IKEA Monkey

GENEVA—A coalition of scientists at CERN announced this morning that the Universe, the accumulation of matter and energy that makes up everything that is, will end abruptly next Friday. “The totality of existence as we know it, including time, space, all distributed matter throughout our reality, and all 11 vibrational dimensional membranes will cease to exist promptly at 11:08 p.m. GMT on June 15,” CERN officials said in a press release signed by every leading expert in physics, mathematics, astronomy, and all related fields. “At the end of next week, the universe will simultaneously dissolve and collapse upon itself, effectively obliterating all that exists across the entire 93 billion light year diameter of our cosmos and all concurrent nesting realities, so please plan accordingly. Wrap up any loose ends you still consider important, say goodbye to your loved ones, and make peace with the cessation of the very nature of your consciousness.” Top theologists and clergy across the world also confirmed that, should higher planes such as Heaven, Elysium, or Nirvana actually exist, then they, too, will be destroyed.

Taking time away from work when you’ve got the flu or a sprained ankle is not only expected, but encouraged. But mental health issues sometimes require time off, too.

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LONDON (AP) — The food-delivery firm Deliveroo thanked Benedict Cumberbatch on Saturday after a newspaper reported that the "Sherlock" star had fought off muggers who were attacking one of its cyclists.

Did you know that broccoli is considered a superfood? One doctor even suggested that it’s the only vegetable you need to eat. Unadorned broccoli (or, as we like to say around here, Sideshow Bob flowers) can be a hard sell though, without a nice cheese sauce, or some soy, or Stephanie Izard’s famous roasting process,…

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These posters designed by the NSA emphasizing the importance of security and secrecy to their employees are amazing. Declassified in mid-April 2018, most of the posters were produced in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and look as though they were cooked up by Salvador Dali or the Dadaists. Or even Mad Magazine. I mean:

What fantastic design artifacts of that era. Many of them appear to be remixes/riffs of contemporary ad campaigns and messaging…you could easily imagine a security-themed distracted boyfriend or American Chopper poster hanging in today’s NSA offices.

I had a difficult time choosing just a few of these…many more are available in this PDF. (via hn)

Tags: design   NSA

In a great moment for the planet Earth, a horse named Bofa Deez Nuts claimed its first victory tonight at Remington Park in Oklahoma City.

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Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Email careandfeeding@gmail.com or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

When Barb’s son showed up at her house with his daughter Avery, 2, on a frigid night in February, it was long past the toddler’s bedtime. So Barb (who asked me to use only first or middle names for her and her family) hustled them inside and set them both up in the guest room. The next day, Valentine’s Day, she searched Craigslist and found a used crib for her granddaughter. She thought the arrangement was temporary.

“I was probably delusional,” Barb told me over the phone recently from her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At the time she believed her son, who had a long history of abusing drugs and alcohol, was just going through another brief bit of “drama” with his girlfriend, who had her own problems with substance abuse. But a few months later, he moved out of the guest room for good, leaving the little girl behind. That was six years ago.

Barb’s son has been granted full physical custody custody of Avery, but even though he lives nearby he hardly ever comes around. Neither does his ex-girlfriend, Avery’s mother, with whom he shares joint legal custody. So it’s been left to Barb, 68, and her husband Fran, 69, to raise their granddaughter. The only one who regularly shows up to help is their daughter, 37, who has no children of her own.

“No one expects to spend their retirement raising a child,” said Barb, a former teacher. “It changes everything. Your life is turned upside down.” But she’s not complaining. Sure, she can’t travel as much as she’d hoped to, and she has no social life; all activities revolve around Avery, now 8, and the other kids’ mothers aren’t really friend material for Barb. But she gets great joy from being with her granddaughter. “I really think of her as my third child,” she told me. This time around, though, “I have learned not to sweat the small stuff,” she said. She doesn’t stress out about Avery’s test scores, or about the “little-girl drama” of third-grade cliques. Instead, she focuses on giving Avery love, stability, and the skills to fight her own battles.

More grandparents than ever are being put in a position like Barb and Fran—becoming full-time parents again, often with fewer resources and more health problems than they had the first time around. The arrangement is not new, of course—people raised by grandparents for at least part of their childhood include Maya Angelou, Carol Burnett, and two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—but it’s more common than ever these days. (The Greek god Zeus was raised by his grandmother, too, though that was really the least she could do: Her son, Cronus, threatened to swallow the child whole.) The proportion of children living in “grandfamilies” has doubled in the U.S. since 1970, and has gone up 7 percent in the past five years alone—an increase many attribute to the opioid epidemic.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 3 percent of children nationwide live apart from their parents, and of those, nearly two-thirds are being raised by grandparents. Some 2.6 million grandparents are raising their grandchildren, either because of a temporary change in circumstance for the parents, such as military deployment or joblessness, or something more lasting and terrible: mental illness, divorce, incarceration, death, or, as in Barb and Fran’s case, substance abuse.

Raising grandchildren can take a toll on grandparents: higher-than-normal rates of depression, sleeplessness, emotional problems, and chronic health problems like hypertension and diabetes; feelings of exhaustion, loneliness, and isolation; a sense of having too little privacy, and too little time to spend with their spouses, friends, and other family members. There’s a disproportionately high rate of poverty among grandparents raising grandchildren, and more than 40 percent report having economic or social-service needs—for themselves or, more often, their grandchildren—that are unmet.

The grandparents might be struggling with complicated feelings about their own child’s shortcomings as a parent, too, which stirs up an unsettling mixture of disappointment, embarrassment, anger, and resentment. They might be grieving for a child who either died or simply walked away, and for the vision they once had of a simple, ordinary, fun-with-the-grandkids kind of grandparenthood.

Still, there are unexpected rewards. Some grandparents say they feel younger because of being involved again in the day-to-day lives of children, running to after-school activities, or reading Harry Potter and teen magazines to keep current. They also have a renewed sense of purpose, at just the time of life when their age-mates report feeling less and less necessary. The kids can benefit, too; according to some studies, children raised by their grandparents have fewer behavioral problems than those who end up in foster care with non-relatives, though perhaps there was something that set apart those kids and families in the first place.

Yet even while grandparents offer stability and consistency to children whose previous lives might have been chaotic, grandfamilies suffer from a particular kind of precariousness. For a variety of reasons, most grandparents are not licensed foster-care providers, don’t have custody or guardianship of their grandchildren, and thus don’t have legal standing to make decisions regarding the children’s schooling, medical care, or vacation plans. “We estimate that for every one child in foster care with relatives,” said Ana Beltran, an attorney with the advocacy group Generations United, “there are 20 outside of foster care with relatives,” usually grandparents.

Why are so few grandfamilies actually licensed? For some, the idea just feels wrong. Why go through all the red tape to make it a legal relationship when these children are already family? Why invite child-welfare caseworkers and judges to monitor what’s taking place in your own home? Grandparents might balk at licensing because it means giving the child over to the legal custody of the state. Or they might worry about failing the licensing requirements in their state, which could entail strict criminal background checks that take into account nonviolent crimes committed in youth, or strict housing standards that dictate a certain number of bedrooms or a particular amount of floor space per child.

Becoming a licensed foster parent might not even be an option for everyone, Beltran said, since to be eligible for licensing, the grandchild must have come to the grandparent’s home by way of a child-welfare agency. But many grandchildren arrive the way Barb’s did—late at night, without much prior warning, dropped off by a parent who eventually leaves.

The majority of grandparents raising grandchildren, then, are left to make their way through trial and error, cobbling together financial and logistical support for the grandchildren as best they can. They live in a kind of shadow world, worried that things could shift without warning, causing their beloved grandchild to be sent back to an unsafe situation, or to be sent into non-relative foster care.

Barb has no legal standing with Avery; it’s her son who has custody, and Barb fears that his ex, Avery’s biological mother, will someday go back to court to try to get custody. One way some grandparents avoid this sense of precariousness is through a program called assisted guardianship. Created by the Fostering Connections Act of 2008, which gives all states and some Native American tribes the option to use federal child-welfare money for this purpose, assisted guardianship is a way for licensed foster grandparents to exit the foster system. They continue to receive the same monthly payments they received as foster parents for the child’s food, shelter, and clothing, plus access to support services to help meet the child’s educational and emotional challenges. But there’s no longer any need for oversight from child-welfare agencies and courts. As a result, assisted guardianships cost the state much less than non-relative foster care—$10,000 a year per child, compared to $60,000 per year for foster care, according to Beltran—and the grandparents with this arrangement have legal authority to act in their grandchild’s best interest without a case worker checking in.

But there’s a catch: Assisted guardianship is only available to grandparents or other relatives who are already licensed foster parents. That means it’s no help at all to the majority of grandfamilies. And even though it’s supposed to be available across the country, it is not. Ten years after the act was passed, only 35 states, the District of Columbia, and eight tribes offer assisted guardianships.

The arrangement of grandparents raising grandchildren is precarious in another way, too: The grandparents are older and sicker than typical parents, and more likely to die before the children they’re raising reach adulthood. (But they’re not as old as many might suspect: About 61 percent of grandparents raising grandchildren are younger than age 60.) Barb, for instance, has rheumatoid arthritis that flared up recently, and she started aggressive therapy in hopes of staving off symptoms while Avery still needs her. “I hope I can stay healthy enough to at least get her through the next couple of years,” she told me. “I’m not anxious to do the teenage years again. But I know that, as close as we are, [the early teens] might really be a hard age for her to handle losing one of us.”

Avery sometimes looks at Barb and says, “Why are you so old, Grandmom?” Buried in that question is her fear of being abandoned again. Barb talks about the scene in The Lion King when Simba’s father tells him that if he ever feels alone, he should look up at the stars and talk to his dead ancestors. “I tell her, ‘You know, you can do that if something happens to me,’” Barb said. “I tell her, ‘As long as I’m in your heart and your head, I’ll be there, and I’ll listen.’” She doesn’t really believe she’ll be up in the sky listening, but she thinks it’s the kind of comforting thought that an 8-year-old deserves.

On Wednesday, a particularly gruesome incel message board called “Incelocalypse” was kicked off the internet, thanks to the efforts of babe.net writer Harry Shukman. While this may seem nearly impossible, Incelocalypse was actually somehow worse than your average incel site — their official slogan was “the day we make the jailbaits our rape slaves” and the site included a secret subsection devoted to discussion of pedophilia and child porn.

Via Babe.net:

Yesterday morning, we contacted DreamHost, the server for Incelocalypse.today, with links to users talked about raping girls, throwing acid in their faces and expressing support for mass murderers. Twelve hours later, the site was offline.

While it was running, Incelocalypse was home to disturbing posts that saw users rail against women in extremely violent terms. Members posted threads like “Father-daughter incest makes more sense now than ever,” which argued for men to raise daughters just to rape them. Another post was titled “Even if you could get pussy from a willing female, you should still want to rape girls.” Users regularly fantasized about throwing acid in the faces of women, imagining what it would be like to make them “crippled with ugliness.”

Suffice it to say, the site was absolutely fucking horrifying.

The user who wrote the “you should still want to rape girls” post was one “Leucosticte,” who was the owner of the site, as well as its previous incarnation, incel.life.

He is also someone we have met here, at Wonkette, before.

Last year, we told you about Nathan Larson, the pro-rape, pro-pedophilia Libertarian running for Virginia’s House. Now he’s running for Congress, this time in Virginia’s 10th District. According to Wikipedia, he’s got a spot on the ballot. And, yes, he owned and commented at Incelocalypse.

Larson has been active on the internet for years, often under the usernames Leucosticte and Lysander (the latter largely being the one he uses on pedophilia sites). Leucosticte has long been his user name for edits of various Wikis — although he has been banned from editing Wikipedia. Following his banishment from Dreamhost, he posted a letter from them on incels.me, under the Leucosticte screen name, comparing himself to fellow freeze peach martyr Nazi Andrew Anglin.

Well, I guess that like Andrew Anglin, I have discovered the limits of how much Dreamhost will stand up for its customers’ free speech. I will be researching other options for hosting. They write:
—

Hello,

This is written notice that DreamHost is enacting the “Termination”
clause in the Terms of Service regarding your account:

https://www.dreamhost.com/legal/terms-of-service/
“This contract may be terminated by either party, without cause, by
giving the other party 14 days written notice.”

We have refunded the last month’s VPS service charge ($17.10) to your
credit card as a courtesy. We will no longer be actively hosting your
sites and all sites’ HTTP service are now disabled, but your panel and
SSH/FTP service will remain active until the end of 2018-06-12 to allow
you to download your data and transfer your domains.

Please ensure you save all your transfer authorization codes for your
domains as you will not be able to renew them with us.

DreamHost
http://www.dreamhost.com

Perhaps unsurprisingly, several members of the incels.me gang were very disappointed to learn that the secret pedophilia discussion group was no more — although others criticized Larson for claiming to be “incel” despite being married. Larson then explained that he is a “rapecel,” whatever the fuck that is, and that one can be married and “not getting any pussy.”

Larson has actually been married twice — and in his first marriage, his spouse committed suicide after (he admitted) he raped them repeatedly and discussed his plans to rape their daughter in the future.

In an email that was an exhibit for the case, however, Larson admits to abuse, including raping Finn, and apologizes that his desire to molest their children caused Finn stress.

“It didn’t concern me that given my history of raping you, as well as the gravity of what I was proposing doing with the children, I might irreparably destroy our relationship and any prospect of my ever seeing the children (especially unsupervised),” he wrote.

This is all horrifying. And what I’ve seen today on the cached pages of Larson’s own, personal, bliki (a blog in Wiki form, apparently), is even more horrifying than that. He has over 100 “Larson press releases,” many of which reference incels, about rape and “female virginity” that you should probably not click on if you want to sleep tonight.

As a more SFW example though, here is part of a particularly ridiculous “press release” he wrote, titled “Nathan Larson asks feminist girls, ‘Why is it so hard to accept that you were meant to be men’s property?'”

“We men also can pee wherever we want without having to sit down. We just whip it out and less than half a minute later, we’re done. We don’t have to create a big line to the bathroom. It’s true that women usually take a shit faster than men, but men typically multitask during that time, pondering the mysteries of the universe. Men also have larger bladders than women. All in all, we’re just better optimized to have more efficient excretory habits, especially when we’re out in the wilderness, which is nature’s way of saying that our time is more valuable than women’s and that we were the ones meant to be going out there and hunting mammoths. During urination, we can even aim our penises in such a way as to write messages in the snow, maybe leaving a message informing fellow hunters in our tribe, ‘Mammoths this way’ so they can follow the arrow in search of their quarry.

There is, however, some good news here. Because in addition to taking down Incelpocalypse, Dreamcast took down all of Larson’s other sites as well — including not only the bliki, but also the wiki for Return of Kings, which he made for garbage human Roosh V, which, sadly for all of you, means that the post about how I am a clownface-would-not-bang is no more, along with a post I found there, apparently from Larson, about the host of problems that making it legal for men to kill their wives for things like “cutting their hair” would “solve.”

While it’s great that this literal monster is getting banned from the internet, it would sure be swell if someone in law enforcement could keep an eye on him, and perhaps, even, perform a welfare check on his wife.

[babe.net]

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Stormy Daniels, X-rated film star and thorn in the life of President Trump, will soon be in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago to dance on stage at the Admiral Theatre, which has been home to movies, cartoons and thousands of dancing naked women.

Tickets for Daniels’ five shows on June 14-16...

Chicago’s Riot Fest unleashed its 2018 lineup today, announcing that Beck, Blink-182, and an enigmatic mystery musician will be headlining this year’s Fest. Scheduled for September 14-16, the festival will take up residence in its usual spot in the city’s Douglas Park.

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If you are in the mood for a high-priced cup of coffee that tastes burnt – you'll have to go somewhere other than Starbucks during a three-hour period Tuesday afternoon.

A Florida man told officers he was Captain Kirk from “Star Trek” after he was captured masturbating on Monday.

The 71^st Cannes Film Festival wrapped up on Saturday with a closing ceremony that not only featured blunt talk from Asia Argento but also the festival’s usual awards, Variety reports. Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-Eda took home the Palme d’Or, the highest honor at Cannes, for Shoplifters, a drama about a family whose larcenous secret causes a crisis. Spike Lee won the Grand Prix for BlacKkKlansman, a true story about a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s. Lee, who forcefully denounced Donald Trump at one of the festival’s panels, accepted his award “on behalf of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn.” And Jean-Luc Godard, despite not attending, was given a Special Palme d’Or for his contributions to the cinema over his decades-long career.

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The large group of teens had been wandering downtown and along the lake Sunday evening, but police decided it was time for the group to leave.

The teens, numbering more than 100 and some deemed "borderline criminal" by police, were first steered onto Red Line trains that ran express from the Gold...

Saturday night, we were walking down 7th Avenue in Chelsea with a friend and, encountering a MASSIVE situation where a cross street was being dug up in the middle of the night, we and our friend almost simultaneously made the hilarious joke that Trump sure was going to great lengths (allegedly!) to hide the body of his wife Melania, assuming the reason we haven’t seen her in over three weeks is that the president of the United States mighta coulda had his beloved bride offed. (HAHA! JOKE! Not to be taken literally like well-known newspaper The Onion, Michael Cohen! The first lady has not been murdered! WE THINK!)

Seriously though, where the fuck is Melania? “She’s doing great. She’s looking at us right there!” The reporters turned to look where the president was pointing, but there was no Melania. Perhaps she is currently invisible. Perhaps she is a shape-shifter. Perhaps Melania is one of those things that really feels like it exists, if you believe in Melania with all your heart. Perhaps she is like Christ in that regard.

Or perhaps the entire White House is lying right now, saying Melania (or “Melanie” as the president likes to call her) went into the “hospital” for a “kidney procedure” and proceeded to stay there for “five days,” which is weird because said “kidney procedure” is usually an over-nighter at the most, and now she’s on week three of her recovery at home. Maybe the truth is that she went in for the kidney procedure, then found the nearest sexxxy man nurse and said, “Gabriel! Please to give me piggyback ride back to New York City so I never have to see my husband President Shitwad ever again! It will be WEEKS before he even notices I am not there!”

We dunno, but there sure as hell is a rumor that Melania has indeed noped out of this whole First Lady situation and peaced out back to NYC, where she fucking tried to stay in the first place after Donald was vaguely “elected” president:

Friend who just retired from Secret Service has confirmed that Melania Trump has moved back to New York for the “foreseeable future” and will now cost us millions in additional protection daily.

He said that the agents assigned to her detail have been told to prepare.

— Pesach ‘Pace’ Lattin (@pacelattin) May 28, 2018

HMMMMMMM! Is that horseshit? Well, that person follows Wonkette on Twitter (as all patriotic Americans should), so he can’t be all wrong!

OK, we are kidding, that is not the proper journalistic way to fact-check things. But it’s a fun rumor!

According to internet website “Hollywood Life” (no, we do not know if it is bullshit or not, so please don’t think we’re Louise Mensch-ing at you right now), a “source” says Melania has indeed headed to NYC for some Me Time, so she can figure out how to Be Best again. Also, Donald Trump is a shit and she HAAAAAAATE him. According to “source,” Melania wants to fast-forward to the end of Trump’s presidency (her mouth to God’s ears, allegedly!) so her life can be “normal” again. Does she want Donald Trump to be part of that “normal”? We don’t know, but if she has a lick of sense, the answer is FUCK NO.

Twitter person has more rumors to say to us:

I’m told that two secret service vehicles with Melania Trump were seen at the Waldorf Hotel in NYC.

— Pesach ‘Pace’ Lattin (@pacelattin) May 29, 2018

HMMMMMMMMM! Did the vehicles bring Barron? Were they creating a barrier so nobody would see Melania’s rumored longtime sidepeen security guard whisk himself into the Waldorf, shedding security guard clothing as he approached the bank of elevators that would reunite him with his beloved? AND ARE YOUR TAXPAYER DOLLARS PAYING FOR THIS SECRET SERVICE BEHAVIOR?

We just don’t know, but we do know what the 2018 midterm election season needs, and it is a high-profile and gross celebrity/presidential divorce, so FILE THE PAPERS, MELANIA! WE GOT YOUR BACK!

Just kidding, Melania is #complicit, but we’ll at least drink shots of the finest Fireball in celebration if she suddenly decides to lose several hundred pounds of dead weight, all of which is named “Donald.”

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT HERE.

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Conservatives, to put it lightly, are not good at art. They want to be, of course, because they enjoy the way art has influence over people, but they don’t want to invest the actual time it takes to become good at it, like some hippie loser.

To that end, a bunch of talent-free White Nationalists have established the “White Art Collective” — a sad, Geocities-style website devoted to promoting the work of a grand total of eight Nazi “artists.”

One of the musicians showcased on the site is one Bryn Dolman, who has written and produced what may be the most goddamned pathetic song I have ever heard in my entire life, titled “It’s OK To Be White.” Bryn manages a café near a cemetery and also does “life coaching.” Because who doesn’t want to get life advice from a Nazi Barista?

The song has already proved popular with the kind of creeps who write for for Christopher “Crying Nazi” Cantwell’s website, because of course it has.

PREPARE TO CRINGE.

Sunbeams rest in suspension,
Like heavenly blades.
Berthing at the surface,
Of her tender, pale skin.

The sound of our children’s voices,
Rings the air.
The little rumble caused by their running,
Reverberates my spine.

It’s okay to be white

My wife rises to dance with me,
We go together in the light,
The little ones surround us below,
Singing out their hearts delight.

And out in the garden,
I’ve been laboring
The fragrance of grass fills our noses.
We play with the garden hose
Nothing like a day of rest well earned.

It’s okay to be white

I take my wife’s hand,
The one I love.
She wears a flowered dress.
And we run with the kids,
The sun is setting now,
The sky is pink and orange,
Our children’s faces light up like they are candles.

It’s okay to be white

It’s okay to be white, but is it OK to write a song that bad? Seriously, if you’re gonna be “the master race” and go around trying to compare your shit to Michelangelo, you should probably strive for better than … whatever the hell that shit is.

“It’s OK To Be White” is a whole 4chan white supremacist troll, meant to allow them to go “WHAT? You think this is a white supremacist thing? Are you saying it is unacceptable to be white? Then I guess you are the REAL racists! And that means we are good and you are bad!” This “gotcha moment” was, of course, deeply undermined by the fact that the only people pushing this were literal white supremacists.

No one is actually out there telling this dude he’s not allowed to be white, or that he is not allowed to frolic in the hills with his probably imaginary family, or even that he is not allowed to write bad teenage poetry and do bad impersonations of Dave Gahan. People manage to do these kinds of things all of the time without being a Nazi about it.

Bryn has also written an equally, if not more terrible song about Donald Trump and how he is the God Emperor.

Wagner, he is not. Except, you know, politically.

[Angry White Men]

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The former church was built in 1906

Another glorious church conversion has come to our attention, this time in Melbourne, Australia, where the former Northcote Presbyterian Church Hall has been transformed into a bright and spacious home.

Built in 1906, the church located in the suburb of Northcote retains its original brick exterior, but the interiors have been completely gutted. Still, the loft-like space features soaring vaulted ceilings and an open floorplan—now repurposed for flexible living.

In addition to the huge living area that comprises a lounge, kitchen, dining area, and room for a pool table, there are five bedrooms (including a master loft that doubles as a family room), three baths, and a massive bi-level deck (off the master) that offers panoramic views of the city and endless opportunities for indoor-outdoor living.

There’s also a detached studio with a mezzanine bedroom and bathroom across a small brick courtyard. It’s offered through JellisCraig with a guide price of $3.5 million Australian dollars, or about $2.6 million.

Via: The Spaces, JellisCraig

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) — A man who expressed thoughts about suicide and was briefly hospitalized returned to a home and fatally shot his wife, her father and her stepmother before killing himself, police said.

It could have happened to anybody. A lot of Dr. Phil clips will show you young (well, middle-aged) people just absolutely convinced that the person they were sending money to for “their construction business” was going to pay them back that $250,000, and also was going to fly out and marry them, just as soon as they got their passport sitch fixed. Dr. Phil tries not to call them fucking idiots, but you can only not call them fucking idiots for so long.

I’ve reported BigTits McFakeBook to Facebook three times — “this is a fake profile”; “this person is pretending to be someone they’re not”; “this person is using someone else’s pictures” — but there’s literally nowhere on Facebook to “tell us about this problem” or “add more evidence,” like “this person is using pictures stolen from the Instagram account of an Italian model and having old men wire a third of their Social Security check for the past six months to Nigeria and here are the screen shots.” And guess what, she is still there.

It took two days to convince the old man she wasn’t real, she didn’t need to borrow money for the “gold business” her parents had left her, she wasn’t going to pay him back. He didn’t like all the tit shots in her Facebook pix and asked her to send some that were less risque. But of course she couldn’t; she wasn’t in charge of wardrobe for the woman whose identity she’d stolen, right down to the little dog and the heart knuckle tattoo. He scrolled the Italian woman’s Instagram for a long, long time, before he sighed and said, “It does look like her.” Then he started facebooking Nigerian men’s names — the “associate” to whom his dear friend, a good woman, a kind woman who just needed help, had him wire the money. She had taken $560 and he was down to $10 in his bank account. The next $450 she was pressing him for would have to wait till the first, when his SSI check hit the bank.

Have I mentioned she couldn’t talk to him on the phone because she is “mute”?

Even after he finally, finally admitted to himself that his friend wasn’t just a lonely woman who thought he was interesting, he just said, “You know, I feel sorry for her, or for him, that this is how they have to make a living.”

Like I said, and if I didn’t, I meant to: He’s a kind man.

I spent all day Saturday talking to her (or him). She was sorry. She didn’t mean to hurt him. She knew he was a nice man. She would leave him alone and stop texting him and then telling him to keep his phone “secret.” If I didn’t go to law enforcement, she would try to sort out the money. I offered fifty bucks for an interview — honest money! you’ll feel so good after! — about how it all works, who the marks are, how easy or hard it is, whether she laughs at them, if she would just send his money back. She went in circles that might have dizzied a lesser person: She didn’t take the money. The Nigerian man scammed her too. She’d get the money back to us if I didn’t call the cops. The cops can’t do anything in Nigeria, so don’t bother calling them, but if I call them I will lose all the money and she can’t help. I have to just wait and listen to her. Shut up and listen, do I want the Moneygram details OR NOT. She played wounded if I said things like “how long will it take you to hook another old man.” She had been only respectful to me; why was I insulting her by calling her “scammer.”

I’m not an old man; it didn’t work on me. I did, however, grow bored.

That night, we watched The Family, about an Australian cult that sucked all the money from its affluent adherents and stole their children along the way. And then it slammed me:

OH NO. Am I a cult? Am I sucking the money out of scared, lonely olds for the price of a personalized thank you note? (I send personalized thank you notes. Unless you send a check in the mail, in which case there’s a two-year backlog.) Am I a Nigerian scammer?

AM I PAT ROBERTSON OR GHOST JIM BAKKER??????!!!!!!

Oh wait, Ghost Jim Bakker still walks among us. WITH YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY IN HIS PANTS.

With that, my terrible ones, if you are sending Wonkette money several times a month, or only once but for a whole bunch of dollars, run it by someone you trust — a bitchy elder daughter, for instance — and ask them if you are being suckered and had or need to cut back a tiny. (Make sure it’s not a bitchy elder daughter who voted for Trump.) It is never our intention to prey upon a person trying to do right in the world. We don’t want you to go without, or spend your dick children’s inheritance, so we can buy another freelance post or bottle of Grand Poppy.

(OR DO WE.)

You shouldn’t have to give to Wonkette till it hurts. You should do your mite and trust, like us, that God and other Wonkers will provide. And we’ll let you know — about once a month! — when we really need your help to feed a child for just a dollar today. Oh wait, that child is us!

Now go outside and have a holiday — this is it for us today; we’ll see you tomorrow! — and remember:

President Donald Trump welcomed Josh Holt back to the United States after he was released from prison in Venezuela, where had been held since the summer of 2016. “You’ve gone through a lot, more than most people could endure,” Trump told Holt in the Oval Office shortly after the 26-year-old landed in the United States.