Events

I just realized, 25 years ago today I graduated from college. To help you understand what that means, here's the Beloit College Mindset List for kids born back then. And there I am with my college radio colleague Renee Depuy: For context, this was my dorm refrigerator two days earlier (you can see the packing boxes to the left):

Via Deeply Trivial:

I'm sad that an urban area with 8 million people can no longer support two regional, daily newspapers. This makes me very uncomfortable: Tronc, the parent company of the Tribune, has entered into a nonbinding letter of intent to acquire Wrapports Holdings, which owns the Sun-Times as well other assets such as the Chicago Reader alternative weekly, the Aggrego digital content business and the syndicated column The Straight Dope. The announcement follows months of discussions between Wrapports and Tronc...

The New York Times yesterday published a chilling description of how Venezuela's democracy sputtered and died: Venezuela, by the numbers, resembles a country hit by civil war. Its economy, once Latin America’s richest, is estimated to have shrunk by 10 percent in 2016, more than Syria’s. Its inflation that year has been estimated as high as 720 percent, nearly double that of second-ranked South Sudan, rendering its currency nearly worthless. In a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves...

Just, I dunno, man. Did the president blab to the Russian Foreign Minister what our intelligence capabilities are? In front of TASS, no less? How about the Troglodyte General reversing the Obama Administration's efforts to target only violent drug offenders instead of corner boys? And the Grand Old Party abetting this nonsense? Or how to understand the Comey firing? Sleep is overrated.

A fossil found in a mine in Alberta six years ago is one of the best-preserved dinosaur specimens ever discovered: On March 21, 2011, Shawn Funk was digging in Alberta’s Millennium Mine with a mechanical backhoe, when he hit “something much harder than the surrounding rock.” A closer look revealed something that looked like no rock Funk had ever seen, just “row after row of sandy brown disks, each ringed in gunmetal gray stone.” What he had found was a 2,500-pound dinosaur fossil, which was soon shipped...

Laura Reston at New Republic has a good piece on how the Soviets Russian government is doubling down on its disinformation campaign against Western democracies: One of the most recent battles in the propaganda war took place on January 4, less than a week after President Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in the U.S. election. The Donbass International News Agency, a small wire service in Eastern Ukraine, published a short article online headlined “MASSIVE NATO...

With no one who can read written words believing that the official reason for former FBI Director James Comey's firing is true, the Washington Post has three germaine articles today on the subject: "Inside Trump's anger and impatience" "Why Trump expected only applause when he told Comey, ‘You’re fired.’" And Trump's poll numbers were 36 approve, 58 disapprove before this news hit. The last story has this nugget: Interestingly, the reason the numbers have ticked down appears to be the group that elected...

I was waiting with bated breath to see how Scott Adams would spin last night's Watergate moment into yet another example of the masterful persuasion techniques of President Trump. Like Baghdad Bob standing on the hotel roof, he did not disappoint: Democrats and the Opposition Media reflexively oppose almost everything President Trump does. This time he gave them something they wanted, badly, but not for the reason they wanted. That’s a trigger. It forces anti-Trumpers to act angry in public that he did...

I'll get to Eddie Lampert's interview with the Chicago Tribune later today. But first, let's take a moment to realize that as we shake our heads at the amateur hour over at the White House, we knew damn well they were going to cause a Constitutional crisis at some point. And that point arrived last night: President Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, abruptly terminating the top official leading a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s advisers colluded with the...