IKEA Monkey

In your "Jesus Christ these People" news today, there's word from the Daily Beast that Donald Trump's White House staff and other Republicans know he's completely full of shit when he lies about that caravan of asylum seekers in southern Mexico, but hey, that's the base-enervating narrative du jour, so they're all good with it. Never mind that the caravan is a thousand miles from the US border or weeks away from arriving, or that a previous large caravan in April had largely dispersed by the time a few hundred migrants sought legal asylum at legal border crossings -- and especially, let's please ignore that the US and Mexican actions against those migrants posed a real danger to the migrants, not the other way around. It gets the proles worked up and enthusiastic about voting, so let the lies rage on!

Of course Trump is lying. When has that ever mattered to TrumpWorld?

"It doesn't matter if it's 100 percent accurate," a senior Trump administration official told The Daily Beast. "This is the play."

Trump is doing his best to revive immigrant panics of years past. Remember how in 2014, ISIS was smuggling terrorists into Texas delis, and those terrorists stood around and let people take pictures of them wearing authentic ISIS uniforms? Totally happened!

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Also, Ebola was going to kill us all, and the illegal aliens were bringing in Ebola, too, which never actually happened but we had a good panic about some medical workers, didn't we? And by golly, Breitbart knew the illegal alien hordes included ISIS terrorists because some dingus found an Adidas soccer shirt near the border in Arizona and decided it was a MUSLIM PRAYER RUG.

And then the midterms happened and the Ebola "crisis" vanished, right along with all those bagel-munching ISIS terrorists in Texas, to be stored away until needed again, like this week, because hey, what if GEORGE SOROS is funding the caravan? Duh, he's not, but it's fun to say, isn't it?

"Soros is probably not masterminding these people coming to the border," conceded one GOP operative in an interview on Tuesday. "When it comes to allowing segments of the base to believe what they want to believe, it happens on both sides. Republicans are no more guilty of it than Democrats."

Both sides make shit up to energize their bases, as we all know. Republicans make up nonexistent terrorists in caravans, and Democrats make up "global warming," "voter suppression" and "sexual harassment." Why are you so hung up on "reality" anyway?

What made the caravan politically useful, the operative continued, was that it resonated with precisely the voter sect that the GOP needed to reach in the next two weeks. "It's an issue that motivates Trump's most ardent conservative base," the operative said. "If your worry was that we're not going to be able to turn our base voters out, well—what's the opposite of kryptonite?"

The Big Lie, we believe. Some VERY effective populists have been a fan of the technique.

Then when Trump began recycling the Terrorists in Your Delis lie, saying the caravan included "criminals" and "unknown Middle Easterners," Mike Pence helped lie for him, claiming that at least 10 terrorists a day try to enter the USA, which was nice of him, and a lie he's been caught telling before -- the previous number he threw around was seven, which is the number of people on the watch list prevented from flying daily. Worldwide, not at the border. And being on the watch list doesn't mean someone's an actual terrorist. So apart from being a lying liar, Pence makes a pretty good case.

Of course, by yesterday afternoon, Trump himself had decided maybe there was nothing to it. Sure, he'd tweeted all those criminal terrorist caravanners constitute a "national emergy" (YES, "EMERGY"), but later he seemed to equivocate. OR DID HE?

"They could very well be," Trump reiterated during a bill signing in the Oval Office, referring to Middle Eastern individuals embedded in the caravan. "I have very good information."

However, pressed for the proof of Middle Eastern individuals in the caravan by CNN's Jim Acosta, Trump said "there's no proof of anything."

"There's no proof of anything but they could very well be," Trump said.

Really, there's no way to fact check someone who's simply stating the possibilities. The caravan may not exist at all, because who's to say it's not all just CGI? It could be. Or maybe they're all actually disguised Chinese soldiers on their way to find the Mexico-side entrances to the tunnels under all the Wal-Marts in Texas? You just saw on the internet that's a possibility.

In any case, it's not like Trump fans care if he lies. As Yr Wonkette's own Robyn Pennacchia found on the AskTrumpSupporters subreddit, trump HAS TO lie to counteract all the lies in the media, which is simply Good Logic:

Besides, there's really nothing to worry about with all the craziness and threats and paranoia, because lies have no consequences. It's not like anyone would take this shit seriously enough to mail bombs all over the country to people Trump hates.

Hey, maybe the bombs are being mailed from inside the caravan, you ever consider THAT?

[Daily Beast / CNN / Politifact / Vanity Fair]

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President Donald Trump believes he is being unfairly linked to the pipe bombs delivered to frequent targets of his acrimonious rhetoric and has watched with disdain as the national conversation has shifted to his role in shaping the divisive political environment.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who has advocated, among other things, jailing political opponents, killing and torturing suspected criminals, and limiting Brazil’s gun restrictions, was elected President of Brazil on Sunday night, besting leftist Worker’s Party candidate Fernando Haddad. According to the New…

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“Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” — 1 Peter 5:8 

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Since November 9th, 2016, the majority of Americans have been trying—mostly in vain— to understand the psyche of Trump supporters. Surprisingly, the person on the left who seems closest to understanding the angry young men on the other side of the aisle is comedian and musician Tim Heidecker, who has skewered the vain…

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I’m up for pretty much anything when it comes to horror movies, but I’ll make a special point to watch anything that deals with the occult. True, witchcraft has gone mainstream—you can buy “witch kits” at Sephora, for crying out loud—but those are white witches, not dedicated black-magic practitioners sacrificing some…

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In the fall of 1956, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School, she was one of just nine women in a class of more than 500 men. “You felt you were constantly on display. So if you were called on in class, you felt that if you didn’t perform well, you were failing—not just for yourself, but for all women. And [you] also had the uncomfortable feeling that you were being watched,” the Supreme Court justice later recalled.

PITTSBURGH—In the hours following a violent rampage in Pennsylvania in which a lone attacker killed 11 individuals and seriously injured six others, including four police officers, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Saturday that there was no way…

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Two people in Kentucky were killed in a grocery-store shooting on Wednesday, and a man later identified by police as 51-year-old Gregory Bush has been charged in their murders.

U.S. authorities have no intention of shooting migrants attempting to enter

Summer dreamin’ all year long

Have a nomination for a jaw-dropping listing that would make a mighty fine House of the Day? Get thee to the tipline and send us your suggestions. We’d love to see what you’ve got.

Location: Key West, Florida

Price: $2,799,000

If the change in weather has you missing the sunny skies of summer, look no further than this charming four-bedroom, four-bath abode in Key West, Florida. Built in the late 1800s, the restored two-story home boasts an elegant porch, charming dark green shutters, and a plethora of oversized windows and 12-foot ceilings.

Other perks include a dramatic stained-glass entryway, stained pocket doors, and hardwood floors throughout. The second level is home to the bedrooms and a third-floor suite makes for a cozy guest area with living room, bedroom, and kitchenette.

But like so many homes in this part of the world, the outdoors is king. The well-sized corner lot provides a blank slate for a lush garden, and the saltwater pool takes center stage no matter the season.

If you can see yourself swimming in style this winter, 727 Eaton Street is on the market now for $2,799,000.

To succinctly capture the strangeness of how Americans feed their house pets in the year 2018, there are perhaps no better five words than pumpkin-spice lattes for dogs. If there’s room to use a few more qualifiers, then non-GMO, American-made goat’s-milk pumpkin-spice lattes for dogs would probably be more evocative.

That is a real product, sold by a real company—“Just add warm water!” the label says—and it would not feel too out of place on the shelves of many pet-food aisles, where these days one is almost just as likely to encounter labels boasting “grass-fed beef” and “high-protein” recipes as anywhere else in the store.

As these aisles indicate, pet food—particularly high-end pet food—is edging ever closer to human food, and the overlaps between the two categories can be uncanny. “People are putting whole berries in there, whole cranberries, whole blueberries,” says Don Tomala, the president of Matrix Partners, a pet-products branding firm. “They’re putting kelp in there, they’re putting turmeric in there, they’re putting apple-cider vinegar in there … These are all trends within the human-food side.”

[Read: Why do humans talk to animals if they can’t understand?]

Tomala, who helped launch the dog food Kibbles ’n Bits in the early 1980s, remembers that back then, “it was food for your dog—that was about as far as it went.” Ingredients weren’t fussed over, and the packaging was playful; he remembers cartoonish labels, say, with “a bubble-faced dog on it smiling.” That wouldn’t fly today. Tomala says packages now are more likely to display “a serious-looking dog … It looks nutritious and healthy—it looks like something I’d buy at Whole Foods.”

This transformation of pet food reflects a broader trend, in which people go to ever-greater lengths to address the human needs they project onto their pets, almost as if the animals were their children. Some Americans buy silicone testicular implants so that their pet might “retain its natural look and self-esteem” after being neutered, or make provisions in their wills for their horses; a friend recently told me that she discovered, when picking up a new prescription, that she and her dog had been put on the same anxiety medication.

Marketers often attribute the treatment of pets as little humans in part to Millennials waiting longer to have children, which frees them up to channel their energies toward their “fur babies,” a term people sometimes (unfortunately) use for their pets. With that in mind, it makes sense that some people would want to buy the finest foods for their animals. Another factor behind the rise of high-quality pet food is the increased concern many shoppers have about the environmental and social impact of all sorts of consumer goods.

“One of the main things that we’ve seen in the past five-plus years is that the parents, the shoppers, of the pets, they’re looking at pet food in the very same way they’re looking at the food they buy for themselves,” says Steve Rogers, a principal consultant at the firm Clarkston Consulting who advises large food and beverage companies, many of which have pet-food divisions. Non-GMO, gluten-free, no preservatives—these are what many consumers are after, and, Rogers says, “any trend that you almost see in consumer purchases or consumer food, pet food is basically a lagging indicator.”

These trends, of course, do not apply to the entire pet-food market, but they do apply to a significant, fast-growing chunk of it. Based on market research and conversations with clients, Rogers estimates that about half of pet owners could be potential buyers of these more expensive, ethically sourced, and organic varieties. And Tomala says there’s plenty of demand for regular old dog food, but “it just isn’t what’s driving the pet industry as much—the growth is coming from higher-end products,” the ones that cost twice as much, or more, per pound. Indeed, Americans’ spending on pet food has increased from $18 billion in 2009 to $30 billion in 2017, which far outpaces the rate at which pet ownership rose during that period. In other words, people are spending more on food per pet than they did a decade ago.

One company that has benefited from this increase is the Honest Kitchen, a San Diego–based firm founded in 2002 that makes the aforementioned pumpkin-spice lattes for dogs as well as a range of other “human-grade” pet foods. “That just means the ingredients are from the human food chain and are manufactured inside a human food facility and follows all of human food regulations,” as opposed to the regulations for pet food at the state and federal levels, explained Carmen Velasquez, the company’s marketing director. The Honest Kitchen makes dehydrated products, which, with the addition of warm water, achieve “almost like an oatmeal consistency. You can still see cranberries, pieces of apple, little banana chips,” Velasquez says.

“We definitely pull inspiration from the human food chain,” she told me, citing her company’s “instant bone broth” and “seasonal instant eggnog.” It also sells beef jerky for dogs. Mike Steck, the company’s chief marketing officer, who was also on the phone, said, “We have to be careful. Part of what we have to do with the brand is make sure that it can never be confused as human food.”

[Read: Why is buying pet food so hard?]

Dana Brooks, the president of the Pet Food Institute, a trade group representing pet-food makers, has taken note of the humanification of pet food as well. “We’re trending more into the space of having our pet food look a little more like our food,” she said.

She mentioned a company called Freshpet, which in its own words makes “real pet food, fresh from the fridge.” In explaining the appeal of “real” food, Brooks said, “Maybe you can provide your pet something that looks similar so you feel like you’re sharing your meal with your pet.” She told me about a recent visit she’d made to a Freshpet facility: “I mean, I was hungry when I was touring it—it smelled like hamburgers and roasted chicken and beef stew.”

The history of pet food as a consumer good has not always been so appetizing, as Katherine C. Grier, a historian at the University of Delaware and the author of Pets in America: A History, told me. Grier walked me through pet food’s past, starting in the mid-1800s, when housewives would cook a separate “dog stew” that consisted of leftover meat, bones, gristle, or vegetables mixed into potatoes or rice or cornmeal. The first consumer pet food, Grier said, hit the American market in the 1870s: A British company, Spratt’s Patent Ltd., sold biscuits that claimed to improve the performance of hunting dogs and show dogs.

Over the years, Spratt’s and other companies started selling to more casual dog owners, but what really launched dog food into the mainstream was canned food, which started appearing on shelves around the 1910s. The first canned food was made up entirely of horsemeat—something that humans generally wouldn’t eat but that was left over after worn-out workhorses were killed and turned into soap, fertilizer, or other products. Some meatpacking companies, following the success of horsemeat pet food, realized they could package their own unused animal bits and started entering the market as well.

The Great Depression, ironically, is when canned food started to really catch on. In tight times, households scaled back their meat purchases, which often meant less in the way of leftovers for the family pet. So households started turning to canned food, which allowed them to keep feeding their pets protein more cheaply. Human-quality meat was also hard to come by during World War II, and according to Grier, after the war was over, pet food got its own aisle in the supermarket.

This was the beginning of the pet-food market that today’s cat and dog owners would recognize. While the food was generally nutritionally adequate, it was still kind of gross; horsemeat still made it into cans for decades after the war, but disappeared over time. Even today, pet food can include, in the words of the independent organization that helps establish industry standards, chickens’ “heads, feet, [and] viscera.”

When I referred to some pet-food ingredients as “unsavory” in my conversation with Brooks of the Pet Food Institute, she said, “The only thing I would caution is when you hear ‘unsavory,’ it may be unsavory to you as a human consumer … [but] also provide the minerals and some of the vitamins that pets need.” There are animal parts, she noted, that many Americans prefer not to consume, but are “considered delicacies in other countries.”

American pet owners’ ambivalence about these ingredients is part of what high-end food manufacturers are responding to. They are also catering to the pet owners who worry about contaminated food and (probably too much) about grain allergies.

But the sorts of products that some of them are buying—see: jerky—seem unlikely to address health concerns, and blur the line between human and pet indulgences. The concept of that line is something I talked about with Molly Mullin, an anthropologist who lectures at North Carolina State University and studies human-animal relationships. “These categories, people have to, to a certain extent, make them up as they go along,” she says. “People are always revisiting them and thinking about them and playing with them.”

Food is just one category that’s getting played with. And that’s probably a good thing: As upscale pet foods become more environmentally friendly and more ethically sourced, those trends can trickle down into the mainstream market as well and shape the way more American pets are fed.

Still, the contribution to the greater good seems modest, given that the majority of pet food is ultimately just the feeding of some animals to others—not to mention that some people pay to pamper their pets while other people go hungry. And besides, who can tell how much a pet actually likes human-grade bone broth? Humans are not always good at reading dogs’ emotions—the canine expression that humans interpret as a smile actually can indicate fear or worry. For the most part, pet food isn’t getting more human-like so that pets can feel better—it’s so humans can.

This is much more satisfying than browsing Google Trends, and just as illuminating about cultural shifts. Merriam-Webster’s new Time Traveler surfaces words based on the year they were first introduced in print*.

Apparently I was born the same year as the high five, ecofeminism, air guitar, voice mail, gridlock, heavy lifting, and gazillionaire.

My alma mater was founded in the same year as the words capitalism, Chianti, sassy, pants, pseudoclassic, tragic irony, mauve, and, my personal favorite, somnambulate.

*An important note on First Known Use dates:

The date most often does not mark the very first time that the word was used in English. Many words were in spoken use for decades or even longer before they passed into the written language. The date is for the earliest written or printed use that the editors have been able to discover.

Tags: culture   trends   words

Two middle school girls allegedly showed up to school with butcher knives on Tuesday planning to kill "as many students as possible," drink their blood, and scatter their bodies at the entrance to the building, a plot the cops say had something to do with being self-described "Satan worshippers," the Washington Post reports.

It sounds like something straight out of a horror movie, an alleged plot so insane it's hard to believe it's not a hoax—but police in Bartow County, Florida, said at a Wednesday press conference that they "do not believe that this was a joke."

“I believe that these two small children...seriously sat down and plotted to do serious bodily harm to another student at school," Bartow Police Chief Joe Hall said Wednesday.

According to Buzzfeed News, one of the two suspects—an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old—allegedly warned a classmate that "something bad was going to happen," which they passed on to a teacher, who told the principal. When the 11-year-old didn't show up to second period that day, administrators scrambled to track her down.

When they found her, she and the other preteen suspect were hiding out in a bathroom with some sort of "goblet," police said. They were then reportedly marched down to the principal's office and asked to empty their pockets. Cops said the 11-year-old handed over a paring knife and a sharpener—just one of several knives allegedly found on both suspects, including a butcher knife and, for some reason, a pizza cutter. They allegedly told the principal they were planning to kill as many of their classmates as they could—and that's when the cops got involved.

Police arrested the girls and took them down to the station, where they allegedly confessed to the plot and told the cops they were "Satan worshippers," Hall said.

According to Hall, the middle schoolers said they planned to kill as many as 15 people, and were "willing to drink blood and possibly eat flesh." They'd allegedly been plotting this for days: Hall said they had exchanged texts about how they were going to "leave body parts at the entrance" to the school, then kill themselves. The cops found a hand-drawn map of the campus at the 12-year-old's house, etched with the words "go to kill in bathroom."

They've since been charged with conspiracy to commit murder, possession of a weapon on school property, and disrupting a school campus. If they're tried as adults, Hall said, they could both wind up spending life in prison.

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We’ve spent more than 200 hours researching and testing these cookers—going through hundreds of pounds of rice, beans, meat, and stock—as well as testing them over the long term in our own homes. This guide will help you figure out which type of cooker is best for your needs, whether that’s cooking fast or slow, braising hearty pot roasts and stews, or making rice and steamed veggies.

The best thing about the trailer for Season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel isn’t the cutting commentary about how men are like this and women are like that—“Comedy is fueled by disappointment and humiliation. Now who the hell does that describe more than women?” she says at one point. Revolutionary stuff. A…

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Halloween is right around the corner, meaning it’s time once again for us to look at the weirdest, goofiest, and totally mind-boggling Halloween costumes for sale this year. They’re supposed to be sexy, but they’re mostly bewildering. Come join us down the rabbit hole of awful character licensing and borderline…

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We have to assume it’s kind of tiring to be George R.R. Martin, a man who’s spent the last several decades of his life pushing a boulder called A Song Of Ice And Fire up a hill called “Dear God, I’m going to be writing this thing until I’m fucking 80.” That fatigue is presumably not helped by the fact that the boulder…

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Dorcas Reilly, the woman who gave the world—more specifically, the Midwest—the green bean casserole, has died at the age of 92.

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If you’re one of the millions of people who didn’t win last night’s $1.6 billion Mega Millions jackpot, don’t feel bad about the $2 you spent on the ticket. Because a lot of good comes from playing the lottery.

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The Black Panther film came out just eight months ago, injecting the Marvel Cinematic Universe with fresh life and building on the success of Thor: Ragnarok to invigorate an increasingly overburdened franchise. And while Ta-Nehisi Coates has been guiding T’Challa though far more than the originally planned miniseries,…

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University of Utah track and field athlete Lauren McCluskey was found shot dead Monday night in the backseat of a vehicle outside a campus dormitory, according to university police. The suspected shooter was 37-year-old Melvin Rowland, a man McCluskey’s family said she had recently stopped dating. Rowland’s body was…

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In April, Massive Attack revealed it would celebrate the 20th anniversary of its seminal Mezzanine by encoding it into 920,000 actual strands of DNA, which, cool? While it was neat to hear how the process could preserve the album for “hundreds to thousands of years,” fans were maybe a little more interested in next…

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Cailee Spaeny, welcome to Go Fug Yourself. (Spoiler: It turns out okay.)

Hello. Got a minute? I’d like to introduce you to Chubbs, this honkin’ gator that showed up on a golf course in Florida.

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One answer to the question of “How do I help a grieving friend?” is to acknowledge their circumstances…to “join them in their pain” instead of trying to take it away from them. As Megan Devine says in this video:

Cheering people up, telling them to be strong and persevere, helping them move on…it doesn’t actually work. It’s kind of a puzzle. It seems counterintuitive, but the way to help someone feel better is to let them be in pain.

One of the odd things about getting older (and hopefully wiser) is that you stop chuckling at cliches and start to acknowledge their deep truths. A recent example of this for me is “the only way out is through”. As Devine notes, in this video and her book It’s OK That You’re Not OK, there’s no shortcut for dealing with pain…you have to go through it to move past it.

In a new TED podcast, writer Elizabeth Gilbert talked about the grief she felt when her partner and longtime best friend Rayya Elias was diagnosed with and died from cancer.

Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.

The only way out is through.

Update: When Gary Andrews’ wife Joy died, he documented his pain and his family’s grief through a daily doodle posted to Twitter. (thx, matt)

Tags: books   Elizabeth Gilbert   It’s OK That You’re Not OK   Megan Devine   video

The Clippers should blow it up and build around Bobi.

Boban Marjanovic is unstoppable. He is Big Shaq Diesel, if Shaq was more of a novelty than a star. He’s 7’3 with a 7’10 wingspan, and the NBA has no answer for that kind of size. That includes the Denver Nuggets, who Marjanovic’s Clippers opened their season against on Wednesday night.

Boban came off the bench and scored 18 points in 18 minutes, on 6-of-8 shooting from the field at that. He was one of just two Clippers with a positive plus/minus in their 107-98 loss. That’s because Denver couldn’t do much about him for the time he was in the game.

What do you do when someone can dunk without jumping? That’s the equation the Nuggets had to solve on Wednesday. No, they didn’t come up with an answer.

He did it more than once. Every time he was in the paint, someone got him the ball.

HE’S NOT JUMPING.

Boban pulled a Shaq Diesel move and broke the rim. Well, he bent the rim, but you get the point. The man is doing things that should not be done.

The Staples Center crowd even gave him MVP chants for good measure.

Yes, the Clippers still lost; they’re supposed to since Denver’s a pretty good team. But on a court with multiple all-stars past, present and future, Boban was the most unstoppable player out there.

Blow it all up and build around him, Doc. You can’t go wrong here. It’s a no-brainer.

If I could only own one electric kitchen gadget, it would be an immersion blender. Mine sees near-constant use, making short work of everything from mayonnaise to lemon curd; it’s never met a lump it couldn’t smooth out. Still, I’d never have guessed that this trusty machine would solve my cacio e pepe woes for good.

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