I wouldn’t trust the U.S. secretary of percussion to tell me how to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if they had never sat behind a drum set, so why should any teacher trust Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to tell them how to teach, without her ever having sat at the head of a class? (Maybe she should switch to the drums.)
Dave Grohl writes in The Atlantic about how our nation’s teachers need a plan for for the fall semester, and they need it now.
I’ve never tried to link a Twitter thread here before, but let’s go: this is a bracket voting system for ranking America’s Worst Plutocratic Family. The Koch family already blew the Coors family out of the water, and right now it’s Trump vs. Walton. That’s a tough one: completely torpedoing the battered, uneven myth of America in a short 4 years or decades of eroding the social safety net, gutting small business, and selling cheap shit in search of profit. Do you take the global view or the local view?
I was with sadness this morning that I read of the death of Grant Imahara, one of the hosts of Mythbusters, a show I watched as much as I could during its run from 2003–2016. There were several elements of the show I found annoying, mainly the narration, but I always enjoyed the format, the enthusiasm of the hosts, and the subject matter. Imahara was one of the best parts of the show—all science, and no attempt to be an outsized personality.
Having been astounded by the story of the St. Louis couple who walked out on their front lawn waving guns at peaceful BLM protestors, I was glad to see the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did an article diving into Ken & Karen’s backtory to find they (surprisingly) have a long history with the law and a raging persecution complex.
In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees.
This is the guy who gets a law degree just to make the rest of the world miserable. I was happy to see the cops showed up and confiscated their guns, especially after seeing how fucking stupid Karen was with her trigger finger.
In the New York Times, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D, Ill) took Tucker Carlson to task for questioning her patriotism.
But while I would risk my own safety to protect a statue of his from harm, I’ll fight to my last breath to defend every American’s freedom to have his or her own opinion about Washington’s flawed history. What some on the other side don’t seem to understand is that we can honor our founders while acknowledging their serious faults, including the undeniable fact that many of them enslaved Black Americans.
Because while we have never been a perfect union, we have always sought to be a more perfect union — and in order to do so, we cannot whitewash our missteps and mistakes. We must learn from them instead.
To hear Carlson, a privileged frat bro who was turned down by the CIA, question the patriotism of a woman who served in her country’s military, learned to fly rotary-wing aircraft, and who lost her legs in combat, just boggles my mind. The fact that the red states elected the guy who called John McCain a “loser” for being shot down in Vietnam illustrates the mental gymnastics these idiots—who claim daily they “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”—have to do to convince themselves they’re right.
Seat Time Cars is a search engine which finds cars with a manual transmission for sale under $5,000 in any geographic area you desire. There are a lot of cheap Miatas on there that I’d wager have been thrashed to within an inch of their lives, but they sure look like fun…
Retrobatch is a small app that does batch processing of image files without all of the overhead of Photoshop. It’s fully scriptable and there are workflows that can be built and saved into standalone droplets. I haven’t worked out the kinks yet but I’m building one to convert iPhone HEIC image files to high-quality JPGs.
This is awesome. Artist Alexandra Bell re-edits and rearranges the front page of the New York Times to highlight subtle—and often blatant racism:
Seeing what she did with their front-page reporting on the Virginia white nationalist rally is just stunning. And looking closer at how they’re reporting smaller stories is equally disturbing; a simple article about a man in Tulsa accused of murder is revealed to be plainly xenophobic.
Good art looks pretty. Great art makes you think. I’m definitely going to be looking closer at how things are reported both visually and narratively from now on, because of this work.
And the New York Times should hire this woman on as managing editor today.
McSweeney’s, normally a humor website, has been keeping tabs on what they call President Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. They’re up to 759 as of this post (June 26). It’s amazing, absolutely gutting, and makes me want to throw up.
There’s an app called NextDoor which is supposed to be a neighborhood-based bulletin board social media platform where people can talk about their garbage cans or post pictures of their yard sale crap or ask about when the next yard waste day is supposed to be. As with all other social media platforms, our particular NextDoor neighborhood has devolved into a cesspool of MAGA vs. everyone else over the chalk messages written on the school—specifically the Black Lives Matter messages that went up last week. What started out as a wonderful, grass-roots show of support was met with a bunch of assholes complaining, people threatening to wash it off, other people threatening to cover it in Blue Lives Matter with spray paint, and finally some douchebag white woman actually going out and trying to wash it off herself. Seriously, trying to erase “NO HATE” written on the wall by children? What kind of a racist robot are you?
The school board had a crew come out and pressure-wash the whole thing and now it’s the same boring brick building it always was. Can I mention how much I hate people?
I’ve had a pile of tabs open on my browser, with no idea what to do with them. They were too powerful to close but too much to take in one sitting.
Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop:
I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.
“Cops” Canceled after 33 Years on TV
Check out a great podcast called Running From Cops for a view of how the show informed and impacted policing in America.
IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology
Others will step in for sure. But one fewer company selling ID software to the cops is a good thing, I guess.
John Oliver’s excellent take on police in America:
And finally, a glimmer of hope, from Camden, NJ: they disbanded their police force 7 years ago and rebuilt it from scratch. Here’s how they did it.
Trump sent the DC Police out 1/2 hour before the official curfew to clear the streets so he could walk down to St. John’s Episcopal Church and shoot a photo op holding a bible. One of the Reverends was handing out food and snacks on the steps, and she and her staff were tear-gassed and driven off by police in riot gear. Fuck. This. Guy.
At the Atlantic, George Packer argues that we are living in a failed state:
A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.
Totally pessimistic—you may need to day drink while reading this—but he makes a convincing point. Especially on a morning when the Great Pumpkin is telling people to inject disinfectant to clean their lungs.