Hello, good morning, happy Friday. Listen, the President and I have both sworn to uphold the constitution, and honestly I feel like I am doing a better job.
Last week it was extremely warm outside and probably the first Friday where people really had the need to get out and enjoy the sunshine. And they did so here in Chicago… majorly without masks! Approximately half of the people I saw when I went for my weekly beer and food run - and there were a lot of people out - were not wearing masks.
So of course Illinois is “reopening” today and Chicago is “reopening” next week, what could go wrong? “One Day Before Entering Phase 3, Illinois Reports 1,527 New Coronavirus Cases.” Ah, yes, that! That could go wrong!
How do I feel about this? Well:
I don’t need your civil war
In a both utterly unsurprising and totally unbelievable turn of events, the President threatened civil war last night on Twitter. Which is totally cool and not at all concerning given this:
As the head of Cowboys for Trump, Couy Griffin has led pro-Trump horse rides through Washington, D.C., and posed for a photo in the White House with Donald Trump. He’s a superfan of the president and on May 17, he made the case that Democrats should die.
“I’ve come to a place where I’ve come to a conclusion where the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” Griffin said to cheers at a rally at a New Mexico church. He was there to defy a public safety order pertaining to the coronavirus.
An aspiring militia leader plotted to kidnap or kill police officers to win over new recruits, and then steal their equipment to arm his budding anti-government revolt, the FBI said Tuesday.
Christian Stanley Ferguson, a 20-year-old Cleveland man, faces an attempted kidnapping charge after an FBI informant infiltrated the chat room where he allegedly hatched his plot, the latest alleged violent anti-government scheme to emerge during the coronavirus pandemic. He sought out co-conspirators to help him murder police on a popular meme website, according to social media posts reviewed by The Daily Beast.
And this:
There is a group of far-right Nazis who actively want a civil war so they have an excuse to shoot people in the streets. They’re headed to protest sites across the country, heavily armed. They want a fight. And now the President is encouraging shooting protesters! Cool, great, awesome, what could go wrong.
This is all fucking terrifying. I don’t have anything particularly helpful to say about it other than that I would like you all to please stay safe. The protests are generally being organized by people who have a lot of experience and they generally do not need people to travel, so don’t do that unless you’re specifically asked to by an organizer. Be loud, make calls, give money.
You’re not going to see me get upset about property damage when the cops are the ones who escalated the fight, sorry, it’s not happening. A riot is the language of the unheard.
Gotta get down
It’s possible that we were all extremely unfair to Rebecca Black.
The day that everything changed for Rebecca Black was a Friday. On March 11, 2011, the then-13-year-old got an unexpected notification about a YouTube comment. The commenter had seen the video for her then-unknown song “Friday,” on a popular blog and felt compelled to write. “The song sucks, but they said the song is going to be big,” Black recalls. “And I was just like, ‘What?’ ” As soon as I got home, I ran to my computer, and I scrolled down to the comments, and that was immediately when I was like, ‘Oh, no, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is not happening.’ ”
She had a great resurgence with Saturday, and of course the amazing Katy Perry music video. But people still trash her, and if you read this article you will probably agree that doing so is in poor taste! You will learn a lot about Ark Music, which is insane. Here’s another article about it from 2011. I remember watching a YouTube video or reading another piece about them years ago, but I can’t find it now, sorry. It’s a tantalizing tale, though.
Joe Rogan is brain junk food
Have you ever wanted to read a profile of Joe Rogan? Me neither, but The Atlantic has one this week and it’s absolutely fascinating, I could not stop reading. The first few paragraphs will hook you:
Every morning of my Joe Rogan experience began the same way Joe Rogan begins his: with the mushroom coffee.
It’s a pour-and-stir powder made from lion’s mane and chaga—“two rock-star mushrooms,” according to Joe—and it’s made by a company called Four Sigmatic, a regular advertiser on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. As a coffee lover, the mere existence of mushroom coffee offends me. (“I’ll have your most delicious thing, made from your least delicious things, please,” a friend said, scornfully.) But it tastes fine, and even better after another cup of actual coffee.
Next, I took several vitamin supplements from a company called Onnit, whose core philosophy is “total human optimization” and whose website sells all kinds of wicked-cool fitness gear—a Darth Vader kettlebell ($199.95); a 50-foot roll of two-and-a-half-inch-thick battle rope ($249.95); a 25-pound quad mace ($147.95), which according to one fitness-equipment site is a weapon dating back to 11th-century Persia. I stuck to the health products, though, because you know how it goes—you buy one quad mace and soon your apartment is filled with them. I stirred a packet of Onnit Gut Health powder into my mushroom coffee, then downed an enormous pair of Alpha Brain pills, filled with nootropics to help with “memory and focus.”
This feels like some extremely grifter shit, and of course it does because Rogan is a grifter. It’s like Goop for men or whatever.
I do not like Joe Rogan. Thankfully, I do not think this article makes him look sympathetic. I do think it’s important to know why people like him and what his whole deal is.
One does not simply make the putt
Holey Moley is one of the best game shows in years. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. It is beautiful, amazing, hilarious, incredible. I tweeted these feelings about how much I love it, this week, and one of the show’s producers liked my tweet. So I looked him up and found a wonderful profile:
THE LOCAL GUY
“My dad could’ve probably bought his own miniature golf course for all the times we played,” Nick Contino laughs. As Director, Development & Programming, at Eureka Productions, he never could have expected that hitting colorful neon golf balls through crazy structures and hazards throughout Wildwood (New Jersey) as a child would actually be a reference point for a future occupation.Although he grew up in Washington Township, New Jersey, he has fond memories of hanging out with his dad Joe in the city on weekends. “Yeah, I used to go to work with my dad and grandfather at their hardware store (Barlow’s) in Southwest Philly,” he muses. Back in “Township,” however, is where the foundation was set for Contino’s future successes.
He and his dad loved mini-golf! So he created a game show that is giant mini-golf! And it got made! And it’s amazing! I love this! If you are still not sold, watch this “greatest hits” compilation, I hope you love it:
Crime time
Listen, I don’t know, don’t do this:
A well-known Waco, Texas defense lawyer, who once ran for county district attorney, sat behind bars on Saturday after a local police sting allegedly caught him plotting to kill a colleague’s ex-husband using a hitman, according to arrest affidavits obtained by The Daily Beast.
There are several notable elements here. “Defense lawyer.” “Ran for county district attorney.” “Police sting.” “Plotting to kill a colleague’s ex-husband.” “Using a hitman.” I mean, really, every single element of this is… a lot!
Seth Andrew Sutton has long held an upstanding reputation in Waco as a criminal defense lawyer, successfully defending clients in high-profile cases like the aftermath of the Waco biker shooting.
But, in lieu of separate $1 million bonds mandated by a local judge, Sutton and his colleague, Chelsea Tijerina, may not soon see the outside of the McLennan County Jail.
I am a lawyer (but not your lawyer), as mentioned above I have taken an oath to uphold the constitution, I would absolutely never consider hiring a hitman. What the fuck.
I’m an anti-racist (and so can you!)
Brittany Packnett, who rules, posted this great tweet last night:
Here is a direct link to that Google Doc and that Medium post.
Please take a little time to look at these things, bookmark them, share them.
Who can say what consumer relief really means
If, for some reason, you ever decided that you could trust Goldman Sachs again, sorry:
At the time, in 2016, when the Justice Department announced that Goldman would pay “$1.8 billion in the form of relief to aid consumers harmed by its unlawful conduct,” and would “provide loan modifications, including loan forgiveness and forbearance, to distressed and underwater homeowners throughout the country,” I wondered—well, which homeowners? “It is unclear exactly how Goldman’s consumer relief will be doled out and to whom,” reported the New York Times. It was a mysterious settlement.
…
You could imagine Goldman buying the loans at auction and calling up the homeowners and saying “hi, this is Goldman Sachs, we paid off your mortgage for you, have a nice day.” It could buy $1.8 billion face amount of mortgages for, say, $900 million, forgive them all, and claim $1.8 billion of consumer relief at a cost of only $900 million.
That is not what happened.
I do not want to spoil this story, the real ending is too unbelievable and too perfect for Goldman, it is like the most Goldman thing that Goldman could have done. Also the entirety of that post is great, so.
Hello, we have receipts
Oh, I love it when Shaun King gets dragged:
When Shaun King and progressive journalist Benjamin Dixon launched an ambitious multimedia reboot of Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, last February, it was celebrated across social media by prominent voices, including Susan Sarandon, Michael Eric Dyson, and Megan Mullally. A month later, the company boasted on Twitter that it already had “multiple angel investors” and more than 30,000 subscribers contributing $5 per month for students and $10 a month and up for the general public.
…
But 14 months after launching, almost none of what King promised to build has appeared and the site has struggled with issues that alienated many subscribers. The headquarters and television studio was quietly shuttered last summer, and all Atlanta-based staffers laid off. The mobile app disappeared for over a year, and the “full news site” displays branded The North Star apparel for sale alongside relatively scant original journalism.
So many people still don’t know that Shaun King is a dangerous grifter! So be sure to keep this one in your pocket for the next time you see people sharing his “fundraisers.”
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend. Stay inside.