Trump tortured Spicer and Priebus. Now they get to tell investigators about Trump.
Then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer, left, and then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus in May.
Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus are among six current and former White House aides with whom special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is likely to seek interviews in his Russia investigation, as The Washington Post’s Carol D. Leonnig, Rosalind S. Helderman and Ashley Parker report.
The fact that top Trump aides would be interviewed isn’t hugely surprising. The probe has gradually grown in scope in recent months, and given its apparent focus on President Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey, it seemed logical that his top spokesman and aide, among others, would be sought out for their versions of events.
But the subplots with Spicer and Priebus are particularly interesting.
Both are former Republican National Committee types — not longtime Trump aides — who joined the White House when the campaign was over. Both are also now former aides, having lasted just seven months. And perhaps most notably, both were practically tortured during their time in the White House, directly by Trump or apparently with his blessing. …
Stephen Colbert Gives Trump Nazi Salute Over Charlottesville
The ‘Late Show’ host had thrown some stinging barbs the president’s—and Steve Bannon’s—way on Thursday. But none more controversial than this.
Stephen Colbert returned to The Late Show this week after a two-week vacation, and, given the constant chaos of the Trump administration, there was quite a bit he missed.
The comedian didn’t waste any time, ripping President Trump’s bizarre Hurricane Harvey response—wherein the commander in chief hawked a new line of USA hats, marveled at the size of the crowd he received, and failed to meet with a single victim of the devastating natural disaster during his first go-around—and the president’s creepy story about his 35-year-old daughter Ivanka, who he has a history of sexually objectifying, addressing him as “Daddy.”
Well, on Thursday, Colbert got around to covering Steve Bannon’s “conscious uncoupling” with the Trump administration.
“As so many things happened, I really missed the chance to talk about some big stuff—especially the exit of White House strategist (and Proactiv ‘before’ model) Steve Bannon,” cracked Colbert.
…
Video: Henry Rollins Talks About Bernie Sanders And Lady Gaga While Getting Owned By Hot Wings
You may have already encountered First We Feast’s “Hot Ones” on YouTube. In the series, celebrities are brought in for a 20-minute or so interview about their work and personal takes on miscellany. The added twist is that the guests are invited to eat a plate of hot wings that get increasingly hotter and hotter. It’s a great way to watch your favorite celebs sweat, lose their composure, and generally toe the line of self-destruction. Past participants have included James Franco, Bryan Cranston, T-Pain, and Cara Delevingne.
This time around, host Sean Evans brought on Henry Rollins, everyone’s favorite LA Weekly writer and former singer of the seminal Southern California punk band Black Flag. Considering Rollins had agreed to this meeting, it’s safe to assume that he’s into spicy food, right?
“I don’t eat it. I can’t handle it, cause I’m not a hot food person,” Rollins told Evans. Oh, well. OK.
And when Evans asks, “Are you ready to get it going?”, Rollins replies with a firm, “No.” …
The Powerful Pull Of Opioids Leaves Many ‘Missing’ From U.S. Workforce
Jonathan Guffey, 32, has spent more than half his life hooked on opioids. He currently works with his family in construction, but his job history is pockmarked by addiction.
Jonathan Guffey has chiseled youthful looks and, at 32, does not have the haggard bearing of someone who has spent more than half his life hooked on opioids. That stint with the drug started at 15 and ended — he says for good — 22 months ago. He has a job working with his family in construction, but his work history is pockmarked by addiction.
“I’ve worked in a couple of factories for a short amount of time, probably just long enough to get the first check to get high off of,” Guffey says.
I met Guffey at Road to Redemption, a weekly free dinner and support meeting at a church in Muncie, Ind., for people in, or seeking, recovery. He says his habit was enabled by other users — family, friends, even a boss at a factory where he once worked.
“There [were] plenty of times when I wouldn’t go to work there, and my boss would call me and he wouldn’t even say anything about work, he would just want more opiates … pills or whatever it was that I could get at the time,” Guffey says. …
5 Reasons We Need To Slow The Hell Down On Social Media
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are full of amazing people, hilarious jokes, and insightful commentary — any of which can throw people into a murderous rage at a moment’s notice. It’s a great time to be alive.
But as with most great, murder-inducing things, there are a few downsides to these websites. Because of the speed with which they encourage us to respond to things, we can get into all sorts of trouble. As is so boringly the case, the solution to most of these problems is just slowing the fuck down, but because I know you really don’t want to do that, I’ve broken it down a bit into some concrete “do-not”s and … more “do-not”s. Not a lot of “do”s here, basically. For your rage-ameliorating pleasure, here are the five least-helpful ways you can react to things online …
#5. Responding Immediately
Social media encourages and rewards rapid response. You can quip back and forth with friends, your puns literally moving at the speed of light. Or you’ll think up an obvious joke about a current event and need to get that out there before everyone else does. Or maybe you’ll just be swimming in your everyday rage and want to channel that before it seeps into your pancreas and kills you. As with so many things, it’s the people who speak loudest and fastest who will tend to have the most people listening to them. And social media networks know this. That “reply” field is right there for a reason.
Speaking quickly and without thinking is often hilarious and profitable, but there are unique problems when doing it online. To illustrate, let’s first consider an offline example. Were you to scream “Ass-gargler!” at your boss during a meeting, that would certainly dazzle and intimidate the people in the room, and probably get you fired. But outside the room, people would only hear about the incident in whispers. And outside the company, people might not hear about it at all. You probably wouldn’t have your life ruined over it.
But online, everything you say lingers in the public record. Even if you delete the offending words, there’s always a chance that someone got a screenshot of it. Or, you know, that it was archived in the Library of Congress. There are plenty of tales of people ruining their lives because of something they blurted out on social media. Like the woman who made a stupid racist joke, got on a plane, landed several hours later, and found out her tweet had gone viral and she was now widely hated. I’m not excusing racist jokes, but I’m a stupid guy, and know that stupid jokes pop into one’s head every now and then. There’s an art in not saying them, and social media doesn’t exactly encourage that art.
Another weird side effect of social media is that it amplifies the importance of everything you say. What might have been funny (or at least tolerable) when taken as an off-the-cuff statement looks a lot worse if it’s considered as a published statement, which is what it ultimately is. Your words are just there, hanging out, giving people time to pore over them and pick out all the meanings you never even considered.
Never say anything online without a team of PR professionals, is my main suggestion, I guess. Workshop “ass-gargler” for a few days. Let that shit simmer. …
California could be hit by an 8.2 mega-earthquake, and damage would be catastrophic
Here’s what a hypothetical magnitude 8.2 earthquake would look like in Southern California — a quake that begins near the Mexican border and moves north and west through L.A. County into central California.
A magnitude 8.2 earthquake would rupture the San Andreas fault from the Salton Sea — close to the Mexican border — all the way to Monterey County. The fault would rupture through counties including Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino.
An 8.2 earthquake would be far worse here because the San Andreas fault runs right through areas such as the Coachella Valley — home to Palm Springs — and the San Bernardino Valley, along with the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles. The fault is about 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
Thursday’s earthquake occurred in the ocean off the Mexican coast and began about 450 miles from Mexico City — and it was relatively deep, starting about 43 miles under the surface.
In Mexico, “you’ve got [many] people a pretty long way aways from it,” seismologist Lucy Jones said Friday. But in Southern California, “we’d have a lot of people right on top of it. It would be shallow, and it runs through our backyard.”
A magnitude 8.2 on the San Andreas fault would cause damage in every city in Southern California, Jones has said, from Palm Springs to San Luis Obispo. …
The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded
History researcher says that it’s a mostly plagiarized guide to women’s health.
Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that.
Since its discovery in 1969, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.
Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale’s Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.
After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. “From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry,” he wrote. “The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc.” So this wasn’t a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine. …
How Aliens We’ve Never Met Could Help Humanity Escape Self-Destruction
Humans have had such a dramatic impact on Earth that some scientists say we’ve kickstarted a new geological era known as the Anthropocene. A fascinating new paper theorizes that alien civilizations could do the same thing, reshaping their homeworlds in predictable and potentially detectable ways. The authors are proposing a new classification scheme that measures the degree to which planets been modified by intelligent hosts.
Whenever a distant exoplanet is discovered, astronomers categorize it according to its most obvious physical features and orbital characteristics. Examples include hot-Jupiters, Earth-like terrestrial planets, and brown dwarfs. With ongoing advances in telescope technology, the day is coming when astronomers will be able to expand on these simple characterizations, classifying a planet according to other features, including atmospheric or chemical composition.
But as a new study led by University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank points out, we may eventually be able to place exoplanets within an astrobiological context, too. In addition to taking the usual physical measures into account, Frank and his colleagues are proposing that astronomers take the influence of a hypothetical planet’s biosphere into account—including the impacts of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Frank’s hypothetical planets, ranked from Class I through to Class V, range from dead, rocky worlds through to planets in which a host intelligence has solved the problems caused by its own existence, like excessive use of resources and climate change. Moreover, as Frank explained to Gizmodo, this paper presents more than just a planetary classification scheme—it’s a potential roadmap to an environmentally viable future. If we discover signs of an advanced alien civilization—and that’s a big if—we may learn a thing or two about how we might be able to survive into the far future. …
NETWORK ORIGINS: CBS
CBS trailed NBC through most of its radio years but zoomed ahead—and stayed there—when the TV era began. Here’s the story of the “Eye Network.”
ARTHUR’S THEME
In the 1920s, talent agency Columbia Concerts Corporation (CCC) dominated the music industry. Under founder Arthur Judson, CCC managed and booked more than 100 conductors, musicians, and singers for concert and radio performances. Basically, if any of the big radio networks wanted top-shelf musicians to appear on their shows, they had to consult with Judson.
That’s what NBC chief David Sarnoff did in 1927—he needed a lot of performers for programs on his new radio network. Judson thought he could demand any price because Sarnoff needed the talent so badly, but Sarnoff wouldn’t play ball, and walked away from Judson and CCC.
Judson was outraged but also frustrated that he himself had botched the negotiations. Then he had an idea: If Sarnoff wouldn’t hire his acts, he’d start his own radio network…and stock it with his own clients!
LET’S PUT ON A SHOW
Judson felt sure that his performers could outshine any musicians found by NBC. Based on that promise, he and his business partners convinced 16 radio stations in the Northeast to join his network, which Judson wanted to call the United Independent Broadcasters Company (UIB). …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Despite the distractions, Trump’s Russia troubles are growing much worse.
Seth takes a closer look at how Donald Trump is exposing how unfit for the presidency he is through his handling of crises from all sides, from hurricanes to immigration reform.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Bill Maher assesses Trump’s hurricane response and his action on DACA in his Real Time monologue.
Bill Maher examines the “Fuck-Up Economy,” where companies – and political parties – profit from people’s mistakes.
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Some news this week: Spoiler alert, it’s not all about Trump! There’s some timely clown stories to report to help distract us from the king climate denier whose country he’s in charge of is currently being ravaged by hurricanes caused by, you guessed it, global warming.
Thinking of visiting the city in Alberta that doesn’t have the world famous stampede?
THANKS to Comedy Network and The Beaverton for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Max keeping himself busy with his toys.
FINALLY . . .
Some Crypto-Capitalists Just Want to See the World Burn
“In battle, the commander is the first one to go over the top,” Joe McKinney, shirt unbuttoned, wearing a shower cap and one of those airplane neck pillows, exclaims over music swelling from every direction. He’s having a great time, romping around San Francisco as part of a “decentralized dance party”—a roving DJ set controlled by an FM transmitter, beamed to dozens of boomboxes, and led by men who look like Road Warrior extras drenched in neon paint. One of them advises through a megaphone not to step on or trip over a homeless man in the path of revelry.
This is the culmination of the Startup Societies Summit, a two-day conference organized by McKinney and his friend Thibault Serlet. Advocates for cryptocurrencies and planned communities, free trade and special economic zones, moon colonies and the Northern California independence movement—anyone who sought to circumvent or dismantle regulations was represented by a 15 to 30 minute presentation.
McKinney spent some of his youth in Celebration, Florida, a planned community built and bungled by Disney; Serlet is the son of former Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and the “father of OS X” Bertrand Serlet. They bonded over weed and libertarianism, then fell out with the latter, and have kept busy since graduating college. For the 24-year-old McKinney at least, much of that work culminated at the Summit, where in his opening remarks in the cafeteria of the City College of San Francisco he exclaimed that “every era has its hubs of the future and we are building those centers. Consequently we could perhaps get rid of the scourges of disease and poverty, and perhaps even death itself.”
But future-building is inherently risky stuff, and gathering technologists, venture capitalists, and intellectuals who see most government intervention as an oppressive and often tyrannical force can breed as many opportunists and snake oil salesmen as idealists. In the nondescript, Silicon Valley casual of blazers and jeans, suits, and branded hoodies, it was hard to tell which was which. Earlier that day when considerably more sober, McKinney told me, “I don’t think there’s a single person here that’s just here to fuck people over and get rich.” I believe that he believes that. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?