• Minsky’s Many Moments (Institute for New Economic Thinkin) Economist Hyman Minsky hypothesized that economies are inherently unstable and fragile, whereas mainstream economists generally work from the idea of economic equilibrium. The world has proven Minsky right.
• Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line (New York Times) From the department of, “Well duh.”
• Democrats’ Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History in U.S. (The Intercept) Glenn Greenwald is noticing the red baiting by the Clinton campaign as well. It’s good to hear someone else say this. I already have enough reasons to doubt my sanity.
• Wisconsin man’s prosthetic leg found in beaver dam (St. Paul Pioneer Press) Actually a good news story: The guy got his leg back, and the discoverers were pleasantly surprised that it was not a body, as they originally believed.
• Microsoft, Sony, and other companies still use illegal warranty-void-if-removed stickers (ExtremeTech) That sticker is a lie.
• Surprise! Ark Encounter Isn’t Providing the Economic Boost Local Communities Were Expecting (Pahteos) Elmer Gantry gets millions from state to create a Noah’s Ark theme park complete with ark, touts economic benefits. No benefits accrue the same as when non-religious private enterprise sucks from the taxpayer’s teat.
• Good news: Teen hacker gets 1-million-air-miles bug bounty reward. Bad news: It’s United (The Register) Could be worse, could be Delta.

Artificially induced buzzes in history:

• McDonald’s Let People Name Their Own Burger Creations and of Course It Backfired Hilariously (22 Words) Why do they keep trying this?
• Plantations Practiced Modern Management (Harvard Business Review) The point is not that plantations were like modern management, it is that modern management is like plantations.
• Humpback whales around the globe are mysteriously rescuing animals from orcas (Mother Nature Network) It’s a good thing that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy saved them.
• Cities Need More Public Transit, Not More Uber and Self-Driving Cars (Truth Out) File this under, “Well, Duh!”
• Landlord installs Faraday cage to block phone signals because social media is ruining British pubs (The Telegraph) A few years back this was an April Fools joke, and now it is reality.
• India is abandoning Monsanto’s GM cotton for indigenous varieties (New Europe) The Monsanto crops are too expensive, and losing their effectiveness against pests.
• Best joint-roller in the world earns $1000s for his creations (Boing Boing) Smokable joint art, including “Smokemon Go”. 

Have some climate change inaction figures:

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

• Highest-paid CEOs run worst-performing companies, research finds (The Independent) Money quote, “Has CEO pay reflected long-term stock performance? In a word, “no.”” Original study here.
• Gluten sensitivity without celiac disease takes place due to weakened gut (PerfScience) A year ago there were studies saying that non celiac gluten sensitivity was a mirage.
• The Ghost of King Leopold II Still Haunts Us (Media Diversified) King Leopold’s actions in Congo at the end of the 19^th Century not only killed over 10 million Congolese, it appears to have led to the cross species viral transfer that eventually became AIDS.
• Australia’s latitude and longitude coordinates out by more than 1.5 metres, scientists say (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Australia moves by about 7cm a year. Get your cartographic geek on.
• Everything Is Broken (Medium) A nice survey on just how criminally insecure pretty much every piece of software is.
• David Cameron’s premiership is a tragedy for which we will all pay (The Guardian) Righteous! “The most disastrous premiership since Neville Chamberlain is about to draw to a brutally abrupt end.”
• Antibiotic resistance: ‘Snot wars’ study yields new class of drugs (BBC) Ahhh…The wonders of nature.
• ‘Pokémon GO’ Found In Toxic Nuclear Plant In Japan: Authorities Say Stay Away (Forbes)  Yes, stay very far away.
• The best British political insults (The Telegraph) It does seem to be a British area of excellence.
• Beyond #BlackLivesMatter: police reform must be bolstered by legal action (The Guardian) Makes the obvious point that court decisions over the past 40 years have enabled arbitrary search and seizure and arrest by police, along with doing their level best to subvert meaningful reviews of killings by police.  As an aside, Merrick Garland, Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee, is particularly awful in this regard.

Lamas with hats, seriously bent:

• How Finance Costs Too Much and Fails to Deliver (naked capitalism) Bankers are over paid, over protected, over large, and over here.
• The Myth of Upward Mobility in America (Alternet) It’s the opiate of the masses.
• Exploring a Link Between Drone Strikes and Retaliation (Georgetown Public Policy Review) Drone strikes correlate to increases in terrorism.
• Pixelating and blurring doesn’t work to hide text (Fusion) Recovering pixelated text is easier than you think.
• Reality continues to crumble in the wake of David Bowie’s death (News Hump) “Scientists have concluded that Bowie was in some way integral to the function of what we call normality in ways which they have not yet properly begun to understand, but postulate a hitherto unknown particle called the ‘Bowon’ which helped the universe keep its sh%$ together.”
• When Bill and Hillary Crossed the Picket Line (Jacobin) On their first date they were literally scabbing against a strike on the Yale campus to access to a museum that was closed by the strike.

This is f%$#ing mind boggling: (H/t Charlie for finding it)

Wow.

• Aspartame intake is associated with greater glucose intolerance in individuals with obesity (Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism) Like we didn’t know that diet soda is awful for you.
• A Few Upsides of the Brexit Disaster (The Rude Pundit) “Two words: Bargain corgis.”  LOL
• The New Payola: Deals Landlords Cut with Internet Providers (Backchannel) The wonder of the neoliberal free market:  Monopoly rents.
• The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs almost got us, too (The Week) Mammals were hit just as hard, but proved more adaptable.
• The Billionaire Pedophile Who Could Bring Down Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (The Daily Beast) F%$# it.  I am writing Jeremy Corbyn in.
• Is the Supreme Court Clueless About Corruption? Ask Jack Abramoff (The New York Times) A pretty good examination of the Bob McDonnell decision.  (Robert Reich calls it a decision to legalize bribery.)
• New research: ‘competing’ aggressively on tax reduces growth (Foolsgold International) Not a surprise.  Public giveaways to private enterprise does not work.
• The Bahamas’ new U.S. travel advisory: Use ‘extreme caution’ around police (The Washington Post) The citizens of the Bahamas are overwhelmingly of African extraction, and they are warning them US police officers constitute a potential threat.  Who says that Irony is dead?

Coffee: The real truth:

• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (One Div Zero) Hysterically funny.
• The Story Of London’s First Indian Restaurant (Londonist) 1810, wow.
• The Nazi-Era Papers My ‘Mexican’ Mother Kept (Wall Street Journal)
• Russia Actually Lights Rockets With an Overgrown Wooden Match (Popular Science) Seriously steampunk.
• Google Is the World’s Biggest Censor and Its Power Must Be Regulated (US News Opinion) Making Google a regulated utility might not be a bad thing.
• Teen stuck inside giant Barney dinosaur head is freed by firefighters (Boing Boing) What part of, “Barney is Evil,” don’t you get?
• Queen’s ‘Green Screen’ Dress Starts A Hilarious Photoshop Battle (deMilked) The Queen wears an outfit the same shade as is used for special effects. Photoshop hilarity ensues.

A house cat and a lynx hang out at the zoo. Cuteness overload!

• How spyware peddler Hacking Team was publicly dismantled (Endgadget) These folks sold hacking software to tyants, and they got their just desserts.
• What Ancient History Has To Say About Near-Future Doom (International Business Times) Senator Incitatus, Republican nominee Donald Trump. ‘Nuff Said.
• Confession of Hillary Shill from /r/SandersForPresident – thread is now gone but someone saved the content. (Reddit) Some detail about the professional trolls Hillary’s campaign. Money quote, “When even the scum of 4chan think that your candidate is too scummy for their tastes, you need to take a good hard look at your life.”
• AQ to CIA: You Are the Empire, and We Are Luke and Han (Emptywheel) Yes, the similarities between the Jedi and al Qaeda are striking.
• Kyoto University researchers suggests cats ‘use’ physics to hunt prey | (Daily Mail Online) They are biding their time until they can take over.
• I doomed mankind with a free text editor (Medium) He created an editor that uses only the most 1000 words in the English language. It was inspired by xkcd.
• Intel x86s hide another CPU that can take over your machine (you can’t audit it) (Boing Boing) And when (and it is when) a black hat creates an exploit, you will never know. Buy AMD.
• Digital currency Ethereum nose-dives after $50 million hack (MarketWatch) There has now been a second hack.
• Curbing Monopolies Promotes Growth, Lowers Inequality (naked capitalism) As Yves frequently Smith notes, Qu’elle Surprize.

Who amongst us does not like to listen to Richard Feynman:

• Meaningful work not created, only destroyed, by bosses, study finds (ScienceDaily) I wonder what you current and former organizational consultants (Hi Dad) out there think about all this.
• Side-channel attack: PC Hardware is physically leaking encryption keys through the operating noise it makes (SeenThis) I guess we need to make our hats anechoic in addition to tinfoil.
• ‘Clinton as president is danger to world peace’ – far-right French leader Le Pen (RT America) The irony is obvious.
• As Hillary Slams Trump University, Right Wingers Go After Bill for Making Millions From For-Profit Laureate Universities (Alternet) Don’t know if there is any “there” there, but it will be yet more sh%$ flung against the wall during the campaign.
• The Value of the Humanities (The Baseline Scenario) This trash lit reading engineer agrees.
• Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie (Rolling Stone) Matt Taibbi, as usual nails it. It is said that Republicans fear their base, and Democrats hate their base. The incestuous, self absorbed, and delusional behaviors of the party “leaders” proves him right.
• The History of Pho (Lucky Peach) While its origins go back further, it’s only about 100 years old.
• Understanding The European Union’s Facade Democracy (Social Europe) Makes the point that the EU is not just undemocratic but antidemocratic, by design and culture, and as such, it is progressively losing the people and fostering the growth of the wing opposition movements.
• What Milton Friedman Got Wrong: Biologists Destroy Homo-Economicus (Evonomics)^* A devastating takedown of Friedman’s seminal work The Methodology of Positive Economics. Basically, Friedman used evolution as an explanationm and he got evolution and adaptation completely wrong.

Here is an interesting technique for choopping up an onion. I will have to try this at Trial By Fire on July 4^th weekend, when I will be making Cornish Pasties, because it looks a lot easier than what I have been doing.

Full disclosure: I know, and have discussed medieval cooking with Milton Friedman’s son, David.

• How Windows 10 became malware (Computerworld) If software attempts to fool the user into installing it, it is malware. Windows 10 attempts to fool the user into installing it. QED.
• Coder fired after 6 years for automating his job (Boing Boing) Coder gets job. Coder figures out how to have the computer do his job. Boss finds out, and he gets fired.
• Migrant workers in US seafood industry exposed to forced labor conditions (The Guardian) The program, called H-2B is designed to create peonage.  It is a feature, not a bug.
• The Pub: Paul Krugman. VSP (The Pub) A VERY well deserved examination of Krugman’s descent into hackery so as to support Hillary Clinton.
• Finance is Just Another Industry (naked capitalism) An essential discussion of the destructive and parasitic role of modern finance.
• Spice gull: seabird turns orange after falling into vat of curry (The Guardian) The Donald Trump of birds. (Click for larger popup)
• US Tax Receipts Signaling Recession?(MishTalk) Yes.

Star Wars and central bank policy, what could be more exciting. (Answer: almost everything) H/t Naked Capitalism

• How Bank Networks Amplify Financial Crises: Evidence from the Great Depression (naked capitalism) The interconnectedness of our banking system is a clear and present danger.
• Diamond Geysers: Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape (Epoch Times) Prosecuting the banksters and telling the bond holders to go Cheney themselves worked.
• President Obama’s horrible, terrible legacy on student loans (The Hill) Much like the TARP, it’s all about extracting rents on the vulnerable.
• Desperate Christians try luring millennials to faith with ’emoji’ Bible (Raw Story) Desperation much?
• Sausage-wielding ‘fascists’ terrorize Georgian vegans (Politico)  Not The Onion.
• The Night I Almost Peed on Henry Kissinger (OZY) “Fair warning, Henry. Wear your storm rubbers.”
• King Tut’s dagger blade made from meteorite, study confirms (CBC News) Not a surprise: There are no metallic meteorites around the Mediterranean. They all got dug up during the Bronze Age, because it was the only source of workable iron.
• Asbo dwarf jailed after impersonating a Dalek and threatening woman with a butterknife (Telegraph) I have no words.

How Germany and the US differ: nakedness, small talk, children’s freedom, etc.

• Dr Henry Heimlich uses Heimlich manoeuvre for first time at 96 (The Guardian) He did a “me”?
• Sheep go on ‘psychotic rampage’ through Welsh village after eating cannabis plants (London Evening Standard) A bad case of the munchies?
• Sea sponge the size of a minivan discovered in ocean depths off Hawaii (The Guardian) Oh, who lives in a pineapple under the sea?  Sponge Bob Anabolic Steroids!
• Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer (Aeon Essays)
• The Necessity of Political Vulgarity (Current Affairs) Calls for civility were overrated.
• This 5,000-year-old recipe for beer actually sounds pretty tasty (Ars Technica) History brewing geek time.
• More Young Adults Are Living With Their Parents Than At Any Time Since the Great Depression (Washington’s Blog) And the employment to population ratio remains well below what it was in 2008. We are still in a depression.
• Neoliberalism’s Press Gangs: How Markets Raise Costs (Naked Capitalism) It applies in a lot of places, most notably healthcare, but in this case it’s credit card interchange fees.

A fire tornado.  Do not try at home:

• Ian Fraser: Just How Corrupt is The UK? (naked capitalism) No banksters prosecution in the UK either.
• R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party (Rolling Stone) Taibbi. The Money quote is, “”They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters.”
• A Norwegian view: are things really so bad outside the EU? (openDemocracy) Norway is not in the EU, and it’s doing well. Of course, the general lack of corruption in Norway might have something to do with it.
• Pentagon Official Once Told Morley Safer That Reporters Who Believe the Government Are “Stupid” (The Intercept The recently deceased Morley Safer putting the lie to the Vietnam war in the early 1960s. Just read this.
• Tumblr Replaces Guns With Selfie Sticks In Movie Scenes (Esquire) That which is seen cannot be unseen.
• Anti-Gay-Marriage GOP Candidate Explains His Past As A Drag Queen (Business Insider) Do I need to say anything here?
• Airbnb stealth-updates terms of service, says it’s not an insurer and requires binding arbitration (Boing Boing) It seems the whole “sharing economy” is about f%$#ing the people doing the work.

Charlie rocking out on a mandolin:

• Budweiser Renames Its Beer “America” (Co.Design) This is the stupidest marketing gimmick I’ve heard in a while.
• 11 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Rapidly Deteriorating Even As The Stock Market Soars (The Economic Collapse) Point 11: “Barack Obama is poised to become the first president in U.S. history to never have a single year during his time in office when the economy grew by more than 3 percent.” (Unemployment is down because  workforce participation is down)
• Bernie Sanders Helped A Staffer Propose To His Girlfriend (BuzzFeed) Kawaii.
• A Eukaryote without a Mitochondrial Organelle (Current biology) I’ve been interested mitochondria since I did a Div I on them at Hampshire College.
• U.S. Navy fires commander of sailors who were held by Iran (Reuters) The inevitable search for the lowest ranked individual as a scapegoat in military fiascos.

I love old school machine tools, so I loved this:

Cracker Jack’s Prize In The Box Will Now Be Digitized : The Two-Way : NPR (NPR) This sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
US Prosecutors Consider More Charges Against Ex-CEO Shkreli (Reader Supported News) I’d rather see them spending this resources going after Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon.
Nine years of censorship (Nature) Trudeau is reversing Harper’s muzzling of Canadian scientists.
Andrew Sullivan Is to Blame for Donald Trump (Gawker) Great hed. The thesis is that people like Andrew Sullivan, who have aggressively supported impoverishing of the masses,(He wrote glowingly of Margaret Thatcher) have created the toxic politics that gave us the Donald.
Study Shows How Abstinence Pledges Increase Risk of Pregnancy and STDs (The Atlantic) Not a surprise. Studies have shown this for years. For an anecdote, see Palin, Bristol.
Atlanta Mayor’s Column Ripping Bernie Sanders Drafted by Lobbyist, Emails Show (The Intercept) It really is remarkable how brazen the Democratic Party establishment is about its corruption.
In 1983 Clinton teamed with Walmart to attack public education (Liberation News) The past is prelude.
Who Shot First, According To The Guy Who Played Greedo (Cinema Blend) Han shot first.
Psychiatric hospitals filling up with time travellers sent back to kill Donald Trump (News Thump) This is not a surprise.

This is just too awesome for words:

H/t Atomic Samba.

• Biotech firm creates fake rhino horn to reduce poaching (Digital Journal) Ebay did this to people who stole from archeological sites. There was a flood of counterfeits, and prices dropped, and the numbewr of counterfeits skyrocketed, and people got out of the business.
• Barack Obama Readies For Final TPP Push, Which Could Benefit Presidential Library Donors (International Business Times) Much like his policies, Obama’s corruption is pedestrian and incrementalist.
• Luxembourg Puts Journalist and Whistleblowers On Trial for Ruining Its “Magical Fairyland” of Tax Avoidance (The Intercept) Luxemburg’s only real industry is money laundering, so they are trying to throw people who reveal this fact in jail.
• Microsoft Windows 95 on Apple Watch (Business Insider) The award for the person having too much free time award goes to………
• Cracker Jack’s Prize In The Box Will Now Be Digitized : The Two-Way (NPR)This sucks wet farts from dead pigeons
• How Big Data Harms Poor Communities (The Atlantic)  Big data is the surveillance state privatized, and the surveillance state is about keeping down the poor and minorities. QED.
• Paul Ryan Wants To Kill Me (Cognitive Dissidence) Author is in treatment for cancer, and notes that Ryan’s desire to return to the bad old days of pre-existing conditions would have him dead.
• Wifi hotspot with ‘threatening name’ grounds flight in Australia (The Independent) Naming your WiFi network to tether your laptop to your phone, “Mobile Detonation Device,” is not a smart thing if you intend to use it while at the airport.
• I tried Go Cubes chewable coffee, and I’m pretty sure this is what cocaine feels like (The Next Web) This will not end well .

This is still the creepiest music video that I’ve ever seen:

• Against Fortress Liberalism (Jacobin) Money quote: “For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it “incremental progress.”
• EU Files New Antitrust Charges Against Google Over Android Apps (NPR) All your base are belong to us.
• Panama Papers include top military contractor Triple Canopy (Fusion) Mercenaries laundering money? Least surprising news of the decade.
• Why Western Mass Doesn’t Have the Internet (Backchannel) This is what happens when you elect Republicans. Any attempts at benefiting the greater good through collective action is sabotaged. Rather ironically, Western Mass is the Republican part of the state.
• Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts (The Intercept)  Not surprising:  Both entities are opaque, secretive, paranoid, and dedicated to supporters of undermining our privacy.
• FBI informant who lived with 911 hijackers Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid AI-Mihdhar (28 Pages) (PDF) You can also read a summary here.
• When Media Shill For Saudi Money (Moon of Alabama)  A nice survey of lobbying by the House of Saud.
• Fantasy Math Is Helping Companies Spin Losses Into Profits (New York Times) They should call it fraud, but they don’t.
• Radical Islamism Flops in Scotland (War Is Boring) Unlike most of the rest of Europe, the Scotts don’t segregate and impoverish their Muslim immigrants.
• The web is DOOM’d: Average page now as big as id’s DOS classic (The Register) Too much crap JavaScript out there.
• Fair use prevails as Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case (Ars Technica) The decision going the other way would result in lesser known works vanishing over the next few years.
• UK dead-set on 10-year sentences for P2P pirates (Ars Technica) Why file sharing is not a matter for private torts is beyond me, so I see 10 years as batsh%$ insane.

Here is a neat video of a model of a dam failure scale model doe by some school kids:

• Why the S.E.C. Didn’t Hit Goldman Sachs Harder (The New Yorker)Because they were all Barack Obama’s former classmates at Harvard, or the Clinton’s at Yale, etc. Obama could never bring himself to prosecute what he sees as, “People like us,” and he surrounded himself with people who held the same views.
• Why I Blew the Whistle on the SEC’s Investigation of Goldman Sachs (Watch The Circus) The whistle-blower for the above link, James A. Kidney, in his own words.
• Choosing to Skip the Upgrade and Care for the Gadget You’ve Got (New York Times) Using older tech that still does the job.
• Prescription meds get trapped in disturbing pee-to-food-to-pee loop (Ars Technica) Eww………
• Australian Case Shows Why Corporate Sovereignty Isn’t Needed In TPP — Or In Any Trade Agreement (Techdirt) Money quote, “The key point is that it is not absolutely necessary to include corporate sovereignty provisions in a trade deal to protect companies, because there is always the state-to-state mechanism that can be invoked if necessary.”
• The Pentagon’s Twisted Potlatch (Foreign Policy in Focus) The author refers to the excesses of Potlatch culture, where chiefs would destroy their own property in an attempt to gain status, and draws an amazingly trenchant comparison to the Pentagon’s acquisition process.
• Bill That Obama Extolled Is Leading to Pension Cuts for Retirees (The Intercept) Not a surprise. As Obamacare shows, his solutions to the problems of America is to load more risk and reduce reward to ordinary Americans.
• Scientists Acquire More Proof That Only Beavers Can Save the World (Gizmodo) A little beaver solves everything.
• Firms that paid for Clinton speeches have US gov’t interests (AP) The problem is not that the Clinton’s did broke the law, they did not. The problem is that this is legal.
• Correcting Correct The Record’s Record (Medium) The Hillary Clinton campaign is paying trolls online.

This episode of linkage has Hamaytz. Here is the Ramen Song, by my little girl:

• Fonts, typefaces and all things typographical (I love Typography (ILT)) Get your linotype geek on.
• Virus trading cards (Table Top Whale) Un-dirty-word-believably cool.
• Boy on Burning Deck – What the Uss Donald Cook and the Polish Navy Were Doing off Kaliningrad When They Were Buzzed by the Russian Airforce (Dances With Bears) The US and Poland were practicing attacking Kaliningrad.
• Origins of feudalism in the West (Understanding Society) Get your history geek on.
• College Student Is Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane (The New York Times) Live in obedient fear, citizen.
• The Invisibility of U.S. Oligarchs: The Case of Penny Pritzker (Sam Husseini) If you read anything today, read this.  Also note the Pritzker bankrolled Obama’s political career almost from day one, and profited mightily from sub prime loans at a bank which was at the time the biggest bank failure ever. This explains a lot about why the banksters walked.
• Panama Papers: More Trouble For The West Than Russia (Forbes) Notable for it being published by that bastion of crony capitalism, Forbes magazine.
• What Happens When You Drink an Entire Bottle of Weed Lube (Broadly) Drinking a bottle of lube, even if it does not contain 450mg of THC (it’s intended to be sprayed lightly the genitals) will not end well.
• The People Want Tyrion Lannister for President (Esquire) “Everyone’s favorite Game of Thrones character beat Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in an online poll.”
• How a Simple Request Got Me Blacklisted by the Pentagon (The Intercept) Of note is that it appears that Africom is concealing a lot of misdeeds by its troops with no national security justification.

Prince died on Thursday. An eclectic artist who played a plethora of instruments, produced music, and directed and acted in movies.

He also had the best cameo ever on Animaniacs, which says a lot: (Actual dialogue from the show)

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

^*Chomaytz is leavened bread, which is forbidden during the days of Pesach (Passover).

• Statement on the resignation of the Chair of our chapter in Chile (Transperency International) Chile chair of transparency international resigns after he is found in the Panama papers.
• Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews (Ma Hamatzav? (Was’ Up?)) such bon mots as, “May you find yourself insisting to a roomful of skeptics that your great-grandmother was “legitimately” raped by Cossacks.”
• Radioactive wild boars rampaging around Fukushima nuclear site | Asia | News | The Independent The wolves in the area were exterminated a bit over 100 years ago, and it was a unique species. Perhaps dropping in some other woves, or some bears would help.
• Second Russian intelligence report on Turkey’s current assistance to Daesh (Boltaire Net) So not a surprise.
• Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force (The Intercept) FFS, could someone throw his ass in jail?
• Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired (The New York Times) How what used to be called “Dotcom” companies treat their employees like crap, and then try to pretend that they don’t.
• Churchill got a doctor’s note requiring him to drink at least 8 doubles a day “for convalescence” (Boing Boing) The fact that Churchill was right once in his life, and was a disaster at everything else might be explained by alcoholism.
• Brilliant IKEA-esque instructions teach you how to eat ‘hard-to-eat’ food (ShortList Magazine) Brilliant!
• The Stories We Tell About Killing (The Disorder Of Things) Makes the (IMNSHO accurate) point that US counter-insurgency strategy is rooted in our heritage of genocide against the American Indian. Money quote, “For me, it is impossible to capture the degree to which counter-insurgency is at the heart of the American paradigm of state making and war fighting without placing the Indian Wars and subsequent efforts at American Indian population concentration and pacification at the center of U.S. political development.” 
• When charter schools close, taxpayer-funded property often goes missing (Sun Sentinel) Unsurprising. The activity is all about extracting taxes for private profit.

The Who, Can’t Explain:

• Millennials are being dot.conned by cult-like tech companies (New York Post) It’s the same as the 1990s dotcom boom.
• Yiddish Curses for Republican Jews (Ma Hamatzav?) Yiddish is a wonderful language for curses. My favorite is, “May you find yourself insisting to a roomful of skeptics that your great-grandmother was “legitimately” raped by Cossacks.”
• Head of Chilean chapter of Transparency.org resigns after he is found in Panama Papers (Transparency International) Who says that irony is dead?
• Oops! Bill Clinton Says He ACCIDENTALLY Took $500,000 From Algeria During Key Arms Negotiation With State Department (Downtrend) The depressing thing is that this is probably completely legal.
• Radioactive wild boars rampaging around Fukushima nuclear site (The Independent) No people means more area for them to grow, and larger predators that might keep their numbers down have been crowded out by people over the past 1000 years. They are still too radioactive for people to eat them, so mysuggestion is to airdrop a few packs native predators (the now extinct Hokkaido wolf is very similar to the Gray Wolf, or the also now extinct and smaller Honshu wolf come to mind) into the area.
• Second Russian intelligence report on Turkey’s current assistance to Daesh (Voltairenet) Short version: Our “Ally” Turkey is aggressively supporting ISIS.

Plaster of Paris Bagel and Cream Cheese Paperweight:

Scorcese’s most underrated movie/