There’s a journalist working out in St. Louis — Sarah Kendzior — who’s been covering “flyover country” (and wrote a book of the same name) for years. Her view is rather … bleak. Downsizing, deindustrialization, dying towns, endemic poverty, racist populism, etc etc … all of it has been going on for decades, building…

I imagine a host presenting this dish with these words and being met with either stunned silence (if it’s anything but a 70s dinner party) or (if it is a 70s dinner party) a chorus of “oh, it’s so fancy!” and “I read in Harper’s Bazaar that it’s the latest thing! In Europe!”, all in the very best Edith Massey voices.

“for a long time”? I recall the one intelligent thing a coworker of mine once said, where I reside in Germany: “Die Altersheime sind alle voller Nazis” (“the retirement homes are all full of Nazis”). Fascism and Nazism didn’t all magically disappear after the war. They made efforts for the first couple years of the…

ETA: gallows humor is the only coping mechanism I have right now, and we are well and truly fucked. :(

Well, that’s all very sad and all if the reef system dies off. But did you ever stop to think, you know, those enormous new coal mining operations the Turnbull administration rammed through? They could make money right now.

You last sentence reminds me of this, the best tweet ever from the best twitter:

Apropos “elephant seals on the beach during mating season:”

Let us not forget that one of Brooke Shields’ earliest roles was in “Pretty Baby,” in which she, I think 10 years old at the time, appears fully nude. The whole plot revolves around her, a child prostitute, served up (literally: there’s a scene with her on a platter being carried into the birthday party for which she…

Counterpoint: the HPV vaccine, iirc the first vaccine shown to prevent a disease known to cause cancer, was developed in the US.

I think maybe you misunderstand the nature of the game that’s being played. Republicans currently control all but 12 state legislatures (see this map, and note its overwhelming redness). Once they have a majority, in most places they have then gerrymandered the shit out of congressional districts, so that majority can…

This quote from Gawker’s Beating Heart, Ken Layne, neatly sums up why the train wreck of the Bush years never led to any kind of Liberal re-awakening, and why the coming catastrophe of President Drumpf won’t either:

Pedantry Corner: it’s “hare-brained.” As in, a brain the size of a rabbit’s. “Hair” as a modifier to “brain” makes no sense. See also: “mad as a March hare.”

I gave up hope in a just world a long time ago. Reading too many of the excellent “Yo, is this Racist?” blog’s “Reading List for White People to get Educated” has made me realize just how historically normal it is for horrible injustice to prevail, because the perpetrators are way more driven than the vast majority of…

Good, just in time. I wonder how good cops are going to feel about being in the news pepper-spraying and water-cannoning veterans (or rather, white people).

This is not going to be looked at kindly in the history books.

No, that was Dubya’s America, since the odious practice of corralling protesters into restricted areas where their protests would cause no disruptions to the regular business of America — which, in this case, is “fearmongering about immigrants to gain an unbreakable majority that then systematically destroys the…

shit, maybe I should read comments before posting this exact same link three days after you did :(

Addendum, courtesy of the always-excellent “Yo, is this Racist?” blog: you can donate things to the Standing Rock Sioux via this helpful Amazon wishlist.

Not to detract from Heard’s (definitely helpful and positive) PSA, but it really takes away from the whole message that I can’t understand half of what she’s saying because the audio track is a compressed-to-shit mp3 some guy recorded off of the video footage playing on his buddy’s iPhone.

Came here to see if I could get a word in before the preening, gloating assholes show up and try to make this about how they “won.”