This gave me a solid laugh this morning: perhaps the most local local commercial I’ve ever seen. Jemele Hill called it “the worst-best commercial I’ve ever seen”.
The ad was filmed by comedy duo Rhett & Link for Roller Kingdom in Reno, NV, so the whole thing is definitely tongue-in-cheek…but still worth watching. (via @jemelehill)
A total lunar eclipse will be visible to sky gazers in North and South America and western parts of Europe and Africa on January 20. As a bonus, it will be a supermoon, so it’s a bigger eclipse than usual.
“We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser,” Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland says excitedly in the new documentary Fyre, drink in hand, to a group of supermodels around a bonfire in the Bahamas. Nobody else planning the festival seems to understand why the models were recruited to shoot a video promo for…
The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe said more than $20 million (£15.5 million) in donations were slated to be refunded after a campaign to raise $1 billion for the Trump administration to build a wall on the border with Mexico fell well short of its goal. The fundraising campaign, which began last month, had gone viral as President Donald Trump’s attempt to get Congress to pay for the wall fuelled a heated political dispute and resulted in a partial shutdown of the federal government. More than 325,000 donors had pledged in the GoFundMe campaign that the organiser, a veteran from Florida named Brian Kolfage, said would have been used for Mr Trump’s border wall.
I really hate to interrupt your football afternoon, but we have an important news break from Gillette Stadium: Tom Brady’s coat appears to be getting larger. On Sunday afternoon the Patriots’ quarterback was spotted in a coat that can only be described as XXXXXXXXXXXL.
The coat comes just weeks after Brady was spotted in a very large, but not-quite-so-ginormous coat at the end of December.
This isn’t alarming just for football fans, it should truly scare all of us. Using advanced computer technology we can safely say that Brady’s coat has grown by 1.5 times in the past three weeks. If we stray on the conservative side and say that Brady’s shoulder width is equal to that of the average male (18.25”) that would make the coat approximately 30.25” in width right now.
If we consider the following we have a chilling timeline of what will happen next.
In 9 weeks the coat will be 8.5 feet wide — taking up the entire Patriots’ bench.
By March it will reach across America.
By the start of the 2019 season it will be 2,441,458 miles wide. Enough to wrap around the earth 98 times.
We all thought this was a joke, and now it’s too late.
Is Tom Brady’s coat getting bigger? An investigation:
Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who gained fame over the past several years as an advocate for a white ethnostate and “peaceful ethnic cleansing” (and for taking a highly memeable punch) has always been a virulent racist with horrific views. But Spencer has repeatedly benefitted from the public perception of…
By a wide margin, more Americans blame President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress than congressional Democrats for the now record-breaking government shutdown, and most reject the president's assertion that there is an illegal-immigration crisis on the southern border, according to a Washington...
Earlier this month, newly minted Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan called Donald Trump a "motherfucker." Republicans were thrilled for an opportunity to test the waters and see if they had enough street cred left to clutch their pearls over such a thing given their election of President Grab 'Em By The Pussy. Centrist Democrats were thrilled for an opportunity to show how incredibly balanced they are by saying it was definitely bad to call the President a motherfucker, something he obviously is. Chris Cillizzas across the country cried out about civility and going high and wrestling with pigs. Or whatever.
This past week, Congressman Steve King, in the pages of The New York Times, announced that he was not so sure what was especially "offensive" about being a white nationalist or a white supremacist.
"White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?" Mr. King said. "Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?"
Yeah.
Now, to reasonable people like you and I, one of these things is clearly worse than the other. And it's the swear word! KIDDING. Clearly it's the sitting congressman who simply cannot stop saying obviously racist things. Yet, a study of the media coverage of these two things from Media Matters shows that cable news spent far more time discussing a fucking swear word than a sitting congressman not seeing the big deal about white supremacy.
Not to mention all the headlines referring to King's comments as "racially charged" or "racially tinged" or "controversial" because calling him a racist would just be too drastic. One wonders exactly what it would take for any outlet to just straight up say "racist," or even "white supremacist," a term he clearly thinks is not all that bad. Would he need to be wearing a specific outfit? What, precisely, does one have to do to make the leap from "racially tinged" to "actually racist?"
As Media Matters notes, the only mention on Fox was not even really about what he said. It was about how he was "fighting back" against The New York Times story for, uh, having quoted him directly, I guess. Maybe that part was supposed to be a secret? Is it unfair to expect an adult man who has lived in America for all of his 69 years to have some idea about why "white supremacy" is bad?
But even CNN and MSNBC -- the supposed "liberal bias" stations -- barely covered it. And it is a big deal! It's a very, very big deal. You would think they could carve out an hour in their wall-to-wall Russia coverage to discuss this for more than 14 minutes. Apparently not.
There are two reasons for why this is. The first is the general fact that Democrats tend to be well-behaved and polite, and so when one does something that is less polite, it is news. We expect Republicans to say terrible things, and we certainly expect Steve King to say racist things and to talk about how he is a white nationalist, so there's a certain "dog bites man" aspect to this particular controversy. There shouldn't be, but there is.
The other reason is more tactical in nature, and it is brought to you by the people who tend to be more worried about "division" than Republicans being actual monsters. These are the people who desperately want to go back to the imaginary days of "principled conservatives," the kind of people who loved the feeling of the words "but you've got to give it to Paul Ryan, he's a real policy wonk!" in their mouths. It made them feel reasonable, so very reasonable. So what they want to do is properly chastise Democrats who veer too far off the "civility" track and downplay the utter horridness of Republicans in hopes of getting back to that. It also makes for some good "both sides!"-ing. It's hard to be the "reasonable person in the middle of all of this" when one side is clearly terrible.
To be very clear here, it is Wonkette's official position that Steve King is a motherfucking racist and a motherfucking white supremacist and also that "racially tinged" is not a real thing.
Dwayne Johnson hopped on Instagram this afternoon to address his fans, letting them know that a recent interview he purportedly conducted with British tabloid The Daily Star was entirely untrue,“100 percent fabricated,”and just generally completely made-up by the writer in question. In the “interview”—which was picked…
This was very funny to watch on Twitter livestream. So many confident bros.
Turns out, kicking a 43-yard field goal isn’t so easy
One hundred three would-be kickers tried their hand at kicking a 43-yard field goal at a Chicago brewery on Saturday, and all 103 missed, one week after Bears kicker Cody Parkey had his potential game-winning field goal as time ran out hit the upright and crossbar in a loss to the Eagles.
Goose Island Brewery in Chicago was tired of seeing all the flack Parkey was getting, so they offered fans the chance to put up or shut up.
So you know what we’re going to do? Build a dang field goal post in the middle of the street outside of our brewery, and all you pro athletes can come out and prove us wrong. 3/5
The conditions in Chicago were not ideal by any means, with snow on the ground amid flurries on a cold Saturday. It made for a beautiful setting, at least.
Thank you all so much for braving the cold and snow for today’s event, we had a blast and hope you did too! Also, not a single field goal kick attempt actually went in. pic.twitter.com/aC4kcOe3Ai
The plan to entice would-be kickers with free beer was thwarted, and Goose Island had to alter their prize strategy. Per Eater Chicago:
Turns out the promotion couldn’t clear the crossbar legally and the brewery will now give away tickets to NFL games with the grand prize winner earning a trip to Super Bowl 53 in Atlanta where the Bears will not be playing.
None of the attempts were by actual field goal kickers, so as you might imagine many of the attempts were quite bad. The first kicker really set the tone for the day:
Amazing. Even in death, the contributions of women to art and history are minimized and all-out erased.
"But art experts were still skeptical. Some dismissed the idea that a woman could have been a painter skilled enough to work with ultramarine. One suggested to Warinner that this woman came into contact with ultramarine because she was simply the cleaning lady."
What Anita Radini noticed under the microscope was the blue—a brilliant blue that seemed so unnatural, so out of place in the 1,000-year-old dental tartar she was gently dissolving in weak acid.
It was ultramarine, she would later learn, a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan. This blue was once worth its weight in gold. It was used, most notably, to give the Virgin Mary’s robes their striking color in centuries of artwork. And the teeth that were embedded with this blue likely belonged to a scribe or painter of medieval manuscripts.
Who was that person? A woman, first of all. According to radiocarbon dating, she lived around 997 to 1162, and she was buried at a women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany. And so these embedded blue particles in her teeth illuminate a forgotten history of medieval manuscripts: Not just monks made them. In the medieval ages, nuns also produced the famously laborious and beautiful books. And some of these women must have been very good, if they were using pigment as precious and rare as ultramarine.
If pigments can be preserved in tartar—the gunky yellow stuff on teeth that dental plaque hardens into—that means that fibers, metals, and other dyes could be, too. “This is genuinely a big deal,” says Mark Clarke, a technical art historian at Nova University Lisbon who was not involved in the new study. You could imagine identifying metalworkers, carpenters, and other artisans from the particles embedded in tartar, Clarke says. “It’s opening up a new avenue in archaeology.”
Radini and her co-author, Christina Warinner, did not set out to study the production of illuminated manuscripts. Radini, now at the University of York, was initially interested in starch granules in tartar as a proxy for diet, and Warinner, a microbiome researcher at the Max Planck Institute, wanted to study the DNA of ancient oral bacteria. But the blue particles were too striking to ignore.
The semiprecious rock lapis lazuli is ground up to create a pigment called ultramarine, tiny particles of which can be found in dental tartar. (Christina Warinner)
“Can you imagine the kind of cold calls we had to make in the beginning?” says Warinner. “‘Hi, I’m working with this thing on teeth, and it’s about 1,000 years old, and it has blue stuff in it. Can you help me?’ People thought we were crazy. We tried reaching out to physicists, and they were like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ We tried reaching out to people working in art restoration, and they were like, ‘Why are you working with plaque?’” She eventually reached physicists at the University of York who helped confirm the blue did indeed come from the mineral lazurite, derived from lapis lazuli.
But art experts were still skeptical. Some dismissed the idea that a woman could have been a painter skilled enough to work with ultramarine. One suggested to Warinner that this woman came into contact with ultramarine because she was simply the cleaning lady.
Warinner eventually reached out to Alison Beach, a historian at Ohio State University who studies female scribes in 12th-century Germany. Over the past couple of decades, Beach and other scholars have cataloged the overlooked contributions of women to medieval book production. The challenge, Beach says, is that while most manuscripts with signatures are signed by men, the vast majority of manuscripts are unsigned. But a small number of surviving manuscripts are signed by women, and scholars have found correspondence between monks and nuns about book production.
Beach even came across a letter dated to the year 1168, in which a bookkeeper of a men’s monastery commissions sister “N” to produce a deluxe manuscript using luxury materials such as parchment, leather, and silk. The monastery where sister “N” lived is only 40 miles from Dalheim, where the teeth with lapis lazuli were found. Beach also identified a book using lapis lazuli that was written by a female scribe in Germany around a.d. 1200. The pigment would have traveled nearly 4,000 miles from Afghanistan to Europe via the Silk Road. All the evidence suggests that female scribes were indeed making books that used lapis lazuli pigment in the same area and around the same time this woman was alive.
An illuminated page from the Scivias, a 12th-century book written by the nun Hildegard of Bingen and painted by two anonymous artists. The blue pigment comes from lapis lazuli (Heidelberg University Library / Cod. Sal. X,16 / page 2r)
The team considered a number of alternative ways lapis lazuli could have gotten into the woman’s dental plaque. Could the particles have come from repeated kissing of an illuminated manuscript? This practice didn’t become popular until three centuries after this woman likely died. Could it have come from lapis ingested as medicine, as suggested in Greek and Islamic medical texts? There’s little evidence that prescription was followed in 12th-century Germany. The lapis lazuli particles were also especially fine, which requires a laborious grinding process. This detail in particular suggests that the stones were purposefully made into pigment.
The team concluded that two scenarios are most likely: The woman was a painter who could have ingested ultramarine paint while licking her brush to a point, or she breathed in the powder while preparing pigment for herself or someone else. You can almost begin to picture her, Beach says, sitting by herself laboring over a manuscript day after day. “For a medieval historian,” she adds, “this kind of clear material evidence of something from the life of an individual person is so extraordinary.”
Cynthia Cyrus, a professor at Vanderbilt who has also studied medieval scribes, told me that reading the paper was “the highlight of my day.” Like many monasteries, she noted, the one where this woman was buried was eventually destroyed in a medieval fire. There’s little evidence of what life was like there. But the woman’s teeth suggest that it could have been a site of highly skilled book production.
Warinner is continuing to study the particles embedded in old tartar. She and others have found everything from insect parts and the pollen of exotic ornamental flowers to opium, bits of wool, and milk proteins—all of which tell stories about what people ate and how they lived. The detritus of everyday life accumulates in the gunk that modern dentists are so vigilant about scrubbing off. “They aren’t thinking of future archaeologists,” Warinner jokes.
Replicas, the astonishingly inept new Keanu Reeves vehicle, plays less like a science-fiction thriller than some malfunctioning computer’s unconvincing approximation of one. If you woke up in a glitching simulation, this janky garbage would be projected on every screen, possibly under the title Human Movie. One could…
This was so funny. And SO risque. Amy/Jake literally made a "bitch needs a cock in my ass" joke and it was only barely bleeped. Also, I need that shirt.
Suggesting that NBC might have made the right call when it gave Jake, Amy, Holt, Terry, and all the rest of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s good-hearted cops (and also Hitchcock and Scully) another shot on TV, Entertainment Weekly is reporting that the show’s ratings for its Thursday night debut were the highest they’ve been in…
Hello, wild and rambunctious youths! Are you in search of a funny sign to adorn your bedroom wall? Perhaps something that shows your stunning sense of humor while also proving you are a rebel who has no qualms about breaking the law?
Well too the fuck bad, bro, because the DOT is here to shut that shit down.
The Washington State Department of Transportation has apparently had it up to here with dumbass thieves sneaking out onto one stretch of highway and stealing mile marker 69, CBS affiliate WIVB reports, so they've hatched a plan to put an end to it, once and for all—by changing it to read "68.9."
As the WIVB reporter in this fairly awkward news broadcast points out, it's unclear whether the DOT moved the entire signpost up a tenth of a mile or if the marker is now slightly off, but apparently, the DOT would rather have a vaguely inaccurate sign on the post than no sign at all.
Washington Department of Transportation spokeswoman Beth Bousley told the Seattle Times that, though she understands why people want to steal the 69 sign "for juvenile purposes," replacing the signs can cost up to $1,000 per pop—taxpayer money that could be going to actually improving the roadway.
"It’s not necessarily funny when you take into account the issues it causes," Bousley said.
So come on, everybody. Let's be adults here. All "69" jokes aside, it's not cool to steal public property. Just think about the fact that some poor DOT worker has to lug a heavy-ass sign all the way out to the middle of the highway week after week, pull out his tools, scale some pole, and screw in yet another "69" sign just because you think it's funny to steal a... (don't say it) a, uh... (restrain yourself) a—sorry. To steal a sign that says (oh Jesus here it comes) "69" NICE! NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE NICENICENICENICENICENICE NICE NICE nicenicenice niiiiiiccceeeee NICE NICE NICE NICE NICENICENICENICENICE NICE nice NICE nice NICE NICE NICE NICE NICE NICENICE NIIIICE niiiiice NIIIICE NICE niiiiice NICE nice NICE NICENICENICENICE NICE NICENICENICENICE NICE NICE.
I took a very similar photo of the Space Shuttle Discovery on its last flight! I was flying back from florida with Corey, and we just so happened to be in the air right at the very moment Discovery took off. I was also sitting on the window facing it. Literally a once in a lifetime experience. Made me weep.
I love this photo of the Space Shuttle Endeavour rising through the clouds on a plume of smoke during its last launch in 2011. We are but infinitesimal specks on a tiny rock orbiting a small star in an ordinary galaxy among trillions in an endless universe. And yet we’ve pushed our way into that vastness, just a little bit. I wonder where we’ll end up?
Woman who voted for Panthers Eating Faces party shocked to discover panthers eating HER face
Why Federal Workers Still Have to Show Up Even If They’re Not Being Paid
Since the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, Russell Berman wrote on Wednesday, federal employees have been legally prohibited from striking—which means that during a government shutdown, hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are not on furlough must continue working without pay, indefinitely.
My husband is a senior federal corrections officer at United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, in West Virginia. He has been working up to 18-hour days. He is a dedicated officer. The inmates respect him, he does his job well. With this shutdown, he still has to go to work, but with no paycheck. Still he works extreme overtime.
We are terrified about what the future may hold. We are a one-income household. I have had some health problems and stay home and support him while he works. Yet we have had to have the frightening discussion, What will we do if this shutdown lasts beyond February?
If he has to leave the [Federal Bureau of Prisons], we lose 12 years of retirement and a decent income. We would have to move in with his mother and try to get jobs to survive. We would never be able to retire.
We really were supporters of the Trump administration, but Trump’s lack of concern for the American people, people just like us, has caused us to feel that the sooner he leaves the White House, the better off America will be.
In truth, no American will be untouched by this shutdown, and for some, it will change their lives forever.
CES is a physically taxing event. So far, according to my trusty Fitbit Versa, I have walked upwards of 50,000 steps while carrying a 15-pound backpack. I busted my knee, I’m fighting a cold, and I don’t remember what the loving embrace of a human feels like.
I wonder how those grieving families feel to know they're being used as political pawns. Cry for the cameras, so Trump can use your grief to further his hate.
Trump flew to the Texas border with Mexico to try to bolster his case for the wall, flanked by tearful family members of people killed by illegal immigrants and border patrol agents who are not receiving pay checks during the shutdown. "If we don't have a barrier, a very substantial barrier of some kind, you're not going to be able to solve this problem," Trump said at a briefing where plastic-wrapped bricks of heroin, seized guns and a plastic bag full of cash were prominently displayed. Trump is adamant that a government funding bill to end the shutdown include $5.7 billion for a border barrier - his signature campaign promise.
They’ve weathered blistering attacks from the president, the exposure of sensitive sources, and the politicization of classified information. And now they’re not getting paid. “I’m not going to try to candy-coat it,” Tom O’Connor, a special agent and president of the FBI Agents Association, told me this week. “We really feel that the financial insecurities we are facing right now equate to a national-security issue.”
On Saturday, the current government shutdown will be the longest in U.S. history—and it could remain shuttered for “months or even years,” President Donald Trump warned Democrats last week. While much of the drama has centered around Trump’s demand for a wall on the southern border, thousands of FBI agents and other federal employees whose unfettered work is crucial to national security have either been furloughed or forced to work with no pay and steep budget cuts.
Morale at the FBI had already been steadily declining for months before the government shut down on December 22, according to current and recently departed agents who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss their feelings candidly. President Trump’s open warfare on the bureau has made agents’ jobs more difficult, they say, as trust in the FBI wanes among people who identify as Republicans and right-leaning independents. “Part of it is Trump’s constant attacks,” said one agent who left late last year. “Bigger than that, though, is that it seems like a portion of the population believes him. Which makes their jobs harder to do.”
Another agent who left the bureau last year told me that certain leads that might be politically controversial were sometimes tabled indefinitely because they were not seen as worth incurring the wrath of the Trump White House. In the two and a half years since the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into potential coordination between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia, the president has chided the FBI, former FBI Director James Comey, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Russia “witch hunt,” and the “deep state” in dozens of tweets, rallies, and interviews. Last April, he called the FBI and Justice Department’s desire to withhold sensitive information related to the ongoing investigation “an embarrassment to our country.” The withering morale and possibility of having to work without pay has made it increasingly difficult to recruit new agents, the agents said.
The government shutdown, now heading into its 20th day, is the cherry on top of a galling two years. “You know the old adage that crime doesn’t pay? Well right now, agents are starting to feel like neither does the federal government,” O’Connor said. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, O’Connor said that nearly 5,000 special agents, intelligence analysts, attorneys, and professional staff are currently furloughed, resulting in reduced staffing for “critical functions that support field operations.” None of them are being paid, he said. He wouldn’t elaborate on which investigations were being impacted, but emphasized that a lack of funding has hurt agents’ ability to do their job “completely and to the fullest ability we have.”
O’Connor also described a mounting backlog at Quantico labs, which provide forensic-analysis support services to the FBI, and said that funds supporting drug trafficking and undercover operations have been dangerously limited. Some, particularly those who work at Quantico labs, are not even allowed to come to work because of the shutdown. “FBI headquarters is trying to make sure that the most important topics are covered,” O’Connor said. “But that will get more and more difficult as the pot of money gets smaller and is not refilled.” According to an FBIAA spokesman, FBI field offices are responsible for allocating their resources and determining which activities are most central to specific missions or operations. Which areas are prioritized—whether it’s drug trafficking, counterterrorism, etc.—is also at the discretion of field-office leadership. “However, as the pool of resources dwindles, the scope of what can be adequately funded will also shrink,” the spokesman, Paul Nathanson, said.
If the issue does not get resolved within the next few weeks, however, agents in various field offices may stage a callout—a coordinated sick day to protest the shutdown. (Transportation Security Administration agents have already begun doing so, according to CNN.) O’Connor said he had not heard of any plans to strike or begin calling in sick en masse, but he emphasized that he would not support it if they did. “Whether we’re paid or not, we’re going to show up and do our jobs to protect the United States,” he said. A coordinated “sick-out” would be one way of protesting the current conditions, since the Taft-Hartley Act, enacted in 1947, prohibits public employees from overtly striking. Federal-employee unions may also find recourse in the courts—some have already filed lawsuits arguing that requiring employees to work without pay violates the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
For now, the FBI Agents Association is simply pressuring elected officials. In a petition sent to the White House, the vice president’s office, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other House and Senate leaders on Thursday, the agents association warned of the effects of the ongoing shutdown on the bureau’s work. “The operations of the FBI require funding,” the petition reads. “As the shutdown continues, Special Agents remain at work for the American people without being paid, and FBI leadership is doing all it can to fund FBI operations with increasingly limited resources—this situation is not sustainable.” Asked what the agents’ next steps will be if the funding is not restored, O’Connor said that they’ll continue to do “the best with what we have.”
“But I think it’s the public that will have an outcry when they see things not being done because we don’t have the funding for it,” he added.
The FBI is not the only agency whose limited budget and resources could compromise national security. More than half of the staff of the newly established Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of Homeland Security tasked with protecting the country’s critical infrastructure, have been furloughed, according to DHS. Nearly every employee of the Secret Service—which protects current and former government officials as well as the president—is going without pay, too, according to The New York Times, as are TSA agents and air-traffic controllers. “The growing financial insecurity may lead some agents to consider career options that provide more stability,” O’Connor said on Thursday. “The field is trying to be fully funded and staffed. But as we go forward, that’s going to change.”
For years, Mongolian folk metal band The Hu have been honing their distinctive brand of heavy metal, combining the Western musical form with traditional instruments and throat singing. From an NPR piece on the band:
Mongolian rock combines traditional Mongolian instruments, like a horsehead fiddle (morin khuur), Jew’s harp (tumur khuur) and Mongolian guitar (tovshuur) with the pounding bass and drums of rock.
It also involves singing in a guttural way known as throat singing while throwing heads back and forth reminiscent of the headbanging of ’80s heavy metal bands like Metallica. Those who study Mongolian music believe one reason The Hu has proved so popular with outsiders is this combining of modern and historical and Eastern and Western elements.
I know that the media keeps trying to drum up drama from this divorce, but unless I'm missing something critical, it sounds like all the people involved are being adults? Sort of? Nothing super shocking/out of ordinary, even with people who are still legally married dating other people as long as everyone knows. Guaranteed a lot of this has been going on for a LONG time before it went public.
Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie's divorce announcement was reportedly timed to the release of photos of Bezos with another woman.
Imagine what the world would be like if you woke up one morning unable to hear the voices of men. That’s what happened to a woman in China, identified as Ms. Chen. The Daily Mailreports that one night, Chen went to bed after feeling nauseated and experiencing ringing in her ears. When she woke up, she couldn’t hear…
Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King is so racist that other Republicans, at least when they felt the pressure of getting creamed during the midterms, have denounced him for being too racist. King, who believes that only white people have made contributions to civilization, also enjoy cozyingup to actual Nazis. He…
clickbait stupid headline aside, the Instant Pot has absolutely made me love making and eating rice again. Even when I had a rice cooker, I never could get it quite right. I'd either burn it, or it would be too mushy, or too hard, or whatever. Instant Pot rice is perfect every single goddamn time.
Like anything with a modicum of mainstream popularity, my reaction to the Instant Pot was initially dismissive. “I know how to cook,” I convinced myself, “I don’t need no novelty gimmicks to make good food.” Nevertheless, I bought one for work. Skepticism still coursed through my veins. But after just one batch of…
It is hilarious and awful how obsessed the right is with her and how badly she just dunks on all of them for it. Its pathetic of them.
James Hoft, the stupidest man on the internet, published an important follow-on to last week's revelation that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually went to the high school where she always said she went to high school. As you'll recall, that shocker revealed that not only did her parents move to a neighborhood where she could go to good schools when she was five, she also went by the nickname "Sandy" in high school, and is therefore a total fraud when she says she's "from the Bronx," where she was born. In an earth-shaking exposé published late last night, Hoft offered this astonishing revelation!!!!!! "EXCLUSIVE: Yorktown Elitist and Bronx Hoaxer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Went by 'Sandy' Well into College at Boston U." Well then. Obviously, she'll have to resign from Congress now, since she's not the least bit ashamed of racistly calling Donald Trump a racist just because he's a racist.
Mostly, the new piece just rehashes the same crap as before, insisting it's somehow scandalous that Ocasio-Cortez attended Yorktown High School, where a lot of the kids were rich. Hoft explains that in reality, Ocasio-Cortez has to be secretly rich, because after all, Westchester County is full of rich people and as television actor and rightwing pundit Michael Knowles pointed out on the Twitters, "The average household wealth of the town in which you grew up is $1.2 million." Ergo, Ocasio-Cortez is wealthy too, on the principle that when Bill Gates walks into a bar, everyone there immediately has an average net worth of over a billion dollars.
Mind you, as Yr Wonkette noted the first time around, Ocasio-Cortez has never said she went to high school anywhere other than Yorktown High, and she has used that fact as a springboard for discussing income inequality. Well sure, but that's before we knew she went by "Sandy." We guess it's possible that working-class kids might attend school with rich kids, but only because they're hypocrites.
Hoft then moves on to the new, shocking revelations, proving that, just like all liberals, Ocasio-Cortez lies about her life because she is just the WORST:
We have new photos of "Sandy" Ocasio-Cortez at her elite high school in Yorktown — not the Bronx.
And much like other Democrat hoaxers (Bobby O'Rourke, and fake Indian Liz Warren) Ocasio-Cortez went by "Sandy" well into college at Boston University.
FACT CHECK: "Beto" is a common nickname for "Roberto," O'Rourke says his family called him that "from day one," and a 1986 article about his dad referred to young "Beto O'Rourke," aged 14. On the other hand, there's no evidence his parents ever called him "Bobby." WHY NOT????????? Also, since when is "Liz" a nickname for "Elizabeth?" Everyone knows it's "Betsy."
Oh, yeah, and the college thing, which is supposed to be shocking somehow. Here, Hoft actually achieves something noteworthy, albeit stupid. Hoft insists that last week's cute video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop really is shocking -- but not because she was dancing. That would be silly! No, it's actually shocking because it proves she was engaged in a campaign of politically motivated deception even as a college student!!!
See, here's the shocker: The credits to the BU video list her name as SANDY Ocasio-Cortez, and isn't that all the proof you need of her chicanery and deception and her plot to trick the American people into accepting COMMUNISM?
Hoft explains the awful truth:
It wasn't until her final months at university that Ocasio-Cortez started going by "Alexandria" instead of "Sandy" as an attempt to help propel her career.
She participated in this video in 2011 the year she graduated.
Sandy from Yorktown became Alexandria from The Bronx.
It was all a big scam.
Truly, this is already the best investigative reporting of 2019 and the Pulitzer committee should just stop farting around and award James Hoft the prize. Nothing will beat it.
Also, I now feel morally compelled to confess that "Doktor Zoom" is merely a psuedonym, and that I'm lying even when I say my real name is "Marty Kelley." My given name is actually "Marion" because my adoptive mother was a super-dedicated Catholic who just had to name her kid after the BVM. Mind you, I only learned all that the first day of first grade when Mrs. Huffman called roll and I didn't raise my hand. She asked, "Are you Marion Kelley?" and I said "I don't think so."
Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. Send us money, and we promise to stop lying to you about who we are. Cough up five thousand bucks and Dok Zoom will take a DNA test to resolve the mystery of who he really is.
The actress Carrie Coon is joining the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble, the storied Chicago theater announced Wednesday.
“I’m thrilled,” said the 37-year-old star of “The Leftovers” on HBO, “Fargo” on FX and a 2012 Tony Award nominee for her work on Broadway in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “This...
This is a very reasonable and well-researched piece!
It is time to sit down and have a chat about the 70 percent marginal tax rate proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that is scaring the pants off of all the Republicans, making some Democrats a little nervous, and making me (as well as Paul Krugman and many other economists) very happy. OK? OK!
Now, let's first of all establish what this would even look like. Does it mean that you, a hardworking average American, will have 70 percent of your hard-earned money taken from you by the government and handed over to undeserving, lazy poors? It does not! It means that people making $10 million or more a year will have any excess of that taxed at 70 percent. That money will then be used to fund a Green New Deal -- a program advocated by economists and environmental activists alike -- that would help save our planet while creating jobs. Hopefully, some form of single-payer, universal childcare and pre-K, and some form of universal higher education would all be a part of that, because those are also things we desperately need in this country.
As most of you know, because you are smart, the top marginal tax rate under Eisenhower was 91 percent. But allow me, a lady named after Robyn Hode (best known for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor and doing it in style), to explain why it happened, why it was good, why it's not a thing anymore, and why it needs to be a thing again if we don't want this country to fall the hell apart.
The Social History!
Once upon a time in America, income inequality was really bad. The industrial revolution made some people obscenely rich, while others lived in abject poverty, sometimes jumping from burning buildings to their deaths because some rich dude kept the door locked in order to make sure no one took a bathroom break. It was horrible and cruel and miserable and people started revolting. They formed unions to protect themselves, and started embracing socialism and anarchism. They came out to hear Emma Goldman speak. They voted, in Louisiana, for people like Huey Long, a dude whose entire deal was redistributing the wealth of the nation. If you want to know how seriously people took this, check out this list of deaths in labor disputes. It is very, very long. People were willing to die for a better life. The worse things got during the Depression, the more radical people got. Bank robbers were folk heroes, robber barons were not.
Conservatives these days resent the New Deal, and in their minds, it destroyed capitalism. The fact is, the New Deal saved capitalism. FDR -- who was terrified of the previously mentioned Huey Long -- did not pass it entirely out of the goodness of his heart. He also passed it because people were demanding a lot more at the time. The most popular argument against the New Deal was that it did not go far enough. But FDR was right in that it made things OK enough for people that they chilled on demanding outright revolution.
As we all know, the marginal tax rate under Eisenhower was 91 percent. It stayed pretty high for the next several decades, not least because politicians wanted to stave off the social unrest and crime that came with income inequality. This did great things for our economy and made it so more (white) Americans were able to ascend to the middle class without needing to go into debt forever in order to do so.
Unlike, say, Wisconsin under Scott Walker -- who clearly has a very warped view of history.
This all changed after the Civil Rights Movement. Poor white racist folks in the South had previously been very, very fond of social programs, had been fond of wealth redistribution, and were not especially fond of capitalism as it had kind of screwed them. As long as they were the only ones benefiting from such things -- which is why that all changed when they no longer got to be legally better than black people. Suddenly, economic policies that would hurt them, sure, but would hurt black people more, became a little more appealing.
"N----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r"—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N----r, n----r." -- Lee Atwater
It got to the point in the 1980s, where racist white people were so enamored with being able to complain about "welfare queens" that some of them would have watched their own children go hungry just so long as they got to do that. It was in the 1980s, with Reagan, that America truly fell in love with rich people. They watched Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. They wore designer jeans, which previously would have been considered positively ridiculous.
"The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." – Adam Smith
Then and through the '90s, they watched as unions weakened, as wages stagnated, as factory workers were laid off, as Walmart came to town and put local shops out of business. And everyone was cool with it because gosh, we didn't want to be like them Commies in Russia with their bread lines! Everyone was sure the wealth would trickle down.
It didn't.
But, soon enough, people stopped caring about it trickling down. Soon enough, it became a matter of principle that the wealthy were able to do as they please, that we were not to take any of their "hard-earned" wealth. Soon enough, it became "this is the way it's always been, here in America," even though it wasn't.
America let itself get fucked, economically, because of racism. It doesn't have to be that way anymore!
The Economics!
Over the last few decades, the gap between worker pay and CEO pay has increased dramatically. Wages for workers have stagnated, while CEO pay has gone through the roof. This is the direct result of lowering the marginal tax rate.
See, back in the day, when top earners were taxed 90 percent on everything over $200,000 (about $1.7 million today), they rarely just said "Oh! Fine, I'll just pay the government a whole lot of money." Instead, they chose to pass a big chunk of that money on to their workers. It made sense to pay their workers more fairly because it was just going to be taken away anyway. Henry Ford, with all his many flaws of the anti-Semitic variety, understood that if he wanted to sell cars, workers had to be paid enough to afford cars.
This also limited the appeal of creating a ginormous corporation like Walmart -- which is a good thing. Imagine, for a moment, that all the Walmarts in this country were owned by individuals. Instead of one crazy ass bajillionaire family, we'd have 3,723 fairly wealthy people. Rather than a big chunk of the profits going to the crazy ass bajillionaire family and stock owners, they would -- more likely -- get spread out a little more among the workers. The workers, in turn, would have enough money to actually buy things beyond the necessities, which would then stimulate the economy. The more evenly wealth is distributed, the more chance anyone has to build a successful business.
As Paul Krugman points out, this is basic economics.
Diminishing marginal utility is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he'll barely notice it.
Also, they will put that $1,000 right back into the economy rather than hoarding it.
To put all of this more succinctly -- a marginal tax of 70 percent (or higher!) means that we all have more money. Not just more money for social programs, more money in our pockets, from our actual paychecks. Dig?
But What About The Incentive!
WHELL, says the very reasonable person, if you just give people health care, if you just give people child care, if you just house homeless people, if you just feed the hungry, if you just give heroin addicts Narcan when they overdose, if you take away the ability of people to make more money than they could ever possibly spend in their lifetime -- who will ever have any incentive to do anything?
People in this country have fallen madly in love with the idea that if people cannot get obscenely rich like Jeff Bezos or the Waltons or whomever, that no one will have any reason to reach for the stars and try their hardest and become successful. But the worse income inequality is, the harder it is for anyone else to become super rich or even just middle class. You could come up with the most amazing, life-changing product in the world, if people can't afford to buy it, you are shit out of luck.
Magical thinking is extremely comforting. All addicts will eventually hit "rock bottom" and turn their lives around. The death penalty is what keeps everyone from just going around murdering each other all the time. If people are not able to become obscenely rich, no one will ever bother to do anything.
And sure! These things might be true for some people. But should all of us be miserable over something that just feels like it's true but for which there is no actual empirical evidence? $10 million a year is a lot of money. It is so much money that only 3,755 Americans made that or more last year. Meanwhile, 89,534,313 Americans made under $35K, and 57,836,111 made under $20K. If this "incentive" magic really works, it doesn't seem to be working for anywhere near enough people to justify it.
Stop Being Afraid Of Rich People, Goddamnit!
The big threat that all the panicky right-wingers are throwing at us now is "WHAT IF ALL THE RICH PEOPLE LEAVE! WHAT WILL YOU DO THEN?"
Nothing. I will do nothing. We will all be totally fine. Ayn Rand was a bad writer and an even worse prognosticator. Even worse are the "taxation is theft!" anarcho-capitalists taking over the Republican Party who dream of a world with no social safety net and a thriving baby market instead of legal abortion. And they think we're idealists? Please. There's nothing more "idealistic" than thinking people will be totally cool with that much misery for any extended period of time without going full French Revolution.
The rich have pretty much nowhere else to go. Taxes are higher in almost every other place they could live. If there were some magical place that would tax them nothing and allow them to live in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, they would be there right now. So chill.
Second, if they did get up and leave, they would all be completely replaceable, by people who would be more than happy to make "only" $10 million a year plus 30% of everything they make above that. Rich people are not unicorns! We don't have a limited supply of people who could do great things in this country. It's not like we all suck and should just shut up and be grateful for whatever crumbs they throw at us. How long, exactly, must we be held hostage by these 3,755 people? Is there any kind of time frame on this?
Once upon a time, as demonstrated by that poster above, rich business owners were so afraid that we'd revolt that tissue paper companies were able to suggest that even something like giving their employees substandard paper with which to dry their hands could drive them to revolt. Let's go back to that. Let's to go back to a time when politicians were so frightened that income inequality would lead to social upheaval that they made damn sure it didn't get that bad (well, made sure it wasn't bad for white people, anyway). Let them be scared of us and not the other way around.
But isn't it just pointless to even talk about this stuff while Trump is President?
Not if we want to win the next election. It's time to get people jazzed about a future where they don't have sinking feelings of horror and dread in the pit of their stomach all the time -- either because of Trump or because we're murdering the planet or because the crowdfunding they're doing to cover their medical bills isn't going so well. Our ideas are good! They are not scary and bad and we don't have to slip them in to a dish of ice cream in order to get anyone to swallow them. I get that people don't want to hear about "enthusiasm," but there's enthusiasm for a single person because they are especially charming, and then there's enthusiasm for ideas about a better future and that kind of enthusiasm is something we need. It's time to embrace the radical idea that we don't have to be miserable.
"The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues—not faction, but rather distraction—there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil." -- Motherfucking Plato, suckers
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Trump flew to the Texas border with Mexico to try to bolster his case for the wall, flanked by tearful family members of people killed by illegal immigrants and border patrol agents who are not receiving pay checks during the shutdown. "If we don't have a barrier, a very substantial barrier of some kind, you're not going to be able to solve this problem," Trump said at a briefing where plastic-wrapped bricks of heroin, seized guns and a plastic bag full of cash were prominently displayed. Trump is adamant that a government funding bill to end the shutdown include $5.7 billion for a border barrier - his signature campaign promise.
