lasers to stop eagles from eating lambs.

In Florida, it’s been so cold that iguanas are falling from trees immobile… but they’re not dead. As someone learned when he loaded his car with frozen iguanas.

Cultivating joy
This dog has learned to ride a sled down a hill. And carry it back up the hill. And ride it down again. And carry it up again. And…

It may be cold out, but local weather reporters at least have some good jokes about it.

Sat photo of the storm.

Bloomberg columnist and former econ prof Noah Smith takes us through his analysis of why racism is fundamental to understanding the applications of economics in the US: A nation-state is a machine that facilitates human wellbeing by maintaining functional institutions, distributing wealth, and creating public goods. To do those things it needs the citizenry to have some sense of national cohesion.

And that means citizens have to act like citizens. They have to have a sense of shared responsibility, and shared respect. And in the US, we’re not moving in the right direction. The wealthy regard themselves as above the law, and think they shouldn’t have to pay taxes or interact with the common people. Think about all those supercars registered in Montana, all those private jets and private schools and first-class lounges and dinners in Davos.

And of course there’s the racism. As Paul Krugman comments:

The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites.

If economists don’t take this into account, and citizens don’t regard each other as fundamentally on the same team, then their mathematical models of the economy are going to fail. They can design an ideal tax or infrastructure or other economic policy, but if they don’t take into account that some citizens will oppose anything that helps anyone brown, they’re not going to be able to make useful policy recommendations.

For Noah Smith and the other pundits, professors, and advisors, this is a reminder that they need to address racism as well as math in their economic models.

For the electorate at large, this is a warning: If the US is going to continue to be a functional nation-state, we need to do more to overcome racism and keep the top 1% from running away from the rest of us. We need to foster inter-racial and inter-class cohesion. Instead, we’re re-segregating our public schools and supporting segregated private schools. We’re cutting the safety net and giving breaks to the rich. We’re building wildly regressive policies and stoking racial resentment. 

This is … bad.

What now? I quoted a warning from Brad DeLong the other day:

To be blunt: a social democratic middle-class society is much better society in which to have a large stock of entrepreneurial, inherited, or rent-derived wealth than is a communist society. But it is also a much friendlier society to the wealthy than is a fascist society. And social democracy and fascism—hard or, if you are lucky, soft—are the only options the future will allow: tertium non datur.

Smith provides a rather less stark series of options. We might develop a social democracy. Or we might just sort of muddle along through a series of crises in which coalitions collapse as soon as the immediate Trumpist threat abates. He hopes for a durable coalition.

Each time America has successfully come through a major crisis – the Civil War, the Depression/WW2 – it was because leaders created a vision to unite a disparate collection of American out-groups into an enduring coalition that became the in-group.

Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 1, 2018

A commenter whose provenance I cannot determine has a pretty good point that we’re going to have to make some ugly compromises:

It’s worth remembering those outgroups included Catholic and Free Mason baiting paranoid conspiracy theorists for Lincoln and corrupt, unreconstructed Southern racists for FDR. We are doomed if we pretend this is going to be pretty or wholly edifying.

Robert George (@RobertCinci) January 1, 2018

Gritty reboots
Fresh off the success of his darkly thoughtful Flintstones reboot comics (Fred has PTSD, the appliance-animals are an oppressed proletariat plotting revolution, etc), Mark Russell is issuing a gritty new reboot of the Snagglepuss character from 1970s-era Hannah Barbera. The panther is now a closeted playwright under investigation by HUAC. Sort of if Tennessee Williams were a pink panther. People have some issues with the portrayal, in that they’re fine with bestiality but grossed out by gay bestiality. But come on. Snagglepuss was always gay.

Reading
I just finished reading Sing, Unburied, Sing yesterday. If you haven’t read it, you should. Although I spent most of the day after I put it down in a tear-stained funk.

I don’t want to give away the whole plot, but if conventional ghost mythology holds that ghosts are the souls of those who die bad deaths and leave unfinished business behind, then it stands to reason that America is littered with the ghosts of centuries of Black people who died in terrible ways. Although it’s not a ghost story per se — it’s about a family struggling to get by in bayou Mississippi — Ward still makes the phrase “haunted by the wrongs of the past” terrifyingly literal.

My wife says she finds the ending, in which the two youngest children and their grandfather confront and commune with their spiritual legacy, uplifting. I cannot see anything but the accumulation of wrong upon wrong upon wrong, bayou trees haunted with the ghosts of the unhappy dead keening at us to fix what cannot be made whole.

Cultivating joy
2018 goals: be as chill as this cat.

What makes a midwestern city thrive? Immigration and universities. What do midwestern voters want? Not that.

I hope this is fake: A note from an old family friend, declining a invitation to celebrate an anniversary because although it’s a special occasion and they’re old friends, they just can’t spend any time with liberals anymore.

Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) isn’t exempt from sprawling tentacles of Trumpian corruption. They’ve nominated a guy from Accuweather to run the weather service, someone who has lobbied to make NOAA data harder to access for individuals (so that his company can make money processing and displaying it with ads).
After stalling on Obama’s nominees, most notably to the Supreme Court… McConnell advocates for a rule change to make it easier to put his ideologues in federal judiciary positions.Nursing homes in Germany use ostalgie as therapy – that is, recreating communist-era East German scenes for dementia patients who have forgotten everything after about ’89.

Trump
Read these two articles carefully: The NYT interview and the Washington Post article about how it happened. Stated but not underlined in both: The president is deeply unwell, easily swayed by anyone who talks to him, and frequently incoherent. His organization operates a for-profit club in which the wealthy can buy access to him; because he is so easily swayed, there is very little check on corruption beyond how many other competing corrupt influences are pushing in different directions. 

The transcript of the interview is terrifying:

I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected.

Theory
Dense but worth the effort, a 1983 Harvard Business Review article of the morality and ethics of business management:

The core of the [Protestant work] ethic, even in its later, secularized form—self-reliance, unremitting devotion to work, and a morality that postulated just rewards for work well done—was undermined by the complete transformation of the organizational form of work itself.
…
It is within this complicated and ambiguous authority structure, always subject to upheaval, that success and failure are meted out to those in the middle and upper middle managerial ranks. Managers rarely spoke to me of objective criteria for achieving success because once certain crucial points in one’s career are passed, success and failure seem to have little to do with one’s accomplishments. Rather, success is socially defined and distributed.

One thing that interests me here is the degree to which the failings and mechanisms covered here have changed and evolved in the intervening decades. Risk avoidance is still a problem, but it’s a widely-acknowledged one with a lot of procedures in place – and a greater willingness (or at least, stated willingness) to accept and learn from failure. Conformity is still there, but different kinds of conformity are rewarded or punished. Quarterly-results-driven shortsightedness? Ooooh boy.

Cultivating optimism
THIS SCIENTIST FIGHTS CRIME. AGAINST BIRDS.

Cultivating joy
DogRates year in review. 

There are approximately 3,456,000 seconds until the end of this year, fifteen hours until the end of my current job, and approximately 47,040 working hours until the end of my career, give or take a few years.

What are you going to do with your time?

My main New Year’s resolution will be to judge all media outlets (and writers) by their worst moments, not their best. — brad plumer (@bradplumer) December 27, 2017

I’m gonna… I dunno, finally quit paying for that gym membership I haven’t really used much in a while?

I just heard some real bad news
What happens to the children of single mothers who get arrested? Surprise, the efforts are haphazard and the outcome is terrible.

Twitter just banned a bot trying to help it clean up its Nazi problem.

A modest proposal from a Texas doctor: Make these freeloading infants get a job.

Non-sad news
Excellent (and amusingly titled) profile of home-cooking guru Kenji López-Alt and his next venture.

Boston loves iced coffee. It’s nine degrees outside right now and I’m drinking iced coffee myself. It’s kind of our thing.

Cultivating interest
Everysecond.io: A visualization of things that happen around the world in one second.

Cultivating joy
This is a very good way to introduce a new puppy to your elder dog.
Cat said Nooooooope.
Tiny dog on a kickboard.

Automation and mechanization have always led, in the end, to greater prosperity. You know the story: hand-weavers revolted against the machine loom, but now everyone can have more than one pair of pants and people have new jobs like choosing clothes for celebrities or using sandpaper on new jeans to give them an authentic hand-distressed look. But maybe, just maybe, this time is different. The debate has gotten predictable enough that it’s almost possible to automate the creation of thinkpieces about it.

This analysis of the McKenzie Global Institute report is pretty grim:

Economists have always believed that previous waves of job destruction led to an equilibrium between supply and demand in the labor market at a higher level of both employment and earnings. But if robots can actually replace, not just displace, humans, it is hard to see an equilibrium point until the human race itself becomes redundant.

As a counterpoint, Eichengreen argues that the the pace of automation-driven change is not as rapid as some fear, and that jobs will be more likely to adapt than to disappear entirely. Still, we’re definitely in an era where “lifelong learning” isn’t an aspiration for thoughtful people but an absolute requirement for economic survival.

Anyway, we all know the story. In the long run… 

Bang bang
When the Black Panthers started the carrying long guns in public, Ronald Reagan was moved to sign a gun control law to outlaw the practice. Huffpo interviews some folks to get a look at the state of black gun ownership today.

Cultivating secrecy
The cabinet is shrouded in secrecy: Many agencies refuse to release information on meetings, in what definitely seems to be an attempt to hide the patronage and influence of the wealthy and powerful.

Meanwhile in North Carolina, Trump is turning the judiciary back to the bad old days, nominating a protege of Jesse Helms. Helms was a dinosaur and an embarrassment even in the 1990s, when Farr worked to help him suppress the black vote. The voter suppression, gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement operation Farr abetted kept Helms in power until 2003. (Also of note: He’s a graduate of wingnut-favorite Hillsdale College…)

Cultivating interest
A history of Washington’s worst intersection.
The world’s first comedy film, from 1895: a 45-second prank video.

Cultivating joy
Redditors see this dog and immediately begin a parody of “Shorty got low…”

Awkward kitten practices…. something.

Camo cat.

A quick update on things missed over the holiday: Alleged journalist Mike Cernovich, best known for promoting the Pizzagate hoax, showed up on Reddit and encouraged users to ask him anything. It did not go well. At all.

The state of Wisconsin gave $3 billion in incentives to Foxconn to build a giant plant. Only they did not write the contract very well. It did not go well. At all.

Trump raged at refugees from Haiti (“they all have AIDS”) and Nigeria (“will never return to their huts after seeing the US”). He denies this. Immigration policy is, in general, not going well. At all. 

Trump tweeted a statement thanking Turning Points USA, a group credibly accused of illegal politicking and racist bias.

A Palestinian girl was arrested for pushing soldiers away from her front door. A journalist from the mainstream, centrist, wide-circulation newspaper Maariv Daily called for collective rape as punishment: “In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras.“

Firing Mueller may be impossible, but Trump is undermining the FBI elsewhere for partisan purposes. 

Ed Burmila’s in The Baffler this time, with a warning about the looming danger of nuclear war: It’s a THAAD, THAAD, THAAD World. (See also this Twitter thread from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service professor Colin Kahl).

An iced tea company called Long Island Iced Tea didn’t feel that naming a nonalcoholic beverage company after an alcoholic beverage was misleading enough, so they changed their name to Long Blockchain. Shares soared because now it sounds like it’s related to BitCoin.

Jared and Ivanka’s landlord is getting a sweet deal on some mining leases from the Trump administration. 

The latest sexual harassment allegations are at Vice Media, which is totally unsurprising. The surprise: the HR director who covered up their harassment problems used to work for Harvey Weinstein covering up his harassment problems!

Hey remember when

The evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby conspired with ISIS to smuggle ancient artifacts out of Iraq so they could hasten The Second Coming. We talked about this for like 3 days, max. It’s been a fucked up few years — T. Finn (@The_FinnSA) December 22, 2017

Freedom is Slavery
The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head sure seems to be getting off to a quick start.

Mulvaney’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau no longer defines protecting consumers as part of its mission. https://t.co/7xWUi656gl — @mattyglesias December 22, 2017

Cultivating schadenfreude
10 pints into his evening, a London 22-year-old goes viral with a truly epic crotch injury. (He’s OK).

Cultivating joy
Baby bat getting belly-rubs.
Top 10 movies of 2007. No, not this year. 2007. He’s working on his own schedule, guys.
Forgot to wrap one last present…

It’s the Friday before Christmas. Offices are closing early, flights are full, and package delivery services are booking plenty of overtime. Presented with not very much commentary, a bunch of links I thought were cool. Have a great weekend. 

Fascinating
19th century womenswear was incredibly flammable. 
Cordyceps are … incredible. (Thanks Paul! Other readers – I love getting feedback & tips, just hit reply).
Stats of the year! For the UK, it’s the percentage of land that is densely developed (1%). For the US, it’s the number of people killed by lawnmowers  (69. Nice). 

Freedom is slavery
Typographical errors in warrants lead to inaccurate arrests and charging innocent people.
Ajit Pai’s FCC presses to define not-broadband as broadband.
Guns are allowed in the TN legislature… but not signs, because those are dangerous.
Key difference between Nazi propaganda and official White House statements on immigration: America uses different fonts and a cleaner graphic design.
Callista Gingrich, envoy to the Vatican, attended the funeral of disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Everyone had nice things to say about each other. 

Hey remember when

Remember when a war criminal drank poison in court and it was like the eight craziest thing that happened last week and you probably already forgot because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 2017 — Gin and Tacos, a division of Raytheon (@gin_and_tacos) December 20, 2017

Cultivating joy
Cat does not enjoy Christmas at all.
Secret squirrel?