Bien le bonjour. Get some radioheadphones, 2+2=5 is 👍 live.

Around the interwebs,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on navigating our differences:
  • Fundamental value differences are not that fundamental.
  • The whole city is center.
• The hotel bathroom puzzle, or a great illustration of the XY problem.
• Kurt Vonnegut: Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088, via kottke.

  The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be nature's stern but reasonable surrender terms:

  1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
  2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
  3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
  4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you're at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
  5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
  6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
  7. And so on. Or else.

• Kottke: How to ask a favor.
• [fr] Grain de philo : Voulons-nous mourir ? et FAQ de la mort !
• David Cain: There is no right decision.
• r/PhotoshopBattle: French president Macron celebrating victory, thx Louis.
• SMBC: The Best.
• Tech:
  • DF: Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg.

    Zuckerberg is so wrong here. It is not hard at all to “impugn the intent” of Holocaust or Sandy Hook deniers. They’re fucking Nazis. The idea that these people are wrong but are making honest mistakes in good faith is nonsense. Facebook’s stance on this is genuinely detrimental to society. They’re offering a powerful platform that reaches the entire world to lunatics who, in the pre-internet age, were relegated to handing out mimeographs while spouting through a megaphone on a street corner.

  • Bloomberg: A global guide to state-sponsored trolling, via jwz.

    In Venezuela, prospective trolls sign up for Twitter and Instagram accounts at government-sanctioned kiosks in town squares and are rewarded for their participation with access to scarce food coupons, according to Venezuelan researcher Marianne Diaz of the group @DerechosDigitales. A self-described former troll in India says he was given a half-dozen Facebook accounts and eight cell phones after he joined a 300-person team that worked to intimidate opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And in Ecuador, contracting documents detail government payments to a public relations company that set up and ran a troll farm used to harass political opponents. [...]

    In response to revolutions and social movements launched on Twitter and Facebook, national governments initially censored content, blocked access to social media and used surveillance technology to monitor their citizens. But it turned out to be far more effective to simply inundate the platforms with a torrent of disinformation and anonymized threats -- what the researchers dubbed a strategy of "information abundance" made possible by the rapid spread of social media. [...]

    Turkey is a prime example, according to Camille Francois, who directed the Jigsaw project as a principal researcher at Google. Since the 2013 protests at Istanbul's Gezi Park, President Recep Erdogan's government has used a combination of online and offline repression to turn social media "into a near dead zone for genuine social protest in Turkey," Francois said. "Five years later, there is very little organically organized activity."

  • xkcd #2021 - Software Development. NOT TRUE, WE DON'T "load 500 of them into the cannon we made and shoot them at the wall", WE LET AMAZON DO IT.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Old Steve Jobs on the constructive-destructive axis:

    In return for speaking at the retreat, Jobs got Murdoch to hear him out on Fox News, which he believed was destructive, harmful to the nation, and a blot on Murdoch’s reputation. “You’re blowing it with Fox News”, Jobs told him over dinner. “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful”. Jobs said he thought Murdoch did not really like how far Fox had gone. “Rupert’s a builder, not a tearer-downer”, he said. “I’ve had some meetings with James, and I think he agrees with me. I can just tell.”

Bonjour, frendz. This week's 🎵 is a fresh new Birds in row.

News:

• [fr] Fanny Britt - L’ode à un vieux couple.
• Kottke reminds us about Buckminster Fuller in March 30, 1970 edition of New York Magazine:

  We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

• Kottke: Manually pixelated food.
• Tech:
  • Funfunfunction - Why care how your tools work? Good bits on motivation and tolerance to change.
  • jwz - Facebook's not-at-all-dystopian facial recognition patent application for brick-and-mortar surveillance.
  • Michael Geist - The state of canadian wireless in one chart: no one has carriers that generate more revenue with less usage (pdf report). WJW:

    Canada is a global outlier (or leader if you are a telecom executive). Simply put, no one has carriers that generate more revenue with less usage per SIM than Canada.

    It is difficult to overstate how much the lack of wireless competitiveness is holding back the Canadian market. With the CRTC refusing to take act and carriers continuing to increase fees (particularly on overage fees that generate more than a billion in revenue per year), it falls to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains to recognize that longstanding failed Canadian wireless policies must change.

  • iOS bug reveals how Apple censors the Taiwanese flag on Chinese iPhones.
  • Thomas Dullien on complexity emerging from our overpowered-then-specialized general-purpose computers, and the resulting security challenges (slides), via Schneier. Liked this quote in particular:

    How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? A heap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed — and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design.

    – Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in "The moon is a harsh Mistress", Robert A. Heinlein

  • Are free societies at a disadvantage in national cybersecurity?

    Dan Geer often said that "the price of freedom is the probability of crime." We are willing to pay this price because it isn't that high. As technology makes individual and small-group actors more powerful, this price will get higher. Will there be a point in the future where free and open societies will no longer be able to survive? I honestly don't know.

• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • New Yorker: Man Wins “Why Trump Shouldn’t Go to Prison” Essay Contest, funz.

HelloooooOoooo. Music: Eastern Standard.

On the news,

• SSC / Scott Alexander on Piketty's Capital in the twenty-first century: book review, highlights, comments highlights.
• SSC / Scott Alexander - Dissolving the Fermi paradox (paper: arxiv, pdf).
• [fr] IRIS - Bullshit jobs, brown-out et revenu minimum. Deuxième partie.
• Good SMBCs: Coupling, Knock knock.
• jwz - Ben avli(S), awesome.
• Tech:
  • Cory Doctorow - Zuck’s empire of oily rags. HN.

    It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.

    A decade later, everything is on fire and we’re trying to tell Zuck and his friends that they’re going to need to pay for the damage and install the kinds of fire-suppression gear that anyone storing oily rags should have invested in from the beginning, and the commercial surveillance industry is absolutely unwilling to contemplate anything of the sort.

    That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

    There’s an old-fashioned word for this: corruption. In corrupt systems, a few bad actors cost everyone else billions in order to bring in millions – the savings a factory can realize from dumping pollution in the water supply are much smaller than the costs we all bear from being poisoned by effluent. But the costs are widely diffused while the gains are tightly concentrated, so the beneficiaries of corruption can always outspend their victims to stay clear.

    Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

  • Wired - Marketing firm Exactis leaked a personal info database with 340 million records. HN.

Hey ho! Music, with SEIROM.

And little news this week, frendz. Oh well.

• Justin Peters: A digtial artist who merges reality with his imagination, via kottke.
• Tech:
  • jwz: Today in Uber autonomous murderbot news.
  • jwz: STARTTLS Everywhere, on email centralization because Gmail.

Music: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and The Armed, thx Sam.

News:

• xkcd - Customer Rewards, on our personal data.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Femme et melon, à peine les connaît-on.
• Tech:
  • [fr] Hausse des tarifs de Google Maps : « On a plus que jamais besoin d’alternatives libres »

    Ces nouveaux tarifs posent question, car ils paraissent disproportionnés par rapport aux coûts réels. Par ailleurs, si Google a fourni gratuitement pendant des années à des milliers de clients un service qui avait un coût aussi élevé, il a clairement pratiqué du dumping pour empêcher d’autres acteurs d’émerger. Avec succès. Des initiatives ont vu le jour, notamment grâce aux données d’Openstreetmap, comme Mapbox aux Etats-Unis. Mais globalement, l’écosystème a été paralysé.

  • Schneier: Censorship in the age of large cloud providers:

    In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.

  • And more Schneier: Data protection laws are shining a needed light on a secretive industry.
  • The Inner-platform effect is "the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using". Via Leah Neukirchen.
• Donaldese:
  • Kottke / New Yorker: The language of the Trump administration is the language of domestic violence.

Hi frendz! This weeks music is Celestial Trax.

News!

• Evonomics: Capital’s share of income is way higher than you think. About half of US household income is derived from wealth, and 60% of that wealth is inherited.

  Pretty hard to square this reality with the widely held view of prosperous, hard-working makers vs indolent do-nothing takers. Who's who?

• Kottke: Willpower, wealth, and the marshmallow test.

  The new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background — and, in turn, that that background, not the ability to delay gratification, is what’s behind kids’ long-term success.

  The failed replication of the marshmallow test does more than just debunk the earlier notion; it suggests other possible explanations for why poorer kids would be less motivated to wait for that second marshmallow. For them, daily life holds fewer guarantees: There might be food in the pantry today, but there might not be tomorrow, so there is a risk that comes with waiting. And even if their parents promise to buy more of a certain food, sometimes that promise gets broken out of financial necessity.

• [fr/qc] Le Devoir : Magasiner quand on est noir au Canada, une illustration du racisme au quotidien.
• Kottke: Super freaky recently declassified NSA security posters.
• SMBC: Robot frustrated at humans.
• jakelikesonions: Life is full of peaks and valleys.
• Tech:
  • AMPstinction. HN.
  • Marianne Bellotti: The land before binary. HN.

Hi there. Music, with CARROM.

News news news:

• Funfunfunction: Interpret generously, on debate / rhetoric vs. discussion / understanding. 👍👍👍.
• Aeon: You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to, via kottke.
• [fr] Le Monde - Vidéosurveillance : paradigme du technosolutionnisme.
• [fr/qc] Deux liens Nouveau Projet sur la pollution et les transports :
  • Ventes record de VUS/essence : Il faut cesser d’investir dans le problème.
  • L’Estonie, premier pays aux transports gratuits ?
• Kottke: Amazing 1980s tech company logos, Brutalist cuckoo clocks.
• 五月病, via waxy.
• SMBC: State of the union, AMERICA.
• Tech:
  • GDPR leading to EU being served smaller tracking truckloads, leading to old-new epiphanies that tracking truckloads slows down sites. Via DF.
    • The Verge: 32s → 5s load time, 61 → 2 JS files, 2MB → 1 MB.
    • USA Today: 45s → 3s load time, 124 → 0 JS files, 5.2MB → 0.5MB, 500 → 34 HTTP requests.
  • LinuxJournal - Kyle Rankin: Why you should do it yourself.
  • Reverse emulating the NES, via waxy.
  • Bloomberg: Microsoft to acquire GitHub, oÔ. HN.

Guuuten tag, everyone. Music, with Arabstazy / Aya Metwalli.

On the news this week:

• [fr] Monsieur Phi - Conférence sur la super-intelligence.
• Guardian: Why we should bulldoze the business school.
• SMBC: Why? "Politics is like marriage - the goal is to win".
• Tech:
  • Morning paper - Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity.
  • Nabil Hassein: Computing and climate change.
  • jwz: Uber as Landfill Capitalism.
  • ACLU: Amazon teams up with law enforcement to deploy dangerous new face recognition technology.
  • WaPo: FBI repeatedly overstated encryption threat figures to congress, public
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • AP: EPA bars AP and CNN from summit on contaminants.

O hai, frendz. Music this week with Rev. Lewis and mmph.

In the papers,

• Scott Alexander - Basic income, not basic jobs: against hijacking utopia, on UBI. Comments highlights followup.
• Funfunfunction: Politeness or clarity? 👍, on communication: adapting your message to the audience, and debunking the Torvaldese conception of politeness as fluff.
• New Republic: Don’t blame phones for narcissism and the self as a “sack of noisy ghosts”. Via [fr] Nouveau Projet.
• Chris M. Forsyth: Subway pictures in Montréal and elsewhere.
• Segmented type, via waxy.
• SMBC on cryptocurrencies and the lord.
• Tech:
  • Jacques Mattheij: GDPR hysteria and GDPR hysteria part II, nuts and bolts, actionable advice. HN.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • Kottke: Against political analogies.

👋 ! Music: Joachim Mencel Quintet, Gyan Riley, Just Mustard, Jon Hopkins.

News:

• Scott Alexander / SSC: Varieties of argumentative experience, 👍👍👍.
• [fr] La Presse : Un monde sans information ? Via Nouveau Projet.

  Vous payez déjà beaucoup pour vous informer. L’argent que vous avez économisé sur votre abonnement à La Presse, vous le dépensez, et même davantage, sur la quincaillerie qui vous permet de lire La Presse+.

  Le problème, c’est qu’avant, cet argent servait à payer des journalistes. Aujourd’hui, la même somme sert à enrichir des entreprises de téléphonie mobile et des multinationales technos.

• EV#165 - Zavain Dar: New radical empiricism.

  A young Kepler today likely wouldn’t look into the sky in search for structure, but rather collect the prior month of visual sky data and train a recurrent neural network to predict tomorrow night’s sky. [...]

  The availability of data and machine learning might create new pathways of exploration in a range of domains, where are traditional techniques have become stuck. It's almost as if the availability of data (and better maths with which to manipulate it) allows us to create new dimensions from which to establish vantage points to surveil the problem set.

• I played Fortnite and figured out the universe, on how humans can turn zero-sum situations into nonzero-sum ones. Via Kottke.
• New Yorker: The United States of Japan, via waxy.
• An online collection of high-res scans of M.C. Escher’s prints.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Il n’y a pas de rêve heureux ?
• The Metro Gun Share Program.
• Tech:
  • oÔ: Google’s AI sounds like a human on the phone — should we be worried? to which Kottke gathers questions around Should our machines sound human?
  • oÔ again: Write emails faster with Smart Compose in Gmail. HN.
  • jwz: TicketBastard wants your biometrics.

O hai! 🎹 🥁 🎶: Steve you are a dick, to my cat-neighbor Steeve with two "e"s, Kikuji, Group Listening, Orquesta Akokán, Venetian Snares x Daniel Lanois.

And on the news,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi : La liberté en jeu.
• A mass of copyrighted works is about to enter the US Public Domain.
• [fr] Le devoir : Pourquoi y a-t-il incompréhension entre les critiques de cinéma et les fans ? Via Nouveau Projet.
• On customers Divine Discontent.
• [fr/qc] Hein ? Merci Isa.
• SMBC on mimicry: Rye ← wheat, Plant ← programmer.
• Tech:
  • Linux Journal: Privacy is still personal, excellent reminder. ♥ the parallels between physical privacy (through clothing and shelter) and digital (barely existent) privacy.
  • Amazon & Bezos being shitty pieces of shitful shits:
    • Jeff Bezos sees space as the “only” option to spend his money on.
    • Amazon puts 7,000 jobs on hold because of a tax that would help Seattle's homeless population.
  • WaPo: WhatsApp founder & employees plan to leave after parent Facebook attempts to weaken encryption.
  • Any company using facebook for user ID is foolish.
  • Michael Geist - Canada: world’s worst wireless pricing.
  • xkcd #1988: Containers and #1989: IMHO.

Hey ho; !@#$% awesome sounds from Höga Nord Rekords.

News:

• NYT: Breathing our cities polluted air.
• David Cain: Why the other side won’t listen to reason.
• Magnasanti: the largest and most terrifying SimCity. HN.
• Goood xkcd week: #1984: Misinterpretation, #1985: Meteorologist.
• SMBC: Platypus.

O hai, friends. Dang, no new music this week. Have a sip of Radiohead, then ♥.

Around the interwebs,

• [fr] Monsieur Phi : Dissertation, l'art des réponses longues et intelligentes aux questions brèves et stupides.
• Awesome Kottke links this week:
  • The pigeon photographer: Aerial photographs from the turn of the century.
  • The calmness of airplane pilots.
  • The storytellers who read aloud to Cuban cigar rollers.
• Tech:
  • Kottke: Building a better Kindle (or, why buttons matter). On physical UX.
  • Morning Paper: Processing-In-Memory: mitigating data movement bottlenecks.
  • A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook’s new GDPR privacy changes, lulz.
  • RPS on "the ever-contentious matter of videogame crunch".
  • A reminder from jwz:

    "We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

    – R. Buckminster Fuller, 1970

  • The verge: Ready Player One, a.k.a. the utopian belief that technology would make all voices equal instead of amplifying existing social inequality. Via waxy

Hola! Music, with Rafiq Bhatia, Wout Gooris Trio, and Physique.

News:

• Kottke: Extraordinary aerial photograph of Edinburgh circa 1920.
• [fr] « En fait », « du coup », « j’avoue » : ces tics de langage qui nous font tiquer, via Nouveau Projet.
• Comics! SMBC: Oops, jakelikesonions: Flattery.
• Tech:
  • Facebook barf: Stratechery: The Facebook Current (HN), and Schneier: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, 👍.
  • I would like Debian to stop shipping XScreenSaver, a.k.a. the problem with non-rolling distros.
  • Kottke: Ikea-style instructions for programming algorithms.

Hey ho, frendz! Music, with Haley Heynderickx and Hailu Mergia.

News:

• Madeleine Albright: fascism is a serious global threat.
• Richard Stallman: A proposal to keep your personal data safe.
• [fr] Les 400 culs : Séduction = domination ?
• Kottke: What makes a tree a tree? Scientists still aren’t sure…
• Kottke: Photos of an unknown Soviet discovered when she died.
• The bike-share oversupply in China: huge piles of abandoned and broken bicycles, on efficient & self-regulating markets.
• SMBC: Dark.
• Tech:
  • Ehsan Akhgari: Why do people dislike online ads?
  • FontCode, textual encryption using micro alterations of fonts.

Bien le bonjour. Music; I like Mary Halvorson keys play.

On the news,

• Kottke: Austin Kleon - How to keep going.
• David Cain: Why there’s too much on your plate.
• Kottke: Older Japanese women shoplifting to find community & meaning in jail.
• jwz: Jaywalkers under surveillance in Shenzhen soon to be punished via text messages.
• Tech:
  • Doc Searls: Thinking and working outside the platform, yes!
  • RPS: The game industry needs to change and it begins now, interesting thoughts about gamedev unionization, applicable to other kinds of development.
  • Mozilla: Facebook container extension (HN). ♥! This Firefox addon has exactly zarroo new exciting tech. It's just specialized/preconfigured UX around an existing feature, and opportunity-grasping marketing after the recent Facebook privacy barfs. Happy to recommend/install it to friends I install uBlock Origin for. Great job Mozilla 🙂. More of this!
  • Morning paper: Deep learning scaling is predictable, empirically.

Hola, and music: let new Suuns warm you up.

News:

• Scott Alexander: The dark rule utilitarian argument for science piracy.
• Kottke: What America looked like before the EPA, in photos.
• Kottke: Ohio teenager’s raw photographs of his high school friends is USA.
• Inside El Paquete, Cuba’s social network.
• jwz: "I'm afraid this may hurt your head a little".
• SMBC: Monster and Bayesophilia.
• Tech:
  • Anil Dash: 12 things everyone should understand about tech, 👍👍👍.
  • Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry and Dow drops 336 points as Facebook plunges and Zuck responds to Cambridge Analytics scandal and The case against Facebook.
  • Harper’s Index on Amazon viewed candidly by the populace.
  • jwz: Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Woman
  • History of the browser user-agent string. HN.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • How Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions.
  • The cult of Trump and America’s increasingly authoritarian government

Yo. Music, with Electric Octopus, thx David.

On the news,

• A good Morning Paper duo: Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators - a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem, and Bug fixes, improvements, … and privacy leaks. On the worsening of privacy via growing Personally-Identifying Information leaks in (Android, but iOS is probably similar) apps. Worth a though on that "User Agent" word used to refer to our web browsers and how they can indeed be agents for the user –or against, if you choose badly– by blocking trackers. Contrarily, unless rooting, no such thing is possible in apps.
• Tech:
  • joeyh: futures of (linux) distributions, on Debian lost in language-specific packaging tools and Nix doing the right thing.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • RPS: Trump showed a weird frag montage in his videogame violence meeting.

Bien le bonjour. This week's 🎶 is a new Imarhan, and Mint Field.

And little news this week:

• Vi Hart: Peace for Triple Piano.
• Tech:
  • Reminder: We’re all addicted to the smartphone slot machines in our pockets and How technology is designed to bring out the worst in us, with Tristan Harris of How technology is hijacking your mind  — from a magician and Google design ethicist fame.
  • Ends and means, on Google AMP and monopoly abuse.
  • GitHub survived the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded. Exploiting web-exposed memcached instances, nice.

Hola. Music with Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, thx Ali.

Newsnewsnews:

• Kottke: Olympics, male & female physiology, and socially constructed bodies.
• Kurzgesagt: Homeopathy explained – Gentle healing or reckless fraud?
• Kottke: Warren Buffett wins ten-year bet about S&P outperforming hedge funds.
• SSC / Scott Alexander - Technological unemployment & comments highlights, a historical peek at "will machines steal our jobs (this time)?"
• Cao Shu: One minute art history, via [fr] Nouveau Projet.
• Tech:
  • Funfunfunction: Bad jobs, family and depression.
  • Om Malik: The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change: "Facebook is about making money by keeping us addicted to Facebook. It always has been — and that’s why all of our angst and headlines are not going to change a damn thing". Or, quoting Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese, 'merica, and guns:
  • Newt Gingrich says arming teachers only long-term solution to school shootings.
  • jwz: Thoughts and prayers and NRA funding.
  • Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns; "By law, the system must remain intricate, thorny, and all but impenetrable."
  • Kottke: American teens have had it with authoritarian crap, 👍 classroom idea.
  • When you're such a sociopath that your staff hands you cue cards explaining how to feign empathy.
  • Josh Marshall: Gun rights, ‘positive good’ and the evolution of Mutually Assured Massacre.