Vernon Unsworth is one of the rescue divers who helped free the children who'd been stuck in a cave in Thailand; Unsworth made some pointed remarks about the disutility of Elon Musk's proposal to bring the children out in a miniature sub, to which Musk replied by publicly calling Unsworth "pedo guy" and "child rapist" and then daring Unworth to sue him. Read the rest
Alan Lowe was Executive Director of the Lincoln Presidential Library, and as he struggled to help the debt-saddled institution survive, he hit on the idea of renting out Lincoln's original, handwritten text of the Gettysburg Address to noted colossal asshole Glenn Beck. Read the rest
Eric Rasmusen is a tenured business school professor at Indiana University Bloomington; for many years, he's posted a stream of "racist, sexist, and homophobic views" to his personal social media, including the idea that women do not belong in the workplace (he often refers to women by slurs like "slut" when discussing this and other subjects); that gay men should not be allowed in academia because of their insatiable sexual appetites and propensity for abusing students; that Black students are academically inferior to white students and do not belong at elite academic institutions. Read the rest
New Hampshire's Digital Fair Repair Act -- based on model Right to Repair legislation circulated by the Repair Coalition -- died this week after the state House of Reps voted it down, with Rep John Potucek [R-Derry] telling a reporter that he voted against the bill because "In the near future, cellphones are throwaways. Everyone will just get a new one." Read the rest
Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" is one of the most widely assigned readings in the past ten years' worth of university syllabi; notionally, it describes how property that is held in common is prone to overuse and exhaustion, while privatization creates an owner who has an incentive to serve as a wise steward over the resource. Read the rest
If you know the name Robert Bork, it's probably in the context of his failure to secure Senate confirmation when Ronald Regan put him up for the Supreme Court (his sins from his days in the Nixon administration caught up to him). Read the rest
Torture apologist/homophobe/racist Jair Bolsonaro -- whose successful election to the Brazilian presidency was the result of a conspiracy among the wealthy and senior prosecutors and judges, who subverted the justice system in order to ensure that his rival was kept off the ballot -- has presided over record-breaking Amazon deforestation. Read the rest
Frontier Communications is a telcoms company so naturally they're a terrible company (a telcoms company is just a collection of regulatory subsidies wrapped up in a layer of greed and malpractice); the company is one of the nation's leaders in the use of fraudulent accounting to evade taxes, and it takes in $283.4 million every year in tax-funded subsidies to provide services to rural Americans, while ripping them off like crazy and cutting corners by neglecting its network and allowing it to fall into dangerous disrepair. Read the rest
According to NZ opposition party leader Simon Bridges, the loud mooing noise he made during Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's turn at the mic during Question Time on May 7 was not a "barnyard noise," contrary to the Speaker of the House's characterisation when he was kicked out of Parliament for his behavior. Read the rest
Joe Biden, a colossal asshole, wants to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020 and in the most on-brand move ever, he's launched his campaign with a fundraiser hosted by the chief lobbyist for Comcast, the most hated company in America. (Image: Ildar Sagdejev, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest
Doug Ford (previously) is the trumpian buffoon elected to the office of Premier of Ontario by rural voters who never experienced his laughable bumblefuckery firsthand (the people of Toronto -- who suffered under his tenure on city council while his asshole crackhead brother was mayor -- resoundingly voted against him). Read the rest
As the lawsuit against Alex Jones for his role in directing and encouraging the vicious harassment of the parents of children murdered at the Sandy Hook shooting has led to a lawsuit, and that has led to discovery and depositions that reveal much about how Jones deliberately and cynically created the campaign of terror against the grieving parents -- and the role that organizations like the NRA play in the creation of cruel and destructive conspiracy theories about mass shootings. Read the rest
AOC's two minute speech in response to Rep Sean Duffy's [R-WI] characterization of environmental concerns as a matter for coastal elites is inspired and heartfelt, and entirely on point: the people at greatest risk from environmental degradation are the poorest and most vulnerable in society, and moreover Duffy -- a wealthy lawyer and TV commentator -- has no business lecturing AOC (a working class New Yorker who was working in a taco joint a year ago and got her first-ever health insurance plan when she was elected to Congress) on what is and isn't of concern to working people. Read the rest
Steve King, a racist Republican US congressperson from Iowa, is making waves again. King posted a meme to Facebook suggesting GOP-leaning Red states would win a new civil war.
Read the rest“Folks keep talking about another civil war,” the meme read. “One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”
King, whom Congress recently stripped of committee assignments over his comments about white supremacy, annotated the image with a winking emoji and mused, “Wonder who would win....”
King was openly pondering violent, armed conflict, apparently joking about Republican-leaning states fighting their Democratic-leaning neighbors in a second American civil war.
But King, an Iowa native, may have been confused about which side he was on. There, forming the blue warrior’s bicep, was his home state, delivering a cartographic uppercut to the jaw of its red opponent.
King deleted the post, which he shared on an official campaign page, Monday. His office did not respond to questions about the picture or his reasons for posting and removing it.
In a brilliant Twitter thread, UCSB political scientist Matto Mildenberger recounts the sordid history of Garrett Hardin's classic, widely cited 1968 article "The Tragedy of the Commons," whose ideas are taught to millions of undergrads, and whose precepts are used to justify the privatization of public goods as the only efficient way to manage them. Read the rest
When volunteers for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America appeared before the New Hampshire state legislature, they were met by GOP lawmakers wearing prominent pearl necklaces as a symbol of casual, sexist dismissal of the women's experience with gun violence as "pearl clutching." Read the rest
