7 Unexpected Side Effects Of Trump In The White House
If you hadn’t heard yet, a good deal of America doesn’t much care for President Trump. They have their reasons. Too much golf, they suggest. He hates Muslims, they add. He’s misogynistic, they also point out, covering their genitals. In the meantime. the Trump presidency is causing a number of scary effects that haven’t hit the headlines yet, whose impacts could linger for years. Things like …
#7. It’s Gonna Be Harder To Get Around, Especially In Small Towns
It’s kind of standard for a Republican president to slash the budget, especially if he has a hankering for expensive walls. So no one’s been particularly surprised by Trump’s proposed budget and its cuts for things like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Endowment for the Arts. Cutting Meals on Wheels was a little unexpected, but we guess those poor elderly have had it too good for too long.
“Enough living the high life, Nana.”
But there are plenty more weird cuts planned that you likely haven’t heard about, like to small-town airports and train stations. All told, around 220 cities could soon lose passenger rail service. And not big cities; the cuts would fall heaviest on outer suburban and rural areas — the people who put Trump in office, essentially.
“What do we want?”
“LESS CONTACT WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD.”
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They hate the US government, and they’re multiplying: the terrifying rise of ‘sovereign citizens’
While US counter-terrorism efforts remain locked on Islamist extremism, the growing threat from homegrown, rightwing extremists is even more pressing
he rancher Cliven Bundy, who was the center of a standoff with federal officials in Nevada in 2014.
On 20 May 2010, a police officer pulled over a white Ohio minivan on Interstate 40, near West Memphis, Arkansas. Unbeknown to officer Bill Evans, the occupants of the car, Jerry Kane Jr, and his teenage son, Joseph Kane, were self-described “sovereign citizens”: members of a growing domestic extremist movement whose adherents reject the authority of federal, state and local law.
Kane, who traveled the country giving instructional seminars on debt evasion, had been posing as a pastor. Religious literature was laid out conspicuously for anyone who might peer into the van, and, when Evans ran the van’s plates, they came back registered to the House of God’s Prayer, an Ohio church. Also in the van, though Evans did not know it, were weapons Kane had bought at a Nevada gun show days earlier.
Kane had been in a series of run-ins with law enforcement. After the most recent incident, a month earlier, he had decided that the next time a law enforcement officer bothered him would be the last.
Another officer patrolling nearby, Sgt Brandon Paudert, began to wonder why Evans was taking so long on a routine traffic stop. When he pulled up at the scene, he saw Evans and Kane speaking on the side of the highway. Evans handed him some puzzling paperwork that Kane had provided when asked for identification – vaguely official-looking documents filled with cryptic language. He examined the papers while Evans prepared to frisk Kane. …
Unity Was Emerging on Sentencing. Then Came Jeff Sessions.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday ordered federal prosecutors to pursue the toughest penalties possible for criminal defendants.
As a senator, Jeff Sessions was such a conservative outlier on criminal justice issues that he pushed other Republicans to the forefront of his campaign to block a sentencing overhaul, figuring they would be taken more seriously.
Now Mr. Sessions is attorney general and need not take a back seat to anyone when it comes to imposing his ultratough-on-crime views. The effect of his transition from being just one of 535 in Congress to being top dog at the Justice Department was underscored on Friday when he ordered federal prosecutors to make sure they threw the book at criminal defendants and pursued the toughest penalties possible.
“This is a key part of President Trump’s promise to keep America safe,” Mr. Sessions said on Friday as he received an award from the New York City police union to mark the beginning of National Police Week.
Given Mr. Sessions’s long record as a zealous prosecutor and his well-known views on the dangers of drug use, his push to undo Obama-era sentencing policies and ramp up the war on drugs was hardly a surprise. But it was still striking, because it ran so contrary to the growing bipartisan consensus coursing through Washington and many state capitals in recent years — a view that America was guilty of excessive incarceration and that large prison populations were too costly in tax dollars and the toll on families and communities. …
Why Drag Is the Ultimate Retort to Trump
RuPaul versus the White House
RuPaul Charles, America’s most famous drag queen, sat on a gold lamé couch at a luxury hotel in Midtown Manhattan one Tuesday in March, doling out advice for the white working class. Wearing a patterned suit jacket and black slacks—one of his signature out-of-drag looks—he made a hand motion to suggest widgets being moved from one part of an assembly line to the next.
“If you were a factory worker and your job was to put this to this from 9 to 5, we don’t do that anymore,” he said, his soft voice carrying the imperious, jokey edge familiar to viewers of RuPaul’s Drag Race, his reality-TV show. Then he referenced a viral video from Ts Madison, a transgender activist and former porn star: “You better step your pussy up. Get on a business, bitch!” He delivered this spiel with the clipped, decisive tone of a therapist on the clock. “Nature will not allow you to just sail on through doing some factory job,” he said. “We don’t do factories anymore.”
At 56, RuPaul is in little personal danger of being phased out; he is, to the contrary, one of gay pop culture’s most enduringly relevant figures. Over the past quarter century, he has done more than anyone to bring drag to the American mainstream. At the same time, he has used his platform to act as life coach to the queer masses, counseling self-love and hard work to combat social stigma and inner doubt. (Catchphrase: “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”) But lately, thanks to political developments, this inspirational package has come with a dose of indignation, and a sharpened sense of social purpose. …
Israel-Palestine: the real reason there’s still no peace
The possibility of a lasting deal seems as far away as ever – and the history of failed negotiations suggests it’s largely because Israel prefers the status quo
Scattered over the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace plans, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions and state-building programmes, most of them designed to partition this long-contested territory into two independent states, Israel and Palestine. The collapse of these initiatives has been as predictable as the confidence with which US presidents have launched new ones, and the current administration is no exception.
In the quarter century since Israelis and Palestinians first started negotiating under US auspices in 1991, there has been no shortage of explanations for why each particular round of talks failed. The rationalisations appear and reappear in the speeches of presidents, the reports of thinktanks and the memoirs of former officials and negotiators: bad timing; artificial deadlines; insufficient preparation; scant attention from the US president; want of support from regional states; inadequate confidence-building measures; coalition politics; or leaders devoid of courage.
Among the most common refrains are that extremists were allowed to set the agenda and there was a neglect of bottom-up economic development and state-building. And then there are those who point at negative messaging, insurmountable scepticism or the absence of personal chemistry (a particularly fanciful explanation for anyone who has witnessed the warm familiarity of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators as they reunite in luxury hotels and reminisce about old jokes and ex-comrades over breakfast buffets and post-meeting toasts). If none of the above works, there is always the worst cliche of them all – lack of trust. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Prepare to spend a while. It’s The Long Read.
Ryan tweet on classified info resurfaces after bombshell Trump report
THIS DAY IN HISTORY:
A 2016 tweet from House Speaker Paul Ryan about being “careless” with classified data resurfaced on Monday afternoon soon after a report claiming that President Trump revealed highly classified information to top Russian officials.
“Individuals who are ‘extremely careless’ with classified information should be denied further access to such info,” the Wisconsin Republican tweeted in July, referring to former FBI Director James Comey’s on statement that Hillary Clinton’s handling of sensitive information.
Individuals who are "extremely careless" with classified information should be denied further access to such info. pic.twitter.com/0C76Ae95LD
— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) July 7, 2016
The tweet was reposted by social media users, including many lawmakers, after The Washington Post reported that Trump divulged information from a foreign intelligence source with expertise on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador during their Oval Office meeting last week.
Citing current and former U.S. officials, the Post reported that Trump disclosed more information than the U.S. had shared even with its allies. …
How Automated Posts Are Dominating (And Ruining) Activism
The internet opened a wardrobe to a Narnia of self-expression. With it, political activism found a way to be louder and more organized than ever. But the same technology that further democratized discourse is threatening to shut it down by allowing too many voices into the discussion. If it sounds like I’m saying a lot of people don’t deserve to have a voice, I am. But not I’m talking about real people.
Bots are programs designed to automate simple computational tasks, like sending out spam emails. They can also be used to make it seem like there’s a real person on the other end of an online interaction. You probably said a ton of racist stuff to one on a chatbot site to see if its reactions were convincingly human. They never were, because chatbots can’t roundhouse kick you in the face.
But you’ll suffer that consequences like a true hero, all in the name of being “edgy.”
Bots were used in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election by the right and the left to flood social media with fake news to amplify their side’s message. Russia’s Twitter bots went turbo and spit out thousands of links to fake news stories about Hilary Clinton every day.
In a time when our voices need to be heard more than ever, militant chatbot political spammers think they’re winning the messaging war by turning every social media site into a college campus corkboard drowning in a four-inch layer of event flyers. When everyone hangs a flyer promoting their shitty band’s show, the board turns into a cluttered mound of indecipherable, self-defeating garbage. Instead of offering a rational alternative opinion, the creators end up making people clutch their ears and scream like Clark Kent before he learns to control his supersonic hearing.
“WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE STILL SAYING ‘GIT-R-DONE’?!”
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Florence Nightingale Was Born 197 Years Ago, and Her Infographics Were Better Than Most of the Internet’s
The famed nurse was also an early practitioner of marshaling statistics to advance social causes.
Florence Nightingale’s most famous infographic, comparing causes of mortality for British soldiers in the Crimean War. Click to embiggen.
When someone mentions Florence Nightingale, who was born this week in 1820, one particular image likely comes to mind: A caring presence, head covered by a shawl, holding a lamp as she ministers to patients in the dark. The “Lady with the Lamp,” as she was known, still serves as a symbol for nurses everywhere.
But for every hour Nightingale spent burning the midnight oil to help a sick soldier, she likely spent another up late doing something else: working on some of the world’s first explicitly persuasive infographics. In addition to caretaking and advocating, Nightingale was a dedicated statistician, constantly gathering information and thinking up new ways to compare and present it.
In August of 1856, Nightingale headed home from her famous stint at Scutari hospital in Crimea, where she had successfully lobbied to improve conditions and to expand the role of nurses. Upon her return to Britain, she was greeted as a hero—the press knew her as “a ‘ministering angel’,” and luminaries were eager to donate to training funds established in her name. …
The Weird Thing About Today’s Internet
The world’s biggest tech companies might be bigger than you think.
Google’s rendering of the San Francisco skyline
Hello. It’s my first day back covering technology for The Atlantic. It also marks roughly 10 years that I’ve been covering science and technology, so I’ve been thinking back to my early days at Wired in the pre-crash days of 2007.
The internet was then, as it is now, something we gave a kind of agency to, a half-recognition that its movements and effects were beyond the control of any individual person or company. In 2007, the web people were triumphant. Sure, the dot-com boom had busted, but empires were being built out of the remnant swivel chairs and fiber optic cables and unemployed developers. Web 2.0 was not just a temporal description, but an ethos. The web would be open. A myriad of services would be built, communicating through APIs, to provide the overall internet experience.
The web itself, en toto, was the platform, as Tim O’Reilly, the intellectual center of the movement, put it in 2005. Individual companies building individual applications could not hope to beat the web platform, or so the thinking went. “Any Web 2.0 vendor that seeks to lock in its application gains by controlling the platform will, by definition, no longer be playing to the strengths of the platform,” O’Reilly wrote. …
The global ransomware attack is highly effective advertising for cybersecurity stocks
Protection Money
The hackers who unleashed a global ransomware attack on Friday (May 12) have netted themselves over $42,000 in payments from victims so far—a paltry sum compared with the hundreds of millions in market value that cybersecurity companies around the world have gained since the attacks hit.
In early US trading, Symantec jumped by around 4%, worth some $700 million in market cap. Companies like Fortinet, FireEye, and Qualys also jumped as the US market opened. London-listed Sophos gained a chunky 8% in trading today, adding $160 million in market value. Finland-based F-Secure and Tokyo-listed Trend Micro also added a few percent to their share prices, worth several million dollars for each company. …
Dinosaur asteroid hit ‘worst possible place’
Artwork: The impact hit with the energy equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs
Scientists who drilled into the impact crater associated with the demise of the dinosaurs summarise their findings so far in a BBC Two documentary on Monday.
The researchers recovered rocks from under the Gulf of Mexico that were hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago.
The nature of this material records the details of the event.
It is becoming clear that the 15km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.
The drill rig was on station in the Gulf in April and May last year
The shallow sea covering the target site meant colossal volumes of sulphur (from the mineral gypsum) were injected into the atmosphere, extending the “global winter” period that followed the immediate firestorm. …
A sex doll that can talk – but is it perfect Harmony?
Harmony is more than a sex toy, according to RealDoll founder Matt McMullen
Harmony is a new type of sex doll – one that can move and talk.
Her head, eyelids and lip movements are fairly crude and her conversation is even more limited.
But she is part of a new robotics revolution that is seeing artificial intelligence incorporated into an extremely human-like body.
Some think that it will revolutionise the way humans interact with robots while others believe that it represents the very worst in robotic advancement.
The uncanny valley – the idea that the closer we get to replicating the human form, the more scared we become of our creations – seems to have come to life in this unassuming factory on the outskirts of San Marcos, California. …
The Bro Romper Exists and I Don’t Want to Live on This Planet Anymore
RompHim wants to be the next big thing in menswear.
There’s a lot to thank the bros for in terms of modern menswear. They’ve brought us boat shoes and fleece vests. They’ve embraced body confidence in 5.25-inseam shorts. They’ve even made us rethink what it means to wear a classic gingham shirt. But today, in what might possibly be the bro-iest style move in all of bro style, a new brand launched on Kickstarter that might change the face of menswear: the RompHim.
No, it’s not a romper. It’s a romphim. Well, actually, it is a romper but it’s made for dudes. Let’s be clear here: We happily invite all people to wear whatever it is that makes them feel like themselves, gender labels be damned. But as a woman who is decidedly anti-romper of any sort, I’m not sure this is a train I’d recommend anybody hopping aboard. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pee in those things? (OK, fine. This one has a zipper fly. But this is still very dangerous territory.)
From what we can gather from its page on Kickstarter, it’s positioned to be the next big thing in frat and post-frat culture. The bros are shot in their natural habitats—drinking beers, going to Coachella, etc.—and in colors close to their hearts. Think pastels, youthful prints, and at least one “America!” riff on the style.
Take a look for yourself:
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Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
A case can now be made based on what Donald Trump did last week.
The good news: Trump is finally telling the truth. The bad news: it’s only to high-ranking Russian officials.
The best part of Trump’s commencement speech at Liberty University was, well, when it commenced.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
President Trump is accused of sharing classified information with Russian officials during a meeting in the White House.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Introducing our #fun cooking show for people living in Canada’s north!
THANKS to Comedy Network and The Beaverton for making this program available on YouTube.
A combination of short Max clips put together.
Ed. More tomorrow. Possibly. Maybe. Not?