Since early February, a coalition of immigrant-rights advocates, lawyers and community members have been working on a detailed sanctuary city policy that they hope the City of Denver will adopt into law.
The policy was unveiled on Thursday night at the Denver Inner City Parish before a standing-room-only audience that numbered in the hundreds and included three members of Denver’s City Council and representatives from the mayor’s and city attorney’s offices.
The policy is a response to the Trump administration and recent actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Colorado; during the two-hour presentation, there were multiple references to the recent detention of Arturo Hernandez Garcia, the deportation of Maria de Jesus Jimenez Sanchez, Jeanette Vizguerra being in religious sanctuary, and the Meyer Law Office capturing a video of undercover ICE agents inside a Denver courthouse. …
Hundreds Of Thousands Of Workers Will Strike May 1, Organizers Say
A major union local and a coalition of worker centers have voted to strike on International Workers Day, calling for others to join.
Almost 350,000 service workers plan to strike on May 1, a traditional day for labor activism across the world, in the most direct attempt yet by organized labor to capture the energy from a resurgent wave of activism across the country since the election of Donald Trump.
Tens of thousands of members of a powerful California branch of the Service Employees International Union will participate in the strike, according to David Huerta, the president of the chapter.
“We understand that there’s risk involved in that,” Huerta told BuzzFeed News, “but we’re willing to take that risk in order to be able to move forward in this moment, while the most marginalized are in the crosshairs of this administration.”
Members of SEIU United Service Workers West protest during May Day demonstrations at Los Angeles International Airport in 2012.
Since Donald Trump’s election, there has been no shortage of wildcat strikes by groups disproportionately affected by his administration’s policies. But this time around, organized labor is driving the effort. According to a coalition of groups leading the strike, more than 300,000 food chain workers and 40,000 unionized service workers have said they will walk off the job so far. …
How to Join the ‘Day Without Immigrants’ on May Day
A coalition led by immigrants and workers is aiming to mark this year’s May Day with the biggest workers strike and mobilization in over a decade.
Immigration rights demonstrators rally in downtown Los Angeles, Monday, April 10, 2006.
With the Trump administration intensifying attacks on Native Americans, immigrants, refugees, trans individuals, Muslims, women, people of color in general, and the poor, a coalition led by immigrants and workers is aiming to mark this year’s May Day with the biggest workers strike in over a decade.
This year’s “A Day Without Immigrants” comes after a similar call in February and over ten years after the 2006 May Day strike that brought more than one million people out in protest against the Republican-sponsored draconian Sensenbrenner Bill. The proposal sought to criminalize undocumented immigrants and those close to them, and to reinforce tougher border security. In large part due to forceful organizing efforts by grassroots immigrants rights and social justice groups, the Sensenbrenner Bill was defeated. The protests also made May Day, which started in the late nineteenth century during the fight for the eight hour work day, a powerful tool in the fight for immigrants rights.
Of course, while that particular proposal failed to become law, the anti-immigrant sentiment that fueled it remains embedded in the minds of many Americans and elected officials.
The core of this year’s action is a nationwide May Day strike. Organizers are asking immigrants and allies to skip school, work, shopping, and banking to show the value and power of our labor and purchasing power, and to reject discrimination and hate. The aims of the strike look beyond the Trump administration and beyond even attacks on immigrants, as the 6th Annual Immigrant Worker Justice Tour #May1Strike wrote in the description of their event: “When workers, immigrants, women, Muslims, black and brown, indigenous, queer and trans communities face exploitation, criminalization, incarceration, deportation, violence and harassment, we strike.” …
The Entertainment Presidency
Trump hasn’t accomplished much in policy terms in his first 100 days. But he’s had a huge impact on politics and culture.
The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump didn’t get much done in his first 100 days in office. His signature campaign promises—the Muslim travel ban, the border wall—are no closer to fruition than they were when he took office. He has not figured out a way to work with Congress to repeal and replace Obamacare. Despite an appearance of perpetual activity—a flurry of executive orders, leaks to the media about the inner workings of the West Wing—and a real win in nominating and confirming new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, this White House hasn’t made much of an impact policy-wise.
All of this adds up to an impression akin to the sound of a balloon deflating. “I’ve got an entirely conventional view of this: He’s done basically nothing,” said one Washington conservative who speaks to Trump.
But there are ways in which the presidency matters that have little to do with policy or legislation. Where Trump has unquestionably had an impact, both as a candidate and now as president, is in the shifting of culture and the breaking of political norms. Trump changed the rules of how people can run for office; his ability to steamroll his way through gaffes and scandals, disregard for the infrastructure and leadership of his party, and lack of any experience in government didn’t prevent him from winning the presidency. His victory has thrown decades of political conventional wisdom out the window. …
100 daze of Trump: euphoria and nausea on the White House rollercoaster
The president is a carnival barker, his press secretary a perpetual high-wire act, the White House briefing room a home of truth seen through funhouse mirrors. This, as George W Bush now famously said, is some weird shit.
Donald Trump is trampling presidential norms at the White House.
Sean Spicer was angry. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period,” he almost shouted. Media attempts to “lessen the enthusiasm” for the inauguration were “shameful and wrong”. And today Donald Trump had been at the CIA where he was greeted by a “raucous” crowd “ecstatic” at his election. He delivered a “powerful” message and was given “a five-minute standing ovation”.
And then came the inevitable coda to the tirade. Spicer accused Senate Democrats of blocking the appointment of a new CIA director then berated us: “That’s what you guys should be writing and covering, instead of sowing division about tweets and false narratives.”
The press secretary, wearing an outsized suit, stomped out of the White House briefing room, ignoring a barrage of shouted questions. A journalist sitting next to me mused: “I feel like I’m back at school.” I said: “I feel like I’m back in Zimbabwe,” recalling my visits to Robert Mugabe’s regime when I was the Guardian’s Africa correspondent.
It was the first Saturday evening of a changed world. A day earlier, Barack and Michelle Obama had flown away from Washington by helicopter, leaving us to our fate. Trump had been sworn in as the 45th president and delivered an inaugural address that was like a mouth full of broken glass. “That was some weird shit,” George W Bush, suddenly regarded with nostalgia, reportedly said afterwards. …
Why There Was a Civil War
Some issues aren’t amenable to deal-making; some principles don’t lend themselves to compromise.
President Trump has peppered his first months in office with periodic announcements about the history of the nation he now leads, which he shares in the apparent presumption that others will be similarly amazed and astonished. In February, he marked Black History Month with a rambling speech, name-checking a variety of historical figures. “I am very proud now that we have a museum, National Mall, where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things,” he said. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
“Great president,” he told the congressional campaign committee of the Party of Lincoln back in March. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anyone know?”
But more striking than these episodes in the education of Donald Trump are the lessons he chooses to draw from these snippets of the past. On Monday, he was speaking to SiriusXM’s Salena Zito about his admiration for Andrew Jackson, a favorite theme of Steve Bannon’s, and veered dramatically off course:
I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?
There is, as my colleague David Graham has noted, a tremendous amount to unpack in those short few lines. Most charitably, Trump may have been contrasting Jackson’s successful resolution of the Nullification Crisis in 1832 with President Buchanan’s fecklessness a few decades later, making the case that a strong leader could have imposed a deal that would have averted the war. …
Trump’s Peculiar Understanding of the Civil War
The president’s admiration for deal-making and strong leadership lead him to suggest that Andrew Jackson could have stopped the Civil War.
President Trump in the Oval Office with a portrait of Andrew Jackson behind him.
When presidents play historian, it almost always says more about them than it does with history. In this respect, Donald Trump is just like his predecessors.
In an interview with Salena Zito for Sirius XM radio, Trump discussed the nastiness of the 2016 campaign. (Sirius released a clip; the full interview is to air Monday afternoon.) He was told that the 1828 race between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson was the most similar, he said.
"Had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War" @realDonaldTrump told @SalenaZito. Full intv at 2pE, Ch124 pic.twitter.com/d7PuRRm7Md
— SiriusXMPolitics (@SXMPolitics) May 1, 2017
“I said, ‘When was Andrew Jackson?’ It was 1828, that’s a long time ago, that was Andrew Jackson,” Trump said, a sign that the history to follow would be somewhat shaky. Reminiscing about a visit to Tennessee in March, Trump continued:
I mean had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?
As with so many things Trump says, the quotation is simultaneously deeply confusing, and yet also deeply revealing. …
Almost everything Republicans get wrong about the economy started with a cocktail napkin in 1974
Dangerous Doodles
The Rosetta stone of Reaganomics. Click image to embiggen
The sealing of America’s fiscal fate began in 1974, over cocktails.
As afternoon faded to evening on December 4, Dick Cheney and a young economist named Art Laffer shuffled into a booth at the Two Continents restaurant in the iconic Hotel Washington—it had appeared in scenes from the Godfather II just months earlier—two blocks from the US Treasury department. Cheney was US president Gerald Ford’s deputy chief of staff. He and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, were looking for alternatives to Ford’s plan to raise taxes 5%. Raising taxes was a bad idea, said Laffer. If Ford really wanted to spur economic growth, and therefore government revenue, he should cut tax rates.
Cheney wasn’t following. So Laffer grabbed a napkin, uncapped a Sharpie, and drew two perpendicular lines and a blimp-shaped curve, halved by a faint dotted line. With the tax rate on the y-axis and tax revenue on the x-axis, the chart showed that, except at its bend, there were always two points on the curve that generated the same amount of government funds: a higher rate on a smaller base of economic activity, and a lower rate on a larger base of economic activity.
“The conventional wisdom was: You want more revenue, you raise taxes,” Cheney recalled 30 years later, in a Bloomberg interview reenacting that landmark 1974 meeting. “What Art brought to the table with these curves is that if you wanted more revenue, you were better off if you lowered taxes, to stimulate economic growth and economic activity.” …
Half targeted by ICE had traffic convictions or no record
Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began arresting hundreds of immigrants in visible raids across the U.S. Internal documents, obtained by the Washington Post, show that half had either traffic convictions or no criminal record. Maria Sacchetti, one of the reporters who broke the story, joins Hari Sreenivasan.
HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Shortly after President Trump took office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, began arresting hundreds of immigrants in very visible raids across the United States. But as internal ICE documents obtained first by The Washington Post show, half of those detained had either no criminal record or traffic convictions.
Joining me now from Washington to discuss this is one the reporters who broke this story, Maria Sacchetti.
You have a set of data that is around Operation Crosscheck, which is one of the things that we all heard about. How — what did the data reveal and how does that work with all of the larger roundups that have been happening?
MARIA SACCHETTI, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, the data offered the first look at a breakdown of the immigration raid that occurred right after President Trump took office. And the way ICE classified it is traffic offenses, but we asked for more information. And they said that more than 90 percent of those offenses were drunk driving offenses.
SREENIVASAN: I don’t want to minimize drunk driving as not a serious offense, but what about the criminals like the murderers, and rapists and so forth that the presidet said that that was the focus, that’s who he wanted to go after? …
The untold story of Baked Alaska, a rapper turned BuzzFeed personality turned alt-right troll
Tim “Treadstone” Gionet was not always a supporter of President Donald Trump.
The 29-year-old internet troll, most widely known as Baked Alaska, seemed to be an unlikely person to wade into the real-estate mogul’s camp at the start of the 2016 election season.
Back then, Gionet identified as a carefree, easygoing libertarian. He supported Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s bid for the White House, firmly opposed the war on drugs, and championed the cause of Black Lives Matter, actively participating in the movement’s street demonstrations.
And he worked at BuzzFeed, hardly an incubator for Trump supporters. But Gionet was the exception. As he put it, “BuzzFeed turned me into a monster.” Specifically, a monster who opposed what he saw as political correctness gone amok. He found refuge with those who voraciously supported the freewheeling, brash antics of Trump. …
The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right
The New Far Right
Steve Sailer
After Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama, the Republican establishment undertook a rigorous postmortem and, looking at demographic trends in the United States, determined that appealing to Hispanics was now a nuclear-level priority. And yet their successful candidate in the next election won by doing precisely the opposite. The Trump strategy looked an awful lot like the Sailer Strategy: the divisive but influential idea that the GOP could run up the electoral score by winning over working-class whites on issues like immigration, first proposed by the conservative writer Steve Sailer in 2000, and summarily rejected by establishment Republicans at the time. Now, 17 years and four presidential cycles later, Sailer, once made a pariah by mainstream conservatives, has quietly become one of the most influential thinkers on the American right. …
Sailer, a California native and the son of a Lockheed engineer, became a journalist in his mid-30s, starting his career contributing to National Review in the 1990s. His specialty was a plain-spoken form of science journalism, numerate and clued-in to developments in genetics and evolutionary theory, but also infamous for applying, often in a blunt and inflammatory manner, such methods to alleged racial differences in intelligence and behavior. Indeed, Sailer popularized the term “human biodiversity” (HBD) — now a mainstay on the alt-right — to describe his field of interest, which, despite winning a few lonely adherents in the academy, has been dismissed by critics as pseudoscience at best and eugenics at worst.
Sailer’s brief career at National Review ended in 1997, when William F. Buckley, Jr. eased out the magazine’s then-editor, the immigration hawk John O’Sullivan, in favor of Rich Lowry — part of a larger shift in the conservative world away from paleoconservatives and immigration skeptics near the turn of the millennium. Since then, he has largely been confined to smaller and less mainstream conservative outlets. But after Trump won last November by getting blue-collar, Midwestern whites to vote like a minority bloc, as Sailer had so memorably recommended in 2000, a number of Sailer’s establishment critics, such as Michael Barone, were forced to acknowledge that Sailer had been vindicated. …
The Philosophical Fascists of the Gay Alt-Right
The New Far Right
Jack Donovan — a 42-year-old skinhead icon and right-wing extremist — lived the gay life once. It was in the 1990s, after he left his parents’ blue-collar home in rural Pennsylvania to study fine art in New York, when he danced go-go in gay clubs, hung out with drag queens, and marched for gay pride. But then he dropped out, learned how to use tools and work as a manual laborer, studied MMA, and decided he wasn’t gay — just “an unrepentant masculinist.”
“I am not gay because the word gay connotes so much more than same-sex desire,” Donovan announced, under a pseudonym, on the first page of 2006’s Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (echoing, probably unintentionally, the speech Tony Kushner wrote for Roy Cohn in Angels in America). “The word gay describes a whole cultural and political movement that promotes anti-male feminism, victim mentality, and leftist politics.” He appropriated a new term, androphile, to describe a man whose love of masculinity includes sex with other men.
Gay men are remarkably prominent — if not exactly abundant — in the alt-right universe. Take the infamous Milo Yiannopoulos, who powered a meteoric rise and fall on the sheer cognitive dissonance between his flamboyant self-presentation and callous politics. (When Out magazine profiled Milo, the story’s writer Chadwick Moore “came out as a conservative.”) Or artist turned reporter Lucian Wintrich, who joined the White House press corps when Trump-cheering blog Gateway Pundit (edited by a gay man) received its first credential. But even those men seem relatively mainstream when you compare them with Donovan, who has contributed to “dapper white nationalist” (and friend) Richard Spencer’s journal, advocates for a form of “anarcho-fascism,” and founded a chapter of a masculinist “tribe” called the Wolves of Vinland, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. (One member recently served time for burning down a historically black church.) Which makes sense when he shows me photos from their neopagan fight-club rituals, which sometimes involve nooses. …
Trump’s ‘Very Friendly’ Talk With Duterte Stuns Aides and Critics Alike
President Trump speaking at a campaign-style rally on Saturday in Harrisburg, Pa.
When President Trump called President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines on Saturday, White House officials saw it as part of a routine diplomatic outreach to Southeast Asian leaders. Mr. Trump, characteristically, had his own ideas.
During their “very friendly conversation,” the administration said in a late-night statement, Mr. Trump invited Mr. Duterte, an authoritarian leader accused of ordering extrajudicial killings of drug suspects in the Philippines, to visit him at the White House.
Now, the administration is bracing for an avalanche of criticism from human rights groups. Two senior officials said they expected the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which were caught off guard by the invitation, to raise objections internally.
The White House disclosed the news on a day when Mr. Trump fired up his supporters at a campaign-style rally in Harrisburg, Pa. The timing of the announcement — after a speech that was a grievance-filled jeremiad — encapsulated this president after 100 days in office: still ready to say and do things that leave people, even on his staff, slack-jawed. …
Run against Trump? Elizabeth Warren will certainly stand and fight
Senator who the president derides with a racist nickname has a book to promote, a seat to win and rumors of a White House bid to … neither confirm nor deny
• Warren calls out Obama and Democrats for losing way on economy
Senator Elizabeth Warren poses for a portrait at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Donald Trump has named his most likely challenger in the 2020 presidential election. It is Elizabeth Warren.
Standing before the faithful of the National Rifle Association in Atlanta on Friday, the president predicted a surfeit of candidates. “You’ll have plenty of those Democrats coming over and you’re going to say, ‘No, sir, no thank you – no, ma’am,’” the president said. “Perhaps ma’am. It may be Pocahontas, remember that.”
Pocahontas is the racially charged term that Trump used on the campaign trail to dismiss Warren, who has claimed Native American heritage. Clearly, she had got under his skin. The Massachusetts senator was a self-declared “nasty woman” with a message for Trump: “Women have had it with guys like you.” She went to toe to toe with him on his favourite medium, Twitter, hammering him for delivering a “one-two punch of bigotry and economic lies”.
It is small wonder that, if asked who now personifies the anti-Trump resistance, Warren would come top of many people’s lists. At 67, the former Harvard law professor is a formidable figure with a reputation for reticence bordering on aloofness when approached by reporters in the corridors of Capitol Hill. But the woman who walks into Senate Democratic offices in Washington for this interview, wearing a blue jacket and dark trousers, is the opposite of aloof. …
A Zero B.S. Guide To American Healthcare
Ah, the American healthcare system. Before Obamacare, half the country thought it sucked; half thought it was awesome. After Obamacare … well, it’s pretty much the same thing, now it’s a question of which people are now on Team Suck vs. Team Awesome. The far right wants to cut the government out of healthcare altogether, while the far left wants nothing short of 100 percent taxpayer-funded healthcare. Meanwhile, a single Tylenol pill — which costs 15 cents at Target — can cost $15 at the hospital. For seven years, approval of the Affordable Care Act hovered in the low 40 percent range … yet all of a sudden, on the brink of it actually being repealed, 54 percent of the public suddenly decided they like it.
A few years ago, if you asked me how the U.S. healthcare system should run, I would’ve said something like:
“Get rid of the confusing, overlapping mishmash of insurance companies — Medicare, Medicaid, Private insurance, blah blah blah — and replace it with a single program which covers everything for everyone. It’d be paid for by raising people’s taxes, but everyone would still save money because those taxes would cost less than what they were paying beforehand due to there being no more price-gouging insurance companies and only one, much more efficient system to keep track of!”
Piece of cake, right? So why the hell is it so difficult to make major changes to the healthcare system in America? Well …
#6. Healthcare Terms Are Like Dungeons & Dragon Attributes
People throw terms like “Single Payer!” and “Universal Healthcare!” around a lot, often without understanding what the terms mean. I’m an old fart, so perhaps my D&D reference is going over everyone’s head, but in that game every character had to roll the dice for different attributes like Strength, Wisdom, Dexterity, and Charisma (which I always thought meant how hot the character was, which might explain why I never got a date until I was out of college). In healthcare, the terms are a little different:
Not kidding about the cat plastic surgery thing.
Click image to embiggen
But Wait There’s More
Most people know that Medicare is Single Payer, and it is … but it isn’t Universal because not everyone has it. It isn’t Comprehensive because it only covers about 80 percent of most types of medical problems. And while its Actuarial Value is fairly good, it still only covers about 84 percent of the cost of those medical treatments. On the other hand, it has an extremely high Network Size (just about every hospital and doctor accepts it).
Meanwhile, Medicaid is also Single Payer and is Comprehensive (but only in some states), with a high Actuarial Value … but it has a crappy Network Size because some doctors simply won’t take Medicaid patients because those doctors are evil doctors. Well, not really. Some have legitimate reasons, but still. …
Two Major Credit Reporting Agencies Have Been Lying to Consumers
A CFPB investigation concluded that Transunion and Equifax deceived Americans about the reports they provided and the fees they charged.
In personal finance, practically everything can turn on one’s credit score. It’s both an indicator of one’s financial past, and the key to accessing necessities—without insane costs—in the future. But on Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that two of the three major credit-reporting agencies responsible for doling out those scores—Equifax and Transunion—have been deceiving and taking advantage of Americans. The Bureau ordered the agencies to pay more than $23 million in fines and restitution.
In their investigation, the Bureau found that the two agencies had been misrepresenting the scores provided to consumers, telling them that the score reports they received were the same reports that lenders and businesses received, when, in fact, they were not. The investigation also found problems with the way the agencies advertised their products, using promotions that suggested that their credit reports were either free or cost only $1. According to the CFPB the agencies did not properly disclose that after a trial of seven to 30 days, individuals would be enrolled in a full-price subscription, which could total $16 or more per month. The Bureau also found Equifax to be in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which states that the agencies must provide one free report every 12 months made available at a central site. Before viewing their free report, consumers were forced to view advertisements for Equifax, which is prohibited by law. …
The Internet of Things Needs a Code of Ethics
Technology is evolving faster than the legal and moral frameworks needed to manage it.
Connected devices have proliferated faster than legal and ethical frameworks can keep up.
In October, when malware called Mirai took over poorly secured webcams and DVRs, and used them to disrupt internet access across the United States, I wondered who was responsible. Not who actually coded the malware, or who unleashed it on an essential piece of the internet’s infrastructure—instead, I wanted to know if anybody could be held legally responsible. Could the unsecure devices’ manufacturers be liable for the damage their products?
Right now, in this early stage of connected devices’ slow invasion into our daily lives, there’s no clear answer to that question. That’s because there’s no real legal framework that would hold manufacturers responsible for critical failures that harm others. As is often the case, the technology has developed far faster than policies and regulations.
But it’s not just the legal system that’s out of touch with the new, connected reality. The Internet of Things, as it’s called, is also lacking a critical ethical framework, argues Francine Berman, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a longtime expert on computer infrastructure. Together with Vint Cerf, an engineer considered one of the fathers of the internet, Berman wrote an article in the journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery about the need for an ethical system. …
The ‘yes but’ chair (Studio Roosegaarde)
Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch artist and innovator who is internationally known for creating social designs that explore the relation between people, technology and space. He has already created many interactive designs such as the Smart Highway and the Smog project. And the project that I really love is the Yes But chair. This chair has voice recognition and will give you a little shock when you say the words ‘yes but’. He developed this chair because he was frustrated that so many people start with these words when they hear a new idea. Wouldn’t it be great to have such chairs in every meeting room. I’m sure that a lot of innovations could finally be realized.
Here’s a dutch interview with Daan Roosegaarde – guest at the TV program ‘De wereld draait door.’
Booze-Soaked Shoots, Hot Gay Sex, and Elizabeth Taylor’s Poop Problems: Behind the Scenes of Dominick Dunne’s Infamous Last Film
Elizabeth Taylor showed up late and drunk for her shoots. Richard Burton threatened the film’s beautiful gay star. And producer Dominick Dunne had a terrible secret.
In his middle age, the TV and film producer Dominick Dunne miraculously reinvented himself as a best-selling novelist and Vanity Fair writer. He was so popular in 2002, seven years before his death, that New York magazine called him “America’s most famous journalist.”
The 1970s, however, were a much different time. After being a midlevel TV executive in the previous decade, he produced three low-budget movies in the early 1970s: The Boys in the Band, The Panic in Needle Park, and Play It as It Lays.
Then he met agent Sue Mengers, already renowned for being the most powerful woman in Hollywood. It was she who handpicked him to produce what would be his fourth and last film, Ash Wednesday. In the beginning, the Paramount Pictures movie fulfilled Dunne’s every dream: it starred his idol Elizabeth Taylor. However, before shooting finished in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in May 1973, it was the star who told Dunne, “You know, this is your last film.” Yes, the production had gone that badly. …
The psychological importance of wasting time
Break Time
There will always be an endless list of chores to complete and work to do, and a culture of relentless productivity tells us to get to it right away and feel terribly guilty about any time wasted. But the truth is, a life spent dutifully responding to emails is a dull one indeed. And “wasted” time is, in fact, highly fulfilling and necessary.
Don’t believe me? Take it from the creator of “Inbox Zero.” As Oliver Burkeman reports in The Guardian, Merlin Mann was commissioned to write a book about his streamlined email system. Two years later, he abandoned the project and instead posted a (since deleted) blog post on how he’d spent so long focusing on how to spend time well, he’d ended up missing valuable moments with his daughter.
The problem comes when we spend so long frantically chasing productivity, we refuse to take real breaks. We put off sleeping in, or going for a long walk, or reading by the window—and, even if we do manage time away from the grind, it comes with a looming awareness of the things we should be doing, and so the experience is weighed down by guilt. …
I’m Not Really Royalty: The World Of Nigerian Internet Scams
You might remember a time when deposed members of the Nigerian royal family roamed the web, offering random people millions of dollars if they’d only pay a little up front to help transfer the money. In recent years, the “Nigerian prince” scam has become both infamous and uncommon. But other cons of the same family — advance-fee, or 419 scams (after Nigerian legal code) — are as ubiquitous as ever. One fifth of these scams still originate from Nigeria. In 2013, the world lost an estimated $12.7 billion to Nigerian scammers. We wanted to know more about the life of a Nigerian scammer, so we sat down with “Ibrahim” — who used to be one. He was part of a large, sophisticated team of scammers who all lived together in a big house. There’s a sitcom premise if we’ve ever heard one …
#6. Email Scammers Are A Big Deal In Nigeria
Nigerian scammers don’t call themselves scammers. That’s not because they’re in denial about what they’re doing, but because they have a much goofier name: Yahoo boys (pronounced “ya-oo”). Ibrahim explained the origin of the name:
“When it first started everybody used Yahoo Messenger … but now it’s on every social network, so, it’s also called Game, or G. So they call them Gameboys, G-boys. People are proud of the name. They love being called G-boys, Gameboys. If you are a G-boy you are likely to get a girlfriend … every youngster like me wants to be a Gameboy.”
We’re not so different after all, Ibrahim.
Why? Because Yahoo boys have money, and Nigeria’s per capita GDP is right around $3,000 USD per year. Some Yahoo boys can make that much money, or more, on a single successful scam. It’s no wonder Ibrahim got drawn in:
“My friend was having a matriculation party in the club … and when we’re in the club [we see] these guys are wearing things we only get to see in music videos, spending money like it doesn’t have value. They were just buying the biggest drinks and everything. I was there because of one of my friends, just to support him I was at the club, enjoying. Those guys were friends to my friend and I kind of told him to introduce us. We just arranged to hook up and he said, ‘Come by our place sometimes.’ They introduced me to the game. They showed me the in[s] and outs.” …
THE FORD MODEL K
We’ve all heard of the Ford Model T—but we rarely hear about the earlier automobiles in the whole “model-letter” scheme. So hear you go…
ALPHABET CITY
In 1908, the Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford just five years earlier, released its first Ford Model T—and the world has never been the same. The Model T was the first car that ordinary people could afford, and is regarded by automobile historians as the car that ushered in the Automobile Age (and killed the then extremely popular electric car). From 1908 until production ended in 1927, more than 16 million Model Ts were sold worldwide. No other car model ever sold as well…until 1972, when it was finally surpassed by the VW Beetle.
But the Model T’s great success overshadows all the models that came before it—all of them based on previous alphabet letters. Did Henry Ford make nineteen earlier models before the Model T—one for each letter before “T”? No. Most were experimental and never made it to production. But eight did. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In the final week of Trump’s first 100 days in office we watched the President rush to keep campaign promises, and watched Tuck Buckford lose contact with his mind in another episode of Brain Fight.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Max playing with a pack of tissue paper. It’s the little things that make him happy.
The future as they saw it in the 1920’s. Followed with predictions from the 1930’s.
In this amusing and entertaining clip from the BBC’s Life of Mammals, David Attenborough looks at the life of a sloth. The sloth has adapted to the lack of nutrition in its diet of leaves by hanging around not doing very much at all. We even get to see one moving at high speed!
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Me critical analysis of the DaddyOFive YouTube channel. I’m following on from Phil DeFranco’s vids and the responses from the DaddyOFive parents. I don’t show me face often, but some topics and types of content are worth showin’ it for. They have deleted the video I review in this video and uploaded a new apology…
It has been pretty much a month and I found some time to edit down my Lazy Vlog! 
This episode is full of hateful parrots that can’t wait to be big enough to sever your jugular.
FINALLY . . .
Ten Suggestions for Trump’s Flexible Foods School-Lunch Program
A public-school lunch has never been what you might call fine dining, but for the most part, we’ve been able to correctly refer to it as food. That is, with a few exceptions — most notably during the Reagan era, when ketchup briefly counted as a vegetable in U.S. Department of Agriculture discussions, as a money-saving move. (Legend has it that pickle relish did, too.) It was like that cheap friend of yours who asks for lemons with his water so he can make free lemonade at restaurants; it’s a wonder the USDA didn’t require that all school administrators go to Denny’s once a week on their own dime just to grab some sugar packets.
And because all of our old bad ideas are new again (racism! isolationism! plutocracy!), here comes a new “flexible foods” program from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, designed to redefine free and reduced lunch programs and what qualifies under that nutritional banner in order to — you guessed it — save money. You know, on the backs of American children, because “Let the next generation worry about it” is what “Make America Great Again” really means. But what does “flexible food” really imply? Before the official release on May 1, here’s a modest proposal of ten totally realistic options.
This is the new lunch line. The whole lunch line.
10. Other Condiments
If ketchup is going to be a vegetable (shouldn’t it be a fruit?), and pickle relish is, too, then why not make a meal of condiments? Mustard is a grain, or at least a seed, which is close enough. Mayonnaise is dairy, and don’t even get us started on all those veggies that come together to make salsa! That’s a full plate, right there, and it’s all stuff that you can get in packets at the drive-through. …
Ed. More tomorrow. Possibly. Maybe?