• BLACK LIVES MATTER – SOUTH BEND CALLS FOR MAYOR PETE TO RESIGN (Facebook) Uploading a well-deserved can of whup ass on Mayor Pete. 
• How Robert Bork Fathered the New Gilded Age (Pro Market) How Robert Bork overturned antitrust, and destroyed America.
• Why Is JPMorgan Chase Always in the Middle of Scandalous News? Fake Gold Anyone? (Wall Street on Parade) There is a pattern.  Perhaps they should go the way of Arthur Anderson.
• Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (Ambassador’s Brief) One of Dean Baker’s best essays on the subject.
• How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (New Yorker) Ronan Farrow owns this beat. 
• Taking the credit: can universities tackle academic fraud? (Financial Times) Professors are putting their names on articles written by students and subordinates.  Hoocoocanode?
• Democracy Dies From Bad Fact-Checking (The Nation) Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler is a contemptible hypocrite.
• New Mexico Abolishes Spousal Privilege And I Have No Idea Who To Talk To About That (Above the Law) This is bad beyond belief.

The first turbine powered ship:

• The Curious Transformation of Mike Lee (Google Transparency Project) He went from a critic to a champion of Google because the “Chocolate Factory” bought him off.
• Our Leaders Kill For Their Own Benefit (Ian Welsh) A reminder that at rarified levels of power and wealth, ethics stop being a consideration.
• YouTube flags robot battle videos as “animal fights” (Ars Technica) Adventures in artificial stupidity.
• An 8,000-Year-Old Platform in Britain Could Be the Oldest Boat-Building Site Ever Discovered (Smithsonian) Of course it was Britain.
• Between Plagues, Medieval Peasants Enjoyed Bawdiness and Brawling (Atlas Obscura) Medieval peasants worked about 27 hours a week.
• Indict Aung San Suu Kyi for War Crimes Against the Rohingya (The Intercept) Yes. 
• How a Trump Tax Break to Help Poor Communities Became a Windfall for the Rich (New York Times) This is a feature, not a bug, of tax incentives.

My son doing his stand-up routine:

• Racist letter spawns restaurant support in Siler City, NC (Raleigh News & Observer) They were the target of a racist letter, the the support from the community in response that had them run out of food.
• The Case against Obama (London Review of Books)  A nice summary of the crimes and misdemeanors of the Obama administration.
• today’s topic: why $TSLA FSD is a complete fiction, why the architecture is a fraud (Twitter, as aggregated by Thread Reader) Makes an excellent case that Tesla’s full driving mode is a transparent fraud.
• The west has spent 20 years getting Putin wrong, and now it may be too late to get it right (The Independent) The thesis is that Putin is not a Bond villain, but simply acting in support of Russian interests.
• Huge Survey of Firmware Finds No Security Gains in 15 Years (The Security Ledger) Of course not, there is no money in security.
• Israel has thousands of young men who carry assault rifles. Why don’t they commit mass shootings? (Dallas Morning News) Good question, though I find the answer the author gives to be a incomplete.
• Wind power prices now lower than the cost of natural gas (Ars Technica) Solar is heading for a similar inflection point.

Pretty Much:

• Orange is the new green: How orange peels revived a Costa Rican forest (Princeton University) How spreading orange peels on denuded rain forest supercharged regrowth.
• Sites using Facebook ‘Like’ button liable for data, EU court rules (EURACTIV) Consistent with EU privacy directive.
• MSNBC’s Ridiculous War on Bernie Sanders (Jacobin) MSNBC has jumped C. Megaladon over this.
• Column: Health insurance companies are useless. Get rid of them (Los Angeles Times) People may want to preserve their coverage, but they HATE their insurance companies.
• Millennials are killing these 7 military traditions (Duffelblog) It’s parody. Item 7 is “Winning Wars” 
• Inside hate groups on Facebook, police officers trade racist memes, conspiracy theories and Islamophobia (Reveal) Law enforcement has been objectively pro-white supremacist for some time.
• Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do. (Krebs on Security) The wireless companies are complicit in a whole constellation of criminal enterprises.
• How the Supreme Court Is Rebranding Corruption (Promarket.org) SCOTUS has been aggressively legalizing most forms of bripery over the past few decades.
• Here’s a Better Reason to Unsubscribe From The New York Times (New Republic) Ignore the headline kerfuffle, the real problem is the parochial nature of the paper:  It is the, “Paper for the East Coast rich.

Saxon Glass Working:  Experimental Archeology looking at how the Saxons recycled glass from the Roman era for the next few centuries:

• Pro-Trump Republican aiming to unseat Ilhan Omar charged with felony theft | US news | The Guardian
• Why the dockless scooter industry is going after a repossessor and a bike shop owner – The Verge
• Why Nancy Pelosi Won’t Impeach | The New Republic Because she is primarily concerned with hedging potential losses, not governing. 
• Why Corporations Want You to Shut Up and Meditate | The Nation
• Privatization of public goods can cause population decline | Nature Ecology & Evolution
• Just an abstract, and about bacteria, but a may apply to our society. 
• Man Who Built The Retweet: “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds” (Buzzfeed) Pretty much.
• Rashida Tlaib: While Trump spews hate, I continue to do my job (Washington Post) Bam!
• Seeing Through Silicon Valley’s Shameless ‘Disruption’(WIRED) Likens them to scabs, who, to quote  Pete Seeger, “Will bounce back and make a good living on what he takes out of blind men’s cups.”  A well deserved cup of whup ass.

And then their instruments caught fire:

• AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making ‘Friends’ Exclusive (Techdirt) Yes, it’s just “Friends”, but it underscores the point:  These companies are monopolists, and relying on their good nature is idiotic.
• New Zealand penguins drop in for sushi (BBC) Too cute.  Shades of the movie Madagascar.
• Banks Again Hoist on Their Cost-Cutting Petard: Burgeoning Credit Card Fraud (Naked Capitalism) Penny wise, and pound foolish.
• Failing to Plan: How Ayn Rand Destroyed Sears (Verso) Ayn Rand doesn’t work for capitalists either.
• This is Going to Get Worse (The Baffler) Money quote, “It will get worse because the leadership of the Democratic Party is not built, temperamentally or constitutionally, for this fight. It is built for 1996, ready to debate the V-chip or whether the top tax bracket should be 36 percent or 39 percent. It is a party built to negotiate, to concede, and to see “getting something done” as the value-neutral definition of victory.” 
• U.S. Shale Is Doomed No Matter What They Do (OilPrice.com) It’s been obvious for years that the fracking boom was unsustainable from a business perspective.
• Bad governance: How privatization increases corruption in the developing world (Regulation and Governance) Corruption in privatization is a feature, not a bug:  It is private entities looting public assets. [PDF]
• Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You (The New York Times) This has been known for over a decade.
• How a data detective exposed suspicious medical trials (Nature) Basic shoe leather journalism:  He looks at the raw data and flags the studies when the samples have significant statistical anomalies.

The Movie version of Penguins and sushi:

• Behold, the most (intentionally) poorly designed website ever created (Ars Technica) I’ve seen worse, though those were unintentional, and that’s not including Geocities.
• How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained (The Guardian) The Devil’s Tech-Bro Dictionary.
• Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Friendly Police Fantasy (The American Conservative) Buttigieg ignores reality, which is that people fear police because their impunity is a petri dish for sociopaths.
• Court Upholds Conviction Of Cop Who Threatened, Beat, Tased, And Arrested A Man For Complaining About Being Beaten By Him Earlier (Techdirt) Speaking of which.
• The Jeffrey Epstein case is why people believe in Pizzagate (The Week) The similarities between the Pizzagate hoax and the Jeffrey Epstein matter are rather striking.
• Jeffrey Epstein Is the Ultimate Symbol of Plutocratic Rot (New York Times) People have known that Epstein raped girls for years, and given him a pass because he is rich and powerful.

Have some Llamas with Hats:

• Design Genius Jony Ive Leaves Apple, Leaving Behind Crapified Products That Cannot Be Repaired (naked capitalism) Apple has increasingly chosen style over reliability.  It’s not just the butterfly keyboard.  It’s ditching the magsafe power cord, thing iPhones that bend, unexpandable “Professional workstations, etc.
• New Solar + Battery Price Crushes Fossil Fuels, Buries Nuclear (Forbes) Half the cost of a natural gas plant, and full cost of nuclear has always been stratospheric.
• I Was One of 36 Jews Arrested Protesting ICE. Never Again Is Now. (The Forward) A Jew who recognizes Trump’s concentration camps for what they are.
• Kavanaugh’s Clerkship Quid Pro Quo Continues (Above the Law) Corruption at Yale Law School.  They endorsed someone unsuited for the job in order to get more clerks on the Supreme Court.
• If The Democratic Primary Field Was a University History Department (Notes from the Ironbound)  “Joe Biden is the old professor still teaching off of notes he typed up in 1975 and who gets handsy at the holiday party after one too many scotch and sodas.”  It’s the funniest thing on the internet you’ll read today.

Don’t make Bernie Sanders angry, you wouldn’t like it when he’s angry:

• Study Claims One Punctuation Mark Has Been Skewing Our Scientific Ranking System (Science Alert) The hyphen.
• Cheddar To The Rescue? UK Company Uses Cheese To Power 4,000 Homes (OilPrice) Behold the power of cheese
• Nefarious LinkedIn (Corey Prophitt) Like every other social media site, they are spying on you.
• Lawyer bitten by shark endures the inevitable jokes (ABA Journal) What has happened to professional courtesy?
• Britons View Atheists As More Moral Than Believers, Religion More Harmful Than Good (Church and State) As Abraham Lincoln says, “I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”
• Milton Friedman’s Economic Racism (Evonomics) “Friedman’s original claim in 1962 might be forgivable—but his continued endorsement of it in 2002 is a demonstration of a deeply studied and purposeful ignorance of the literature on race and slavery.”
• The Sameness of Cass Sunstein (The New Republic) The beauty of a well written negative review.

Yes, this is a very young Peter Capaldi:

• Kamala Harris Stopped Cooperation With San Francisco Church Sex Abuse Victims (The Intercept) To the degree that the past is prologue, this does not bode well.
• Reining in CEO compensation and curbing the rise of inequality (Economic Policy Institute) “This paper argues for the desirability of reining in CEO pay and discusses policy strategies that could be part of such an effort.”
• How Boeing Bean-Counters Courted the 737 MAX Disaster (Daily Beast) Also notes the direct line from McDonnell’s took over Boeing (with Boeing’s money) and how this led to a toxic culture.
• A Moment of Silence: The case for keeping new organizers offline. (The South Lawn) Makes a cogent argument that novice political organizers should stay far away from the internet or social media.
• Micropayments-for-news pioneer Blendle is pivoting from micropayments (Nieman Journalism Lab) They could not make money on a pay for articles, so they have moved to premium subscriptions.
• London Celebrates The Monty Python Reunion By Putting A 50-Foot Dead Parrot In Potters Field Park (Fast Company) From 5 years ago, but too good to ignore.
• 2,500 years ago, these folks weren’t cremated – but their funeral-goers were absolutely baked: Earliest evidence of pot smoking discovered (The Register) Oldest evidence of marijuana smoking.  No Fig Newtons here though.

Pining for the fjords:

• How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years (Ars Technica) A tale of ineluctable evil.
• Man Restoring a Classic Synthesizer Goes On a 9-Hour Acid Trip After Accidentally Touching LSD-Covered Knob (Gizmodo) Your feel weird story of the day.
• ‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming for Your Job’—Management Is (Gizmodo) A truth that needs to be said.
• Nice Bones You Got There, Shame If a Startup Was to Start Renting Out Pogo Sticks (Gizmodo) As near as I can figure it out, this Pogo stick shring startup is real. I still call bullsh%$.
• Researcher Exploits Microsoft’s Notepad to ‘Pop a Shell’ (Threatpost) This is hard core hacking.
• Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth (New York Times) Bean Burrito Night on Mars

Godzilla will never die, except, of course, in his very first movie:

I want some fan to splice in a digital avatar of Raymond Burr.

• The Huffington Post‘s War on Medical Science: A Brief History (Science-Based Medicine) It’s not just anti-vaxx bullsh%$.
• Meet Murray Cox, Airbnb’s Public Enemy No. 1 in New York (Bloomberg) Even more than Uber and Lyft, Airbnb profits on negative externalities.  (Making the rest of us pay for their actions)
• J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney and Refused to Let Disney Studios Adapt His Work (Open Culture) Not surprised.
• The British Army’s Guide For Spotting “Extreme Right Wing” Soldiers Has Leaked Online (Buzzfeed) Note that the Pentagon does not appear to have such a program.
• Jewish Teens Don’t Regret Helping Save Man With Swastika Tattoo (NBC10 Boston) Tikkun F%$#ing Olam
• F-35 Dogfight Accidentally Resulted in a Sky Penis, Officials Say (Military.com) Yeah, “Accidentally.”

Charlie doing standup and Sharon^* doing the camera work:

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

• Louisiana’s Democratic Governor Will Sign Fetal Heartbeat Bill (Splinter News) The headline on the page, “The Democratic Party’s Tent Is Too Big,” says it all.
• Alligator Spotted on Alligator Pool Float at Miami Airbnb (Miami New Times) Maximum Florida, huh?
•  IHOP And Ramadan: A Uniquely American-Muslim Tradition (WAMU) I dunno how unique.  I remember Chinese food and a movie on Christmas as a Jew.
• A Comprehensive Guide to Rahm Emanuel’s Failures as Mayor (The Intercept) This man has been a travesty his entire political career.
• The US Government Is Like A Bad Dad (Caitlin Johnstone) A nice essay on how “American Exceptionalism” is having an abusive neighbor.
• We’ve Hit a New Low in Campaign Hit Pieces (Rolling Stone)  The Daily Beast ran an article about Russian Support for Gabby Gifford’s Tulsi Gabbard’s Presidential campaign.  The evidence: 3 donors, one of whom was named “Goofy Grapes”.  Matt Taibbi is unamused.

Chinese food on Christmas, the music video:

• How America’s Oldest Gun Maker Went Bankrupt: A Financial Engineering Mystery (New York Times) No mystery. Private equity robbed them blind.
• The Team That Scores The Most Points Wins, Even If The Scoring Rules Are Complicated  (Eschaton) On how incompetent political consultants in the Democratic Party alibi their failures.
• US Border Patrol Is the Most Brutal Militia of All (Truthout) Sadism and brutality does appear toat the core of their institutional culture, and I am an immigration hardliner saying this. 
• Medieval Bunny Rabbits (Open Culture)  It appears that murderous bunny rabbits were very much a part of medieval culture, I wonder if Monty Python knew this when they did the movie.
• ‘Cow kiss challenge’: Austria tells people to shun charity dare (The Guardian) The hed says it all.

The Who, The Roots, Jimmy Fallon, and Elementary School musical instruments.

Pete Townshend smashes his ukulele at the end:

• Sinister secret backdoor found in networking gear perfect for government espionage: The Chinese are – oh no, wait, it’s Cisco again (The Register) The question is who is a worse security threat, Huawei or Ciusco.
• Organisms that breathe arsenic discovered in the Pacific Ocean (New Atlas) I would have figured Sulphur or Selenium, which are under Oxygen on the periodic table, not arsenic, which is under nitrogen.
• Rachel Maddow endorses regime change in Venezuela to “push Russia back,” sympathizes with Bolton and Pompeo (The Grayzone) Not just jumping the shark, jumping C. Megaladon.
• Microsoft offers software tools to secure elections  (Associated Press) Microsoft + election + security =  abject terror.
• The Great Gambia Heist (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) What is noteable is just how much the west profits on this corruption.
• Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment of Street Lighting in New York City (National Bureau of Economic Research) Cheap and effective, so the penal/industrial complex is not interested
• Scientist to politicians: End oil, farm subsidies to save planet (Reuters) The numbers for these subsidies are huge, and they actively harm the rest of us.

Here is Maddow calling for regime change in Venezuela

• Great White Sharks Flee From Killer Whales (The Atlantic) We now know who are the real apex predators.
• Joe Biden Is a Fraud, Plain and Simple (Truthdig) Some people might consider this a nasty attack.  I consider it to be an accurate summary of Biden’s history.
• A Rough Transcript of Every Interview With Pete Buttigieg (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency) A delightful sendup of Bittigieg’s content free politics.
• The Labor Market for Financial Misconduct (National Bureau of Economic Research) “We then turn to the role of labor markets in constraining misconduct, documenting that while some firms penalize misconduct through a sharp increase in job separations, other firms are willing to hire these advisers, recycling the bad apples in the industry.”
• Family Cited For Viking Funeral on Local Lake (Broad Street Beacon) A hoax, but I wish that it was true.
• Rich guys are most likely to have no idea what they’re talking about, study suggests (Washington Post) Meritocracy, my ass.
• Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: ‘I wouldn’t recommend it’ (The Register) A new definition of “Hands Free” driving, and I would note that (once again) pr0n is an early adopter of technology.

Now, let’s cast a bronze cannon:

• Why there’s a recovery ‘speed limit’ after mass extinction (Futurity) Basically, animals need to evolve into new species to occupy the vacated niches.
• The Final Battle in Big Tech’s War to Dominate Your World (The New Republic) Trying to make your life impossible without them.
• Microsoft confirms you really, really don’t need to ‘safely remove’ USB flash drives anymore (The Verge) Good to know.
• BT Tower broadcasts error message to the nation as Windows displays admin’s shame (The Register) The joys of digital billboards.
• Missing Novell server discovered after four years (The Register) From 2001, but the story of a server that got sealed behind a wall STILL RUNNING after 4 years, Cask of Amontillado style is too good not to note.
• Tolkien’s guide to contemporary politics (UnHerd) The EU (and Zuckerberg) as Sauron.

Eggs Woodhouse from Archer:

• Put Bernie Sanders’ Face on Those Joe Biden Photos, Then Imagine What Party Leaders Would Be Saying (naked capitalism) If it had been Bernie, they would have hanged him in Effigy, New York.
• Wolf pack living west of Cascade Mountains for first time in decades (The Seattle Times) Good.
• Mobile phone electromagnetic radiation affects Amyloid Precursor Protein and α-synuclein metabolism in SH-SY5Y cells (ScienceDirect) Cell phones and Alzheimers, preliminary, but disturbing.
• How Neoliberalism Reinvented Democracy (Jacobin) Replacing the citizen with the consumer. 
• New York State Overhauls Discovery Process in Criminal Cases (The Marshall Project) Reforming New York State’s broken discovery process.
• Was Ending the Draft a Grave Mistake? (Truthdig) I don’t know, but it bears consideration.

Woke military recruiting ads.  Who Knew?

• MIT and NASA engineers demonstrate a new kind of airplane wing (Phys.org) Legos, the future of aviation.
• Revealed: Amazon employees are left to suffer after workplace injuries (The Guardian) Juck Feff.
• How the Church Left Depoliticizes DSA Branches (Benjamin Studebaker) Money quote, “They can only do this because many of the people in these DSA branches are materially comfortable members of the professional class. ……… They don’t care about the citizens in their community who are confronted everyday with the visceral misery of poverty.”
• List: Attorney General William Barr Summarizes Famous Broadway Musicals (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency) Best listicle ever.
• How a guy called Colin Platt became the richest person in the world (FT Alphaville) It was a joke crypto currency issue, but aren’t they all joke crypto currency issues?.

John Oliver observes the obvious about Vince McMahon and WWE, that their personnel policies are abusive beyond belief, “When you’ve lost the moral high ground to the f%$#ing NFL, you are morally subterranean.” 

• Barack Obama represents the old Democratic party (The Guardian) Money quote, “The former president says he’s worried about ‘purity’ tests in the Democratic party. What he’s really worried about is his surrogates losing control of the party”
• Why does the Left sneer at the traditional working class? (UnHerd) The UK, addressing the all to common trope that addressing issues of the working class is just pandering to white people.
• Buy Yourself a F*^king Latte (The Big Picture) Barry Ritholtz runs the numbers, and Suze Orman’s numbers on this, noting that Orman’s numbers assume a return of 12% AFTER inflation, more than double of the market’s rate of return. Wage increases of 2% a year do a lot more.
• That mental health app might share your data without telling you (The Verge) We don’t just need regulation, we need executives behind bars.
• Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? (The Atlantic) The so-called, “Silurian Hypothesis.” The authors of the peer reviewed paper don’t believe it, but present it as a mental exercise on how evidence of such things are fleeting.
• Nancy Pelosi shows no restraint on disparaging young progressive women (The Guardian) Pelosi really needs to go.
• Pete Buttigieg Trivializes the Impact of Trade on US Job Losses (Truthout) As a matter of settled law, we have been subsidizing jobs moving overseas for decades, and automation is an excuse to do nothing to call capital, and the body politic, to account.
• The Kushner Family Passover Haggadah, 2019 Edition (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency) Read this. it is brilliant.

A tour of an old machine shop. I love this sh%$: