In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today!

Something something Grammys. Did you watch? I didn't watch! Something about a hat? I like hats!

There is another arctic blast moving across the country. We are currently experiencing wind chills that feel like 50 degrees below zero! And the inside of our storm door is once again covered in a sheet of ice! This weather stinks. And I feel very lucky to be reasonably warm, which necessitates being bundled up in layers and a stocking cap just to sit in my heated home office to work.

[Content Note: Holocaust appropriation] This fucking guy thinks that progressives' "war on the American one percent" is like Hitler's war on Jewish people. Paul Krugman notes that he is hardly an outlier. As does Josh Marshall: "I think we're missing the point if we see this as the gaffe of one aging, coddled jerk. Because it's only a more extreme and preposterous version of beliefs that have become increasingly widespread in the wealthiest sectors of American society, especially since 2008 and the twin events of the global financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama. Let me state the phenomenon as clearly as possible: The extremely wealthy are objectively far wealthier, far more politically powerful and find a far more indulgent political class than at any time in almost a century—at least. And yet at the same time they palpably feel more isolated, abused and powerless than at any time over the same period and sense some genuine peril to the whole mix of privileges, power and wealth they hold."

[CN: War on agency] "Moderate" anti-choicers who want to restrict abortion like to cite the French model as a possible "compromise" in the US—which is not a viable comparison, frankly, because it elides the vast differences in equal healthcare access in France and the US. But anyway: The French National Assembly has passed a new measure that removes some of the restrictions stipulated by its 1975 abortion law. So, yeah—if we're going to use France as a model, let's use it as a model for expanding abortion access.

[CN: Homophobia] Some dipshit in Oklahoma is proposing banning all marriages in the state after a federal court ruled the state's same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. "If you actually want to get in the game instead of just sitting on the sidelines watching us play, we'll take our ball and go home and NO ONE WILL PLAY AT ALL."

[CN: Gun violence] A new study has found that "injuries from firearms send more than 7,000 kids [in the US] to the hospital annually, an average of 20 per day. Among those admitted to the hospital, 6 percent die from their injuries. ...In addition to children hospitalized for gun injuries, another 3,000 die before they can make it to the emergency room, meaning guns hurt or kill about 10,000 American children each year." If it were anything other than guns hurting or killing 10,000 US kids a year, that shit would have been restricted or outright banned years ago.

All right then: "Google is shelling out $400 million to buy a secretive artificial intelligence company called DeepMind. ...DeepMind has only a landing page for a website where it describes its business as building learning algorithms for simulations, e-commerce and games."

Something something future conservatives starting up a new online news publication.

I love this story about elderly nuns rescuing an elderly pit bull more than I can say. "I purposely wanted a dog that nobody else wanted." All the blubs forever.