Kehinde Wiley!

Beset by a torrent of constant misinformation, people simply start to give up. Ovadya is quick to remind us that this is common in areas where information is poor and thus assumed to be incorrect. The big difference, Ovadya notes, is the adoption of apathy to a developed society like ours. The outcome, he fears, is not good. “People stop paying attention to news and that fundamental level of informedness required for functional democracy becomes unstable.”

Jonathan Chait:

Republicans found reason to be receptive to arguments for Keynesianism under Bush, to reject them under Obama, and then to forget their old position under Trump.

Weird.

L.L. Bean Inc. wants to test the combination of blockchain and Internet of Things technology to understand how people use its outdoor gear.

Nooooooooooooooope.

Basically Russia committed acts of war against the United States during an election while the eventual winning candidate’s campaign was colluding with them or at the very least home to multiple individuals who were happy to enrich themselves as Russian agents at the expense of the country.

Treason might not have been legally committed, but only because — turns out — the definition of treason is too narrow.

Meanwhile President Pumpkin is bitching about the lack of Democratic applause durning his State of the Union address and planning military parades.

How does the congressional Republican leadership sleep at night?

By way of Casey Newton at The Verge, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have a full-time pollster measuring their approval ratings and social media performance. Or at least they did (and probably will again).

[Tavis] McGinn declined to discuss the results of his polling at Facebook, saying nondisclosure agreements prevented him from doing so. But he said he decided to leave the company after only six months after coming to believe that Facebook had a negative effect on the world.

“I joined Facebook hoping to have an impact from the inside,” he says. “I thought, here’s this huge machine that has a tremendous influence on society, and there’s nothing I can do as an outsider. But if I join the company, and I’m regularly taking the pulse of Americans to Mark, maybe, just maybe that could change the way the company does business. I worked there for six months and I realized that even on the inside, I was not going to be able to change the way that the company does business. I couldn’t change the values. I couldn’t change the culture. I was probably far too optimistic.”

I have nothing to add but a link to Superorganism’s music video for Everybody Wants To Be Famous.

P.S. Delete your account.

This piece by Andrew Sullivan has some excellent analysis of Trump and the Republican Party’s steadfast support of Trump, but the “tribalism” framing is an orgy of false equivalence.

Trump is undermining democracy! Rep. Kid Kennedy spoke Spanish on national television! See both parties are tribal!

Anyways, this bit was great:

If Trump is accused of collusion, the gambit is to accuse the FBI, the media, and the DOJ of some sort of “collusion” as well. If Trump is exposed as evading the rule of law, so now must the Justice Department and the FBI be seen as undermining it. The logic here is pure Roy Cohn…. And the tactics Cohn once deployed are now all around us: throw back the exact same charges you’re facing against those investigating you. Invent a conspiracy theory to rival a collusion theory. Throw sand in everyone’s eyes. Get your allegations out first, in as inflammatory and scandalous a way as possible. Ransack people’s private lives and communications to more effectively demonize them.

Dominate the news cycles. Do anything to muddy the conflict and to sow suspicion. Lie, if you have to. Exercise not the slightest concern for the stability of the system as a whole — because tribe comes first. Trump, to make things worse, sees no distinction between the tactics he deployed as a private citizen in lawsuits for decades and the tactics he is deploying as president, because he has no conception of a presidency committed first of all to the long-term maintenance of the system rather than the short-term pursuit of personal interest.

Basically, a bunch of 1920s gods based on major modernist figures stuck in the middle of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, done in a comics-prose hybrid that’s clearly trying to start a fight with JONATHAN HICKMAN. (Yeah, you heard, Jon. Come at us, bro.) It’s high art versus lo art, with the most beautiful AUD KOCH artwork the world has ever seen. We’re so excited, we may have to have a lie down.

Sold.

This will end badly, and the sooner it does, the better.

— Paul Krugman on Bitcoin

That’s right, a bar where you’ll throw axes. “Think of a cross between bowling and darts,” says Marla. “You can rent a lane or two, grab drinks from the bar, and kick back for some friendly ‘lumberjack-style’ competition. It’s insanely fun.”

Insanely something else maybe too though.