Too Stupid for Words category archive
Kitchen Cabinet, 21st Century Style 0
You can’t make this stuff up.
Sentenced Friday to 1½ years in prison, Brent Meisner was found to have left about $170,000 in income off his 2009 tax return. Federal prosecutors continue to contend, though, that the omission to the IRS was the least among Meisner’s crimes.
(snip)
“Meisner was not merely a tax cheat,” the prosecutors said in court papers. “He was a bully, a narcissist, and a white-collar gangster. He felt entitled to things to which he clearly was not. He took things from others, justifying the theft with an oversized sense of self-entitlement and self-worth. …
By the by, does that last bit of the remind you of anyone else?
Football uber Alles 0
Signe comments on the NFL Draft’s invasion of Philadelphia this past weekend.
Honest to Pete, from all the hullabaloo, you’d think football mattered.
Breaking! 0
Penn State University discovers that drinking is a problem at college fraternities!
In other news, Penn State announces that preliminary studies indicate that the sky may be blue and that it is applying for a research grant to determine the color of grass.
Attention Theftacit Disorder 0
One of my local convenience stores features, GSTV, a vile and loathsome creation that yabbers commercials at you while you fill your gas tank. (Why they think that making persons angry is a productive sales technique mystifies me.)
At the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Glenn Harlan Reynolds offers his take on the soundwall of advertising that is consuming our attention. An excerpt:
Columbia law professor Tim Wu thinks your attention is being stolen. And he’s not happy about it.
He’s not talking about TV commercials, which pay for the show that you’re watching. He’s talking about ads that seize your attention while giving you nothing in return. He has a special dislike of gas station TV, in which saccharine fake newscasts appear on the pump while you fill your car, tethered by a short length of hose. But that’s not all, Wu writes: “In that genre are things like the new, targeted advertising screens found in hospital waiting rooms (broadcasting things like The Newborn Channel for expecting parents); the airlines that play full-volume advertising from a screen right in front of your face; the advertising screens in office elevators; or that universally unloved invention known as ‘Taxi TV.’ These are just few examples in what is a growing category. Combined, they threaten to make us live life in a screen-lined cocoon.”
Aside:
I was recently subjected to one of those target medical “channels” when I picked up a friend from a doctor’s office. Ugh.
I chose to wait outside and look at my own screen–and at the trees, the flowers, the sky, and the near-misses on the adjacent street.
Down to the Sea in Slips 0
In a related piece, Josh Marshall tries to figure out what happened to the fleet. A snippet (much more detail at the link):
But then the White House and particularly the President said things that were much more direct and clearly, at best, misleading. What is key is that this does not seem to have been some intentional misdirection or ambiguity. . . . It seems much more like the White House and the President got sloppy, didn’t know exactly what was happening and through sloppiness and bravado created an impression that simply wasn’t true.
The Trump White House, sloppy? Oh, my.
A Piece of the Rock 0
In a curious sidelight to Brexit, there seems to be a bit of kerfuffle over Gibralter. From The Local:
British rhetoric quickly heated up after the EU’s Brexit negotiating guidelines released on Friday included a section saying Spain must have a say on any future trade deal involving Gibraltar.
In related news, the British paper, The Sun, which makes our National Inquirer look like Smithsonian Magazine, decided to do a bit of saber-rattling.