April, 2016 archive
Card-Carrying 0
Alexandra Petri plays Trump with her “woman card.”
I have been carrying one of these for years, proudly.
It is great. It entitles you to a sizable discount on your earnings everywhere you go (average 21 percent, but can be anywhere from 9 percent to 37 percent, depending on what study you’re reading and what edition of the Woman Card you have.) If you shop with the Woman Card at the grocery, you will get to pay 11 percent more for all the same products as men, but now they are pink.
Read the rest. Collect the full deck.
But wait! The card pays strange dividends.
Nothing To Do, Nowhere To Go 0
Still not bad.
(snip)
The four-week moving average of claims, a less volatile measure than the weekly figures, decreased to 256,000, the lowest since December 1973, from 260,750.
The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits fell by 5,000 to 2.13 million in the week ended April 16, the fewest since November 2000. The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits held at 1.6 percent. These data are reported with a one-week lag.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness is child’s play.
It happened around 7 a.m. at a home on Camp Circle in Dallas. Holston Cole was taken to Paulding-Wellstar hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Detectives said the shooting was an accident but don’t know how the toddler got the gun.
It’s not going to stop, you know.
“Everything You Know Is Wrong” 0
Cenk and the gang consider what Trump’s success says about Republican voters. I don’t buy everything they say–I often pick stuff to post because I find it thought-provoking, rather than necessarily persuasive–but I think their skewering of the punditocracy is right on the mark.
Trumping “Objectivity” 0
As Science 2.0, Ryan J. Thomas wonders whether Trump may accidentally perform a public service by bringing to an end the unqualified “on the one hand on the other hand” fact-free never-call-out-a-lie reportage that passes for “objectivity” in the news industroy. A snippet:
Objectivity is a much misunderstood concept and is too often uncritically mythologized as central to American journalistic practice. What interests me is how the pressure to be objective – and therefore disengaged from the very real impact Trump is having on the democratic process – may impede journalists’ crucial role as stewards of democracy.
Follow the link for a long and thoughtful meditation focusing on a recent kerfuffle at NPR.
Maine Governor’s Secret for Success 0
Shorter Greg Kesich: Hate sells.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Exercise politeness on the public thoroughfare.
“Initial witness accounts indicate that a child in the back seat of the vehicle got a hold of a gun and discharged the firearm, sending a single bullet into the drivers back,” the sheriff’s office said.
First responders arrived on the scene soon after the shooting and found her without a pulse and breathless. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
More guns would, no doubt, have prevented this.
Seeing the Light 0
Highway engineering for the iJunk Generation:
Rows of red LEDs have been embedded in the pavement after a 15-year-old girl was killed when she stepped in front of a tram while looking at her smartphone and listening to music. Two other people have been seriously injured in separate but similar incidents.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness toddles along.
A toddler has accidentally shot and killed himself in Georgia.
Police in Paulding County are investigating after a three-year-old got hold of a gun and it went off, killing him.
Thus passeth another day in NRA paradise.
