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Robert Hickey is the deputy director of The Protocol School of Washington, which provides etiquette and protocol training. In his book Honor & Respect, he covers the “correct written and oral forms of address for everyone from local officials to foreign heads of state”. For The President of the United States, the proper forms of address are:

Letter salutation: Dear Mr. President:
Complimentary close: Most respectfully,
Announced: The President of the United States
Introduction: Mr. President, may I present …
Conversation: Mr. President

And contrary to how many media outlets refer to former US Presidents, they should not be referred to as “President” (e.g. “President Bush”):

“While it is common practice in the media and elsewhere to address and identify former presidents as ‘President (Name),’ this is a mistake,” said Hickey. “Serving as President of the United States does not grant one the personal rank of ‘President’ for life. The office of President is a one-person-at-a-time role that a specific individual holds and then hands off to the next person.”

“Courtesies, honors, and special forms of address are symbols of the power of the office. They belong to the office and to the citizens, not former office holders.”

Hickey recommends “The Honorable” as an official title (e.g. “The Honorable Jimmy Carter”) and “Mr./Ms.” for conversation or salutation (e.g. “Mr. Clinton”).

While Donald Trump was officially sworn in as the President on Friday, this site will continue to refer to Trump as “Trump” or “Donald Trump”¹ and not as “President Trump”. Again and again, almost to a pathological degree, Trump has demonstrated, in word and deed, that he has not earned and does not deserve our respect and the title of his office. It’s a small protest by a small “media outlet”, perhaps petty, but as long as the First Amendment still applies, I will publish what I like on my own damn website.

And since I am all for the “one-person-at-a-time” rule, this site will also continue to refer to Barack Obama as “President Obama”. He’s earned it many times over.

1. Or even “Fuckface Von Clownstick”. We don’t stand on ceremony here. But I won’t call him just “Donald”…that would be disrespectful to greater Donalds like Sutherland, Glover, and Duck.↩

I came across this fascinating discussion on Tumblr, comparing the oft-irreverent blogging platform to the avant-garde Dada art movement of the post-WWI era:

@HalfOnionInABag has one goal in life: to exceed Trump's follower-count, proving that such numbers are a plebiscite on precisely nothing. (more…)

Like some ancient megalith, an imposing windowless structure in Manhattan may be even more sinister than it appears. The AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street was built for machines, designed to house long-distance phone lines in the 1970s, but reports now suggest it has been used by the National Security Agency as a listening post in the heart of America’s financial capital. Welcome to the home of Project X, both a supposed name of the place (also known as Titanpointe) and title of a short film about it by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras.

Aside from its everyday functions, the 29-story, bunker-like building was constructed to house over 1,000 people in a nuclear attack (with its own food, water and generators) — what better place, really, to conceal government agents for indefinite periods of time? The building is located toward the southern tip of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Its proximity to offices and meeting places of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank also make it an ideal location from which to spy on such organizations.

According to reports, NSA and FBI employees and contractors working in the building were given tips on how to avoid standing out when entering and exiting the structure. They were told what clothes to wear and cars to rent to remain inconspicuous.

Edward Snowden was a major source for the associated links now bringing this all to light. Apparently, there is no direct evidence that government agencies used the actual AT&T equipment on site — it may have just been an ideal staging space for their own technologies and operations. There is, however, a major “gateway switch” on site (routing international calls) which has led some to suspect there may be more to the story. So far, of course, the NSA has declined to comment.

“This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.”

Designed to restore and augment the city’s floodplain, this new green recreation space features thousands of acres of forest as well as playgrounds, lawns and trails. Upon completion, it will be one of the biggest urban green spaces in the country (more than 10 times the size of Central Park in NYC).

In a state not exactly known for its greenery (or environmentalism), this project in Texas by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates is designed in part to address a critical and ongoing issue: flooding damage during severe weather events.”I believe we can create the most value and the greatest benefit to our citizens when we complete projects around nature,” said mayor Mike Rawlings  of the project.

The park aims to serve both recreational and engineering purposes, shoring up the city against future floods while creating a great green asset for citizens and visitors. Developed in collaboration with government engineers, it will be part community resource but also (and critically) part infrastructural insurance against the effects of climate change.

The development is part of a larger series of projects along the flood plain and will link into over seventy miles of regional trails. At an estimated cost of $50 million, the park is not cheap but surprisingly inexpensive given its scope and aims. So far, a private donor has stepped forward offering $20 million of the funds needed, leaving a smaller bill for the city and state governments as well.

According to a report by Oxfam, the world’s 8 richest men are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world’s population. That’s 8 men with the same combined wealth of 3.6 billion people.

As decision makers and many of the super-rich gather for this week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, the charity’s report suggests the wealth gap is wider than ever, with new data for China and India indicating that the poorest half of the world owns less than previously estimated.

Oxfam, which described the gap as “obscene,” said if the new data had been available before, it would have shown that in 2016 nine people owned the same as the 3.6 billion who make up the poorest half of humanity, rather than 62 estimated at the time.

The gap between the super-rich and poor is widening: in 2010, it would have taken 43 of the richest people to equal the bottom 50%. The eight men in question are Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg.

Five of the men on this list — Gates, Buffett, Ellison, Bloomberg, and Zuckerberg (all Americans) — have signed the Giving Pledge, a public promise to give away the majority of their fortunes while still alive (or upon their deaths). They are essentially agreeing with Oxfam that their wealth should be redistributed. When five men who control, say, as much wealth as 25-30% of the world’s poorest are saying, by their actions, that the wealth inequality gap needs to be narrowed, shouldn’t the government take that as a sign that something needs to be done about it?

Update: The way Oxfam is calculating wealth here takes debt into account:

If you look at the numbers that the statistic is based on, from Forbes and Credit Suisse, you’ll see that the equality here is that the eight richest people in the world have a combined net worth of roughly $426 billion, or 0.16% of all the world’s wealth.

Is it really true that the bottom 50% of the world’s population accounts for only 0.16% of the wealth on the planet? Well, not really. The bottom 50% comprises five different deciles. Of those deciles, the fourth has 0.17% of the world’s wealth, and the fifth has 0.32%. Those are both very small numbers — but they’re both bigger than 0.16%.

So something funny is going on here — and that something funny is debt. When Oxfam looks at net worth, it adds up your assets, and then subtracts your liabilities. And when your liabilities are bigger than your assets, that means you have negative net worth. According to Oxfam’s methodology, the bottom 10% of the world’s population has a net worth of one trillion negative dollars — an almost inconceivably large sum.

The inequality is there, and growing, but Oxfam’s formulation is misleading without the proper context. (thx, everyone)

North Dakota state rep Keith Kempenich has had enough of people exercising their right to assembly and free expression.

In response to the protests at Standing Rock, Kempenich has introduced legislation [PDF] to shield drivers from penalty who unintentionally strike a pedestrian “obstructing vehicular traffic.”

The bill asserts that pedestrians are not allowed to use the roadbed unless there are no sidewalks, and even in that case, they have to stick to the shoulder. It appears to make no accommodation for people who actually have to cross a street.

The bill has been making the rounds, compelling Kempenich to defend himself. He says it wouldn’t apply to a driver who deliberately mows someone down, nor would it protect distracted drivers.

“If you stay off the roadway, this would never be an issue,” Kempenich told the Star Tribune.

But it’s hard to explain Kempenich’s bill except as an attempt to encourage aggression toward protestors and bully people out of the street. After all, drivers already get away with the type of behavior Kempenich wants to shield from accountability.

A man who intentionally ran into a crowd during Ferguson protests in Minneapolis, running over the leg of a 16-year-old girl and then fleeing the scene, was charged only with minor traffic offenses.

The DIY Feminist Guide to Cybersecurity, available in Spanish and English, is designed to be a quickstart for "gendered, racialized, queerphobic, transphobic, ableist, and classist" threats to digital autonomy, created because "companies and developers frequently ignore or underestimate the digital threats to these spaces and their users."

An excerpt from Elisa Chavez’s poem “Revenge” in the Seattle Review of Books:

Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.

I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;

I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.
With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,
my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,

This is a powerful poem, and I laughed out loud so hard to the “This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw” line.

Many people are surprised to learn that George Miller directed both Mad Max and the animated penguin film Happy Feet. Maybe that's why they work so well combined in this trailer mashup by Nico Bellamy. (more…)

Kali Akuno, an organizer with Cooperation Jackson and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement talks to Alternet about the first stirrings of the mass-scale civil disobedience we must practice to resist trumpism. (more…)

On this weekend's Meet the Press, WSJ editor in chief Gerard Baker said that even when he was clear that Trump had uttered a falsehood, his paper would not call that falsehood a lie, because to do so would ascribe "moral intent" to Trump; instead, the WSJ will call Trump's lies "challengeable" and "questionable." (more…)

Old is new, new is old. The more we know the less we know. Hivemind is our mind. No one is an individual. We all read the same things. Information is enmeshed in the tangled threads of history. It’s raining outside and we have to sort this tangled web. Happy new year TOR!

Lookin’ classy.

[via Tumblr]

Drew Toothpaste tweeted: "Thank you to Google for helping me compile the most popular search queries for each state in the US this year!"

Finally, some real news for a change.

Watch as dancer Lil Buck gracefully moves through an exhibit at Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Icons Of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection, which includes work from Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and Monet, is on view there through Feb 20, 2017. Lil Buck is on view at YouTube indefinitely.

Jakub "Mr Werewolf" Rozalski is a prolific Polish painter whose longrunning series of painters depict rural Eastern European folk fighting against mecha warriors, werewolves, and demons. (more…)

This website shows you all the data any website you visit can find out about you: your location, operating system, browser plugins, previously visited web page, local and public IP, service provider, social media networks you are logged into, devices on your local network, and more. The site also shows you how to hide any of this information that you don't want to reveal.

Dan Ozzi, over at Vice, took the fan theory that Elvis made a cameo in near forgotten holiday classic Home Alone and ran with it. Ran and ran.

Seems a fan spotted someone who looks like an older Elvis in the background of one of the scenes in Home Alone. A lot of theorizing has since taken place...

So why do people think this uncredited background extra with only a minute of screen time and no speaking lines is Elvis? Well, strap on your blue suede shoes, mama, because we are about to dig in deep here, and we don't plan on coming out until we have answers or have LOST OUR FUCKING MINDS.

For starters, appearance. Were Elvis alive in 1990 when the movie was filmed, he would have been 55, making him age appropriate to be the man in this scene, roughly. There is some resemblance between the two around the eyes, for sure. The man also has a full head of brown hair that, from the looks of it, has likely felt the touch of a bottle of Just for Men. "But Elvis had jet black hair," you're saying, very naively. WRONG. Elvis had dirty blond hair which he dyed black.

This is a fun read. Whenever I think of Elvis, however, I think of my old friend Jay Leggett.

Secure the News periodically checks in with news-sites to see how many of them implement HTTPS -- the secure protocol that stops your ISP and people snooping on it from knowing which pages you're looking at and from tampering with them -- and what proportion of them default to HTTPS. (more…)

David A Banks argues that the boom in NPR explainer podcasts -- Radiolab, Note to Self, Hidden Brain, Freakonomics Radio and others -- are ideologically bankrupt, presenting individual, often neurological explanations for social phenomena -- rather than turning to the traditional social science accounts of these issues, so that the weird, broken, messed up things in our world are the result of our human "hardwiring" rather than the outgrowth of policies and ideology. (more…)

When people are bursting into pizza parlor with guns because of fake news stories, it must be addressed at Saturday Night Live's fake news desk. 

Cecily Strong, in character Cathy Anne, stopped by the Weekend Update desk to try to wrap her head around Pizzagate and white supremacists. 

"People like me do not need to be encouraged on Fortune and Redding," explains strong. "4Chan and Reddit," corrects Michael Che. 

Her prescription for the country? "Everyone needs to get off the internet for a few days. Including Donald Trump. I know he's watching."

Trump has not yet tweeted his thoughts on last night's episode, but it's probably only a matter of time.  Read more...

Not only is the song catchy, but this delightful homage by Pogo has fantastic production values, to boot! Warning: you may be singing this the rest of the day. (more…)

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder took to Facebook to share some lessons from 20th century about how to protect our liberal democracy from fascism and authoritarianism. Snyder has given his permission to republish the list, so I’ve reproduced it in its entirety here in case something happens to the original.

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.

3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.

4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of “terrorism” and “extremism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “exception” and “emergency.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.

6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps “The Power of the Powerless” by V’aclav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.

7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.

14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.

15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.

16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.

18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)

19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

A great thought-provoking list. “Corporeal politics”…I like that phrase. And I’ve seen many references to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in recent weeks.

See also Five Steps to Tyranny and The 14 Features of Eternal Fascism.

Note: Illustration by the awesome Chris Piascik.