“Payless ShoeSource is shuttering all of its 2,100 remaining stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico”
Category: Knowledge and News
Cool
The interactive tool enables users to hone in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.
“President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action — including a national emergency.”
And so … the legal battle will probably begin.
“Inside America’s eerie abandoned malls: How shopping centers that once buzzed with eager shoppers are now being transformed into Amazon depots staffed by robots“
I have no problem with this concept, but I have a question or two …
1. If this is a secret program, why do I know about it?
2. If I know about it, doesn’t that mean Iran also knows?
Jokes aside, some of these accusations involve serious criminal behavior.
“Lyndon LaRouche, the political extremist and conspiracy theorist who ran for president in eight consecutive national elections, died Tuesday, his political action committee confirmed. He was 96.”
One of the more fascinating tidbits: he ran one of his eight Presidential campaigns from prison! He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for running some scam or another, but he only served about six years. I presume they let him out early because they just got tired of listening to him. I think even Charles Manson found him “a little out there.”
Although he did nothing that I know of on the internet, he was the true father of internet nutbaggery. He was a prominent nutburger before it was even a thing. If you took ten of his wackiest positions and intermingled them with ten headlines from the late, lamented Weekly World News, nobody but a true LaRouche expert could tell the difference.
Although LaRouche was pretty much wrong about everything he ever said, I suppose he may well turn out to be right about his overall premise:
“A central tenet of his apocalyptic platform warned of an inevitable global downward slide into crisis.”
True enough. That may not happen in the next ten or a hundred or even a million years, but I suppose it is inevitable. Maybe it will occur fairly soon in cosmic terms, or maybe not until the sun burns out. Making that prediction is sort of like predicting that Dwayne Johnson will die. No matter how fit and healthy he seems today, your prediction has to be right eventually.
The background: they published some of Bezos’s intimate text messages, whereupon Bezos hired investigators to find out how the Enquirer could have gotten their hands on his personal texts. The Enquirer does not like being investigated …
And then Bezos picks up the story …
“A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.”
After Bezos ignored their verbal threats, they sent him a written description of the pics they have of him, and said “It would give no editor pleasure to send this email. I hope common sense can prevail — and quickly.”
Needless to say (since we know about it), Bezos simply chose to make the letter public, and continued his investigation. He told his investigators that they have an unlimited budget – and Bezos is VERY VERY rich, so “unlimited” means truly as much as a hundred investigators could spend in several lifetimes.
The big question – why is the Enquirer so paranoid about being investigated? The answer lies in their settlement in the Trump case. In return for not being prosecuted for the obvious crimes they committed there, they had to sign an agreement not to commit any crimes of any kind for three years, and if they did, then “A.M.I. shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this office has knowledge.” In other words, if they commit any further crimes, they would no longer get away scott-free on the Trump crimes. That probably would mean prison time for ol’ Mr. Pecker himself.
Obviously, they can’t afford to have a swarm of investigators up in their business.
They only part I don’t understand is why they thought Bezos would cave to the blackmail. He’s not running for office, and he has more money than he can ever spend, even if he has to fork over half to his wife, so he has nothing to lose, nothing to be afraid of, and there is really no way to control him unless he has committed a crime. Publish his dick pics? Who cares when you have 60 billion dollars earned legally? If you give me 60 billion dollars, you can publish all the dick pics you want. I’ll even pose for some new ones. Just make sure the check is good.
(For many reasons.)
Among the useful/useless things I learned from this article: there is an Emojipedia.
“Creagan’s proposal calls for raising the cigarette-buying age to 30 by next year, 40 in 2021, 50 in 2022 and 60 in 2023.
By 2024, the minimum age would be 100. He said the bill is structured to withstand any legal challenge.”
“Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly, already under fire for killing the current issue of the city-funded Dearborn Historian because it carried a report on Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism, has now fired the magazine’s editor.”
Despite censure from the Historical Commission, the mayor has offered no explanation for either action.
Mueller’s office has poo-pooed the article, or has at least established that some details are not correct.
UPDATE from the comments section:
Inside the Mueller’s teams decision to dispute the Buzzfeed article
DARPA Wants to Build Conscious Robots Using Insect Brains
Good idea for a game show: Is it a modern headline, or the original TV Guide summary of a 1950s horror film?
In the past year, the percentage of Americans approving the wall has increased from 34% to 42%. Assuming 250 million Americans of voting age, that means Trump managed, in the past year, to convince an additional 20 million eligible voters to support his position.
Among college-educated voters, support for the wall rose 13 points, from 30% to 43%. That means that college-educated voters are now slightly more likely to support the wall than those without degrees. The opposite was true last year.
“Strong” opposition to the wall has declined significantly, from 52 percent last January to 38 percent now.
———–
Mind you, these findings still show that the majority of Americans oppose the wall. (54-42, with 4 undecided).
It’s also worth noting that the majority of Americans blame Trump for the shutdown. About twice as many blame Trump as blame the Democrats. (53-29, with the other 18% either in the “don’t know” or “both” camps).
Americans overwhelmingly reject Trump’s depiction of the border situation as a “crisis.” Only 24% agree with that. On the other hand, another 48% call it a serious problem, so almost 3/4 of Americans believe that the border situation is a serious problem or worse. (The rest are either undecided or in the “not a serious problem” camp.)
There will be a tantrum tonight …
“President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general will tell senators ‘it is vitally important’ that special counsel Robert Mueller be allowed to complete his Russia investigation … Congress and the public should learn the results.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019
seize control of the internet
declare martial law
make churches replace the face of Jesus with his own
make everyone wear their underwear on the outside
Usual stuff. Nothing to see here. Move along. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
(The real stuff is scarier than the shit I made up.)
Dolezal, who legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, was charged in May with welfare fraud for allegedly illegally receiving $8,747 in food assistance. During that same time, it’s said she deposited $80,000 while claiming she was surviving on ‘a few hundred’ dollars a month that was being donated by friends
The Pentagon’s Chief of Staff Resigns (on a Saturday ??!!)
This Twitter comment made me laugh:
“Sending my congratulations to new Pentagon Chief of Staff and recently commissioned Rear Admiral Mick Mulvaney.”
“More and more people are now creating deepfakes featuring everyone from their classmates, coworkers, exes, and even complete strangers whose photos they find online.”
Related: “Scarlett Johansson says fighting deepfake porn is ‘fruitless’“
It appears to be a “contact binary,” a common shape for distant comets, as reported by the Planetary Society. It’s not totally clear how these shapes form, but it’s thought that they begin as two objects orbiting one another that merge.