September 21, 2017 in 3,661 words

The 5 Stupidest People On The Planet (Are All Donald Trump)

How many times are you allowed to say or do something stupid before you realize you yourself are stupid? Seven times? 24? Butts? Rush Limbaugh has been wrong about 270 things a day for 40 years, and he would be truly shocked to learn he’s stupid. We aren’t good at spotting our own intellectual limitations. We walk around thinking we’re brilliant, no matter how many times we get our head stuck in an alligator or our genitals stuck in an alligator. I can prove it: I think I’m smart enough to write an article on intelligence, and the only book I’ve read is the movie Bloodsport. I also recently typed the number butts. Twice. Hold on, butts times now.

The cluelessly stupid are a diverse and colorful community, but most of them fall into one of five distinct categories. I’ll include a famous example of each one, which may end up getting confusing, since our dumbfuck president is somehow the example for all five. So here is a list of dumb idiots, which is maybe the best idea I’ve had for an article since 8 Album Covers White People Could Never Pull Off or Your 3rd Grade Textbook, Only Written By Gary Busey. Here’s the book cover for when it inevitably gets adapted into national bestseller:

One last thing before we start. I imagine that some of you have already taken the idea of this article personally, and you’re keenly watching for any logical flaw, strawman fallacy, or typo which will allow you to dismiss me as a totally wrong hypocrite. If so, I have some bad news: You’re much dumber than you think, and this article is about you. And since you’re already in the comments section, the rest of this sentence is for everyone else: See if you can guess which entry that guy was!

We live in a world infested with experts — body language experts who speculate on handshake meanings, social media experts who tweet about Twitter to Twitterbots, romance experts who tell you how to fuck on a pizza*. There are no rules to declaring yourself an expert. And when you’re self-important enough to think universally shared experiences are yours alone, you become a Keeper of the Common Knowledge.

Cheese-up, while generously fingering your lover’s pepperoni chakra. You’re welcome, couples.

A Keeper of the Common Knowledge can become a leading mind on a subject after a Wikipedia paragraph or a few hazy childhood memories. Here’s how it works: Every day, about 4,500 American tourists check into Paris hotels. After a few days of standard vacation packaging, they come home, and their barely noteworthy trip is only brought up every time France is mentioned for the rest of their lives. But for a Keeper of the Common Knowledge, those three days offered an insight into a culture so complete that they know the mysterious French people better than they know themselves.

A Keeper of Common Knowledge offers their wisdom when you need it least. …

Impeachment, American Style

_{Impeachment is our democracy’s fail-safe, its shield, its sword—and its ultimate weapon for self-defense. But intense political opposition doesn’t provide sufficient cause to bring the charge.}

The American colonies imported the idea of impeachment from England, where Edmund Burke called it the “great guardian of the purity of the Constitution.” But from 1750 to 1775 republican fervor was running rampant, and the colonists made the idea all their own. Long before shots were fired in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, colonial assemblies used impeachment as a homegrown weapon of republican government, rebuking the King’s agents for the abuse or misuse of power.
After the nation won its independence, a number of state constitutions proudly included the right of impeachment. And when the Constitutional Convention accepted the idea of a powerful President, in the summer of 1787, its delegates insisted on the impeachment mechanism. Impeachment lay at the core of their intricate effort to balance the republican commitments to liberty, equality, and self-rule with a strong, energetic executive branch.

There is a good argument that, without the impeachment mechanism, the Constitution would never have been ratified. Too many Americans would have rejected the proposed document as a betrayal of the grounds on which the Revolution had been fought.

At the Convention itself, there was little elaboration of the meaning of the grounds provided for removing the President: “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But the Convention’s brief debates, and the national discussion during ratification, strongly support Alexander Hamilton’s insistence that what is required is “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” He argued that high crimes and misdemeanors “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself.”

Hamilton was not loose with words. If a President abuses or violates the public trust, he has committed “high Crime and Misdemeanors,” even if he did not violate the criminal law. In the Virginia ratification debates, James Madison said that abuse of the pardon power would be an impeachable offense. In North Carolina, James Iredell said that a “president must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” If a President spends three months on vacation in Paris or systematically violates civil rights and civil liberties, he is impeachable, even though he has not committed a crime. …

Far away from any witnesses, my small town is being poisoned by fracking waste

_{In a tiny south-eastern Ohio town in the Appalachian foothills, the Hazel Ginsburg Well is holding waste from out-of-state fracking operations – a sludge of toxic chemicals and undrinkable water.}

_{Far from the cities that profit from fracking, far from any city at all, the leftover wastewater is injected into the ground.}

Some days, the air would smell acrid, sharp like bleach, and I would hurry from the car into the house. Other days, the wind seemed normal, unremarkable. I didn’t know why.

My south-eastern Ohio town in the Appalachian foothills is a small, rural place where the demolition derby at the county fair is a hot ticket, Walmart is the biggest store, and people in the even smaller villages surrounding the county seat must often drive for 30 minutes to grocery shop. We hold the unfortunate distinction of being the poorest county in the state: an area that is both stunning – rolling hills, rocky cliffs, pastures and ravines – and inaccessible, far from industry.

It’s here that fracking companies dump their waste.

The Hazel Ginsburg well, an injection well built in the hillside decades ago, was meant to deposit saline and sand underground into porous rock. For the last few years, however, the well has held waste from out-of-state fracking operations done in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other states.

A forgotten byproduct of fracking is the waste. What goes into the ground must come out: a sludge of toxic chemicals and undrinkable water, which trucks ship across the country. Far from the drill pads, far from the cities that profit from fracking, far from any city at all, the leftover wastewater is injected into the ground – my county’s forgotten ground. …

A million tons of feces and an unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms

_{North Carolina’s hog industry has been the subject of litigation, investigation, legislation and regulation. But are its health and environmental risks finally getting too much?}

Rene Miller pokes a lavender-frocked leg out of her front door and grimaces. It’s a bright April afternoon, and the 66-year-old Miller, with a stoic expression and a dark crop of curls, braces herself for the walk ahead.

Her destination isn’t far away – just a half-mile down a narrow country road, flanked by sprawling green meadows, modest homes and agricultural operations – but the journey takes a toll. Because as she ambles down the two-lane street, stepping over pebbles and sprouts of grass, the stench takes hold, an odor so noxious that it makes your eyes burn and your nose run. Miller likens it to “death” or “decomposition” to being surrounded by spoiled meat.

As bad as it is today, she says, it’s nothing compared with the way it is on a muggy afternoon in August, when the stink hovering in the stagnant, humid air can nearly “knock you off your feet”.

Still, Miller makes this trip often, to honor her family and pay her respects. She points ahead to her family cemetery, which sits just off Veachs Mill Road in Warsaw, an hour’s drive east from Raleigh. It’s a stone’s throw from her one-story, white-walled house, part of a tract of land her great-grandmother inherited as part of a post-slavery land grant. When she gets to the cemetery, she stops in front of her nephew’s grave, recalling his life and his death to cancer. Purple and yellow wildflowers nip at its edges; nearby, a Steelers flag rustles in the wind.

“How long have we lived here? Always,” she says, gazing at her grandmother’s headstone. “And we always will. Nobody else will ever live on this land.” …

A new study debunks one of the biggest arguments against basic income

_{Unloading boxes of food distributed through the PAL program in Mexico.}

As someone who writes frequently about universal basic income — the idea of giving everyone enough money to live on, no strings attached — the most common argument I hear against the proposal has nothing to do with its cost, or the potential that it’ll discourage people from working, an attack that former Vice President Joe Biden used this week.

The most common criticism I hear, rather, is that basic income would cause massive inflation.

This idea has some intuitive plausibility to it. Imagine the government printed and handed out $1 billion for each person in the country. It seems obvious that this wouldn’t actually make everyone billionaires — that is, it wouldn’t let everyone live in Four Seasons suites and fly Gulfstream jets everywhere. A lot of people would just stop working because of their newfound riches, corporations would have to jack up wages dramatically to keep their labor force, those higher wages would lead to higher prices, and the resulting inflation would wipe out most or all of the gains.

Handing out $12,000 to every American adult every year, as basic income advocates like former Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern have suggested, is a much smaller change than that. But it seems like the same principle should apply. If everyone going to a given Trader Joe’s suddenly has $1,000 more per month to spend, shouldn’t Trader Joe’s jack up prices in response? …

An economist says India lacks the guts to even admit that it faces epic economic problems

_{All’s Not Well}

_{All dark here.}

The economy is in a trough.

The first quarter of 2017-2018 saw the growth of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in a year) drop to 5.7% from 7.9% in the corresponding period last year—the lowest rate in the three years the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government has been in power. The index of industrial production (IIP) for July released on Sept. 12 came in at 1.2%, after contracting 0.2% in June, showing that manufacturing has not picked up. On the same day, the consumer price index (CPI) showed that the inflation rate had risen to a five-month high of 3.4%.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley acknowledged that the GDP numbers for the April-July quarter were of concern. But then, BJP president Amit Shah told businessmen that the slowdown was due to “technical reasons.”

Are these numbers an early warning of possible stagflation with low demand, high unemployment, decline in GDP, and persistently high prices? What will it take for the economy to be nursed back to health? …

6 Historical Deaths That Read Like Crazy Myths (But Aren’t)

If you’re like us, you probably spend most of your time thinking about the insane, awesome, and horrifying ways that people have died throughout history. It’s not healthy and we aren’t happy about it, but this is the life we’ve chosen, so here we are. You could argue that life tastes more sweet when you know how many “suitable for a heavy metal album cover” ways it could suddenly end. So with that in mind, let’s take another go on this ride and learn about how …

#6. Georg Wilhelm Richmann Got Struck In The Center Of His Head By Lightning

Georg Wilhelm Richmann was a Swedish scientist and a major fan of Benjamin Franklin, or at least reckless kite flying. Eager to use a lightning rod to confirm for himself Franklin’s theories, Professor Richmann unleashed his inner Bill Paxton and raced a storm home to his lab. He was accompanied by an academic engraver named Sokolov, who ended up seeing (and later engraving) what happened next.

_{Lots of things happened next, it turns out, all at once.}

Sokolov used words as well, and what he described is downright ghoulish:

[A] palish blue ball of fire, as big as a fist, came out of the rod without any contact whatsoever. It went right to the forehead of the professor, who in that instant fell back without uttering a sound.

An anonymous engraving of a 1755 medical report would also eventually surface:

There appeared a red spot from the forehead from which spirted[sic] some drops of blood through the pores, without wounding the surrounding skin. The shoe belonging to the left foot was burst open. Uncovering the foot at that place they found a blue mark, by which it is concluded that the electrical force of the thunder, having forced into the head, made its way out again at the foot.

So a few lessons to take from that. 1) No matter how cool it looks, one should never stand near a conductor during a thunderstorm. And 2) a blue ball of fire to the forehead does not give you superpowers. Still, this was a guy excited about science, and who died doing it. That’s rad, and we’re sorry to see you go, Professor Georg Richmann. And also sorry about the lack of superpowers thing, because that would have made the latter half of the century a lot more interesting and given us a couple more articles. …

Fungus furniture will give you the green-living bona fides you’ve been seeking

_{Get Greener}

If you’re yearning for an especially eco-friendly alternative to conventional mass-produced, flat-packed furniture, a designer duo in London might have just what you’re looking for. Sebastian Cox and Ninela Ivanova are growing chairs and lamps using fungus.

The core of the biotech in the furniture is mycelium, the cotton candy-like, vegetative part of fungus. Cox and Ivanova say they drew inspiration from what they call an “ancient material relationship”: They mix the mycelium with woodchips from hazel and goat willow plants, then put the mixture in different molds. Over time, the mycelium spreads through the wood, and grows until it takes the shape of the container.

The whole growing process is quick and easy to control. Designers decide when to halt the growth to achieve the ideal shape and texture. After drying the pieces, the mushroom-based products are strong, lightweight, and completely compostable—the designers say they have the feel of “velvet or leather.”

Some people may not want to think of their furniture as compost. But the micro-organisms have huge potential in materials science and manufacturing, and a few companies in the US are also trying to develop a business around the stuff. A New York-based biomaterials company Ecovative grows clothes, furniture, and quickly-compostable packaging using mushrooms, and BioMason, a startup in North Carolina, claims to make stronger bricks using bacteria. …

The science behind the 15 most common smart drugs

_Tweakers

_{A smart habit?}

Not all drug users are searching for a chemical escape hatch. A newer and increasingly normalized drug culture is all about heightening one’s current relationship to reality—whether at work or school—by boosting the brain’s ability to think under stress, stay alert and productive for long hours, and keep track of large amounts of information. In the name of becoming sharper traders, medical interns, or coders, people are taking pills typically prescribed for conditions including ADHD, narcolepsy, and Alzheimer’s. Others down “stacks” of special “nootropic” supplements.

For obvious reasons, it’s difficult for researchers to know just how common the “smart drug” or “neuro-enhancing” lifestyle is. However, a few recent studies suggest cognition hacking is appealing to a growing number of people. A survey conducted in 2016 found that 15% of University of Oxford students were popping pills to stay competitive, a rate that mirrored findings from other national surveys of UK university students. In the US, a 2014 study found that 18% of sophomores, juniors, and seniors at Ivy League colleges had knowingly used a stimulant at least once during their academic career, and among those who had ever used uppers, 24% said they had popped a little helper on eight or more occasions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that pharmacological enhancement is also on the rise within the workplace, where modafinil, which treats sleep disorders, has become particularly popular.

In Silicon Valley, where the Nootropic market is most developed, devotees typically take a cocktail of pills, often mixing natural supplements that are readily available and legal, with lab-designed drugs that may be unregulated in the US, but still easily purchased online and shipped in from other countries.

But do these brain-hacking drugs actually make you smarter? The answers are murky at best. …

Singapore baggage handler ‘swapped hundreds of tags’

A baggage handler at Singapore’s international airport allegedly swapped hundreds of baggage tags, sending luggage to the wrong destination.

Tay Boon Keh has been charged with 286 counts of mischief, according to the Straits Times newspaper.

He swapped tags starting on 8 November every day for three months, the court heard. But no motive was given for the alleged crime.

If found guilty, he faces a year in jail or a fine for each of the charges.

Singapore’s Changi Airport told the newspaper it was an isolated case of mischief and there was no serious breach of aviation security. …

Yes, Bill Gates regrets Ctrl+Alt+Delete

_CTRL+Z

_{Bill Gates knows Ctrl+Alt+Delete was wrong.}

At the Bloomberg Global Business Forum today, Carlyle Group co-founder and CEO David Rubenstein asked Microsoft founder Bill Gates to account for one of the most baffling questions of the digital era: Why does it take three fingers to lock or log in to a PC, and why did Gates ever think that was a good idea?

Grimacing slightly, Gates deflected responsibility for the crtl-alt-delete key command, saying, “clearly, the people involved should have put another key on to make that work.” Rubenstein pressed him: does he regret the decision?

“You can’t go back and change the small things in your life without putting the other things at risk,” Gates said. …

AN ENDLESS CYCLE- TAXING BLANK CASSETTES AND “KILLING MUSIC”

In today’s era of streaming and YouTube where we as consumers have the power to pick and choose the songs we listen to and curate our own playlists, the idea of a homemade mixtape is either quaint or completely alien depending on how old you are. Go back just a few decades in the UK though and you’d find heavy-handed warnings in almost every cassette tape sleeve telling you, quite matter of factly, that “Home Taping Is Killing Music” with the qualifier, “And it’s illegal”.

This oddly aggressive morality campaign, which seems to repeat itself any time a new medium is developed in the entertainment industry despite these campaigns universally failing to accomplish anything, was launched in this case as a direct result of the introduction of blank cassette tapes. Specifically, the campaign was launched by what was then known as the British Phonographic Industry (henceforth shortened to BPI) on October 28th, 1981 on behalf of basically the entire British music industry. (The BPI is a trade association that represents nearly every record label and thus nearly every musician, in the UK.)

While the technology to record or copy music onto a blank tape had existed for some time at this point, a cheap, consumer-friendly version of the technology wasn’t readily available in the UK- or, at least, it wasn’t until a man called Alan Sugar came along in 1981. Sugar, a business magnate strongly linked to the British technology sector, saw, according to his autobiography, “a Sharp-brand twin cassette deck” while travelling through Tokyo. The cassette deck, which was being sold in a store selling professional grade musical equipment, could copy inserted cassette tapes onto blank ones, and even record directly from the radio. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Lewis Black explains why congressional Republicans will never be able to fix America’s health care system and offers some grim advice to healthy uninsured millennials.

THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.

From the twisted mind of Senator Lindsey Graham, the scariest franchise is cinema is coming to a hospital near you!

The President’s Tuesday night was spent tweeting his condolences to Puerto Rico, Mexico City, and the Emmys’ ratings.

The President made up a new nation for us to unite with while speaking at the United Nations.

Trump’s proposed border wall along the Southwest border is threatening wildlife in the region – particularly jaguars whose numbers are already dwindling. VICE News travels to Arizona and into Mexico to learn more about the possibility of extinction for this keystone species.

THANKS to HBO and Vice News for making this program available on YouTube.

Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech, unless you work at ESPN or listen to ICP.

We sent Allana Harkin and Michael Rubens to Netroots to find hope for 2018 and/or lean in to our misery. Produced by Elizabeth Skadden.

General Kelly is trying to bring order to a White House that’s doubling as Omarosa’s latest reality show.

THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.

Max being himself and trying to do anything and everything.

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}