The
Spoils: Unlike
Obama, Turkey's Erdoğan has quickly moved to take advantage of
having his party in complete control of the government, arresting
political rivals and magazine
editors who thought they lived in a democracy.
Progress?
Humans have created a new top predator that is taking over the
Northeast. No, not investment bankers, a dog-wolf-coyote mix.
Fill
In The Blanks:
The law firm of a long time aide to Governor
Christie, which
had donated generously to his campaign, has received lucrative
contracts from the New
Jersey state
government.
Unreckless
Endangerment:
The US Supreme Court is going to determine if a man who has been
convicted of beating his wife and/or children can own a gun if his
violence was not “reckless” or “intentional.” Only a bunch
of lawyers could possibly wonder if repeating beating the crap out of
a spouse was “intentionally reckless”. What, exactly, happens to
rational humans when they attend law school?
Timing
Is Everything:
A year ago Candidate Carson
said in reference to the American people, “Many of them are
stupid." Politicians
are supposed to pretend they don't know this sort of thing.
Quoted:
“There is no
assurance that capitalist economies, when plunged into downturn,
will, over any interval, revert to what had been normal.” Larry
Summers, who helped kill Glass-Steagall
and made all this
inevitable and now
claims “advanced
economies are so sick we need a new way to think about them.”
It's
Story Time:
There is a huge complex of 260 previously unknown earthwork
constructions in remote Kazakhstan, first spotted on satellite
photos. They are the size of several football fields and
recognizable only from the air. No one knows who built them (about
8,000 years ago), nor why.
Hell
& Environs:
In the next 50 to 75 years temperatures in the Persian Gulf will
regularly reach 140°F (60°C) – so severe that simply being
outside for a few hours will threaten human life. Similar extremes
of heat and humidity will plague South-East Asia, prompting an
inevitable drop in productivity in their famed sweat shops.
Preying
To Play:
Missouri, following the tragedies in Ferguson, now mandates that no
more than 12.5% of a city's budget may come from traffic citations.
In that most of the 59 individual police departments in St. Louis
County got much of their operating funds by fleecing drivers, this
cut in budget has meant they cannot maintain the out-size police
forces they used as toll collectors. Even before these reductions St.
Louis County was morally far above Western Tennessee, where police
agencies are outraged that they may lose the right to “self-fund
through asset seizures” from people who had committed no crime,
nor even been arrested.
Data
Point: One in
nine black children have a parent who is, or has been, in prison.
Donald Trump's dad gave him a
million dollar loan to get him started in life and left him an
inheritance of between $40 and $200 million (in 1974 dollars).
Porn
O'Graph:
Inflation, watch
2 comments:
re Hell. 140 degrees.. Nah, they'll just hook up more powerful air conditioners to larger fossil fuel driven electricity generating stations... problem solved!
Re Christie pay to play. Is it illegal (albeit hard to prove)? Was it ever illegal? Does that sort of thing even raise eyebrows anymore? Or do we file it under "return to the patronage system."
Is this all about the Koch Brothers et al wanting to secure cushy political appointee jobs for their shiftless grandchildren - with armies of ghost payrollees to (not) oversee, and bribes to collect from desperate constituents?
Here's a project I'd like to see: track the employment of elected officials' spouses, siblings, offspring, etc. What portion do you think are at think tanks, lobbying firms, corporate foundations, and wall street?
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