IKEA Monkey

On Tuesday evening, President Trump tweeted this:

Great News: The boring but very nasty magazine, The Atlantic, is rapidly failing, going down the tubes, and has just been forced to announce it is laying off at least 20% of its staff in order to limp into the future. This is a tough time to be in the Fake News Business!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020

Writing a column to prove the president’s tweet correct—boring but very nasty—turns out to be tricky, so tricky that I failed at it utterly. The first difficulty is syntactical. The president didn’t say boring and very nasty. He said boring but very nasty. That means it is insufficient for the column to be merely both boring and very nasty. It has to be boring, and despite being boring, nevertheless very nasty. I’m not sure I know how to write a column like that. I’m not sure I even know what that means.

What is boring and, notwithstanding the boredom it induces, also very nasty? The moray eel comes to mind. It lives in crevices and basically stays put. It lives a very boring life. Yet it will bite nastily when bothered. It can be poisonous to eat. It’s a counterpuncher, as Trump would say.

How do you write a moray eel of a column?

This brings me to the second difficulty: It’s not that easy to be boring on purpose. I’ve bored a lot of people over the years, I’m sure. I can’t recall the last time I set out to bore people. And I’m almost certain that the nature of the effort undermines the possibility of its own success. That is, the effort to bore people is a pretty interesting one.

[Tom Nichols: Donald Trump, the most unmanly president]

The truth is that most people who are boring have no idea they are boring. They think that they are being wise or clever or that they are making very important points. Take Trump, for example. He seems to think that his gazillionth tweet decrying media that report on him as “Fake News” and whining about how reporting on him is “nasty” is positively scintillating. He seems to think that what the public is yearning for right now from its president is yet another self-serving attack on his critics, a few more conspiracy theories, and a whole lot of superlatives in all caps.

I just don’t think I can outdo that for boring. I don’t even read the president’s tweets with horror anymore. I read them only when forced to by circumstances, and then with a kind of resigned Oh, yes, he did that again sort of air. After which I turn back to whatever it was I’d been thinking about. I may be able to bore you a little, dear reader, but I can’t write a column that can hold a candle to this guy.

Which brings me, finally, to “very nasty.” I’m not the nicest guy in the world. I won’t pretend to be above the occasional gratuitous swipe or even petty insult. I was positively gleeful when I got so far under Mike Pompeo’s skin that he wrote to me on CIA letterhead scolding me (and giving me his mother’s fudge recipe). But in a hundred years, it would never dawn on me to do anything as nasty as—amid an economic catastrophe caused by a pandemic I had grossly mismanaged—gloating over laid-off employees. That’s next-level nastiness, nastiness not just to The Atlantic as an institution, but to real people who have lost their jobs. I can’t compete with that.

[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]

And weirdly, it’s not even close to the nastiest recent presidential tweet. It didn’t, after all, insinuate that Jeffrey Goldberg had murdered anyone at the magazine. It didn’t lie about the integrity of elections, or pandemic disease, or political spying. It was, at once, next-level nastiness and totally boring.

So, yeah, I tried to write an entire column both as boring and as nasty as the president’s tweet. And I failed. I just couldn’t do in a few hundred words what the president can pull off in a single tweet.

Color me defeated—a LOSER.

Plans to hold the Republican National Convention in North Carolina, a key swing state, are now a smoking pile of ashes after President Arty McDeals — once again — set fire to a Republican project with his batshit Twitter feed. Because actually wandering into the room while your agents are attempting to hammer out the provisions of a deal and shouting WE SHOOT THE HOSTAGE IF YOU DON'T GIVE US 100 PERCENT OF WHAT WE WANT is ... kind of a crap negotiating tactic. Go know!

Every organization holding events in North Carolina, from NASCAR to the Carolina Panthers, has been required to submit a COVID plan, and CNN reports that the RNC's convention team had been diligently negotiating with Governor Roy Cooper's office and officials in Charlotte for a safe convention during the coronavirus pandemic. On a cordial May 26 phone call, the parties discussed multiple contingencies "from a full in-person convention to a virtual or online convention" with no deadline for a final deal.

But then ...

---

Burn it all down! Demanding to be "immediately given an answer by the Governor as to whether or not the space will be allowed to be fully occupied," Trump threatened to dump two years' worth of planning if the state of North Carolina wouldn't guarantee to waive all health and safety regulations during a viral pandemic. Because if Donald Trump can't jam 50,000 screaming, maskless MAGA loons from every state in the union into a packed hall to spit in each other's faces, then he's taking his spray of droplets and going home.

"Sadly, now there can be but one outcome," as David Attenborough might say while observing a starving rodent sink its incisors into the neck of the first of its blind babies. The Gippers knew then that the mad king was going to destroy millions of dollars and years of planning in a fit of pique, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do to stop it. The best they could do was try to shift the blame onto Roy Cooper, a Democrat up for re-election this year. (Although pollsters appear to have given up on the race in early May after five consecutive polls showed him 14 points or more ahead of his Republican challenger.)

Luckily, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel long ago surrendered her integrity along with her maiden name, so she was well-prepared to spew shit.

"When the Republican National Committee contracted to come to Charlotte to host the 2020 national convention it was for a full convention," McDaniel wrote to Roy Cooper in a May 30 letter. "A full convention entailed 19,000 delegates, alternate delegates, staff, volunteers, elected officials and guests inside the Spectrum Center. In order to house and feed them, we need full hotels and restaurants and bars at capacity."

Why won't Roy Cooper guarantee eight weeks in advance that a deadly virus will have disappeared, that's what Ronna McDaniels wants to know!

Touting her organization's plans to offer daily temperature checks, "testing before and during the convention," although she didn't say how that would be accomplished during a nationwide testing shortage, and masks to those who want them, she demanded that Cooper agree by June 3 (that's today!) to let the RNC come and cough all over his residents, OR ELSE.

At which point, Cooper reminded Ronna that it isn't the state's job to plan the convention for the RNC or to act as guarantor that the festivities can continue unaffected by a raging public health crisis that has claimed lives of 108,000 Americans.

"The people of North Carolina do not know what the status of COVID-19 will be in August, so planning for a scaled-down convention with fewer people, social distancing and face coverings is a necessity," he wrote in a June 2 letter, reminding McDaniel that her plans don't even comply with published CDC guidelines. "We are happy to continue talking to you about what a scaled down convention would look like and we still await your proposed plan for that. We still await your answers to the questions posed by our state Health and Human Services Secretary, specifically regarding social distancing and face coverings."

"Neither public health officials nor I will risk the health and safety of North Carolinians by providing the guarantee you seek," Cooper concluded, knowing that the pooch was already screwed.

In point of fact, North Carolina is in Phase II of its coronavirus recovery, with indoor gatherings of up to 10 people allowed. The RNC itself and Trump's own chief of staff Mark Meadows had been engaged in good faith negotiations to hold a safe, modified convention until that lunatic blew everything up by refusing to commit to basic public health guidelines to prevent his convention becoming a superspreader event.

So now the RNC is left scrambling, as the various Republican governors vie to host the GOP's Bareback Sneeze Off Spitswappin' Jamboree. Mazal tov, Ronna. You've knocked it out of the park again!

[CNN / Charlotte Observer]

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America finds itself in a state of well-earned unrest tonight, as people outraged by the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd—which occurred on May 25, 2020, roughly 8 minutes and 45 seconds after police officer Derek Chauvin began kneeling on his neck—continued streaming onto the pandemic-shuttered streets of a…

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State troopers who were called in to quell police brutality protests in Minneapolis arrested a CNN reporter and his crew live on air on Friday morning.

The incredible scene unfolded live on CNN’s “New Day,” as reporter Omar Jimenez was describing the scenes around the 3rd Precinct police headquarters, which protesters responding to the police killing of George Floyd had set on fire on Thursday night.

Moments before he was arrested, Jimenez described how police and fire crews had arrived at the police station, and police in riot gear had immediately begun dispersing protesters using pepper spray and batons.

Then, state troopers surrounded the journalist and his crew while he remained on air. He clearly told the officers that he was still broadcasting and that he would be willing to move wherever they directed him to go.

"We can move back to where you'd like. We can move back to where you'd like here. We are live on the air at the moment,” Jimenez said.

But then, Jimenez was informed he was being arrested. He asked why and was not given an answer.

Police then proceeded to arrest Jimenez's crew, including producer Bill Kirkos and photojournalist Leonel Mende, who were all placed in handcuffs.

Jimenez and the crew were released from detention after about 90 minutes, after Gov. Tim Walz told the network’s president Jeff Zucker on a phone call that he "deeply apologizes" for what happened and was working to have the team released immediately.

CNN blasted the arrest, calling it “a clear violation of their First Amendment rights.”

The network suggested that the arrest of Jimenez could have been linked to the fact that he is black, pointing out that a white CNN reporter in the same place was not arrested.

The CNN crew were in Minneapolis to cover the third night of protests following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes. Floyd was heard repeatedly telling the officer he couldn’t breathe before he became unresponsive. He was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later.

Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson John Elder told VICE News his officers were not present at the scene and directed questions to the Minnesota State Patrol, who conducted the arrest. The State Patrol did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The State Patrol did, however, attempt to claim the arrest was a case of mistaken identity. In a tweet, the Patrol said the three crew members were released once the police realized they were part of the media — though it didn’t explain how the police officers didn’t know the crew was from CNN given the reporter clearly told the officers several times they were broadcasting live on air.

Cover: CNN

Hours after President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting Twitter, the social network announced that it had censored one of the president’s tweets for “glorifying violence” against protesters in Minneapolis.

Just before 1 a.m. on Friday, Trump was tweeting about the escalating violence in Minneapolis, a response to the killing of George Floyd by a police officer who knelt on his neck until he became unresponsive, and later died.

Trump initially lashed out at the actions of “very weak Radical Left Mayor Jacob Frey” promising to “send in the National Guard and get the job done right.”

But in a second tweet, Trump labeled the protesters “THUGS” and said Governor Tim Walz had the full support of the military.

“Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

The threat to shoot the protests was enough to trigger Twitter’s rules and the social network placed a label on the tweet.

“This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today,” Twitter said in a statement.

But, because Trump is a public figure, the tweet was not deleted, because Twitter’s rules say that tweets that are in the public interest and come from political figures are exempt.

“We've taken action in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts, but have kept the Tweet on Twitter because it is important that the public still be able to see the Tweet given its relevance to ongoing matters of public importance,” Twitter said.

Instead of being deleted, tweets that are censured like this have their reach limited. As such, Trump’s tweet won’t be promoted by the Twitter algorithm and won’t appear in people’s feeds. Users can’t respond to it, retweet it or like it.

Trump responded on Friday morning by attacking Twitter for targeting “Republicans, Conservatives & the President of the United States.” and threatening the social network with regulation.

Trump was backed up by Brendan Carr, the commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who said Twitter had abandoned any attempt at a good faith application of its rules.

The latest move by Twitter comes days after it fact-checked two of Trump’s tweets about mail-in voter fraud, a move that enraged the president.

In response, Trump lashed out at Twitter, saying it was interfering with the 2020 election and “stifling free speech.” On Thursday he signed an executive order that will require the Federal Communications Commission to look into the legal protections provided to social networks by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

READ: Trump threatens to shut down Twitter in Twitter tantrum about ‘free speech’

The provision currently means that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google are not legally liable for the content their users post on their platforms.

Cover: President Donald Trump speaks as he receives a briefing on the 2020 hurricane season in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

I suppose it is a reflection of the low bar in my own country that I am this surprised that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is “listening to experts,” “seeking data,” and “doing things to protect the nation,” but I continue to be floored by New Zealand’s exemplary handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Today on the…

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Social distancing priests are performing baptisms with water guns. This is definitely a metaphor for something but I don’t know what. Or like something out of a Tarantino screwball comedy — “And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my Super Soaker CPS 2000 upon thee…” Love the social distancing though. More here.

Tags: guns   religion   this is a metaphor for something

According to a recent poll conducted by Yahoo News and YouGov, way the hell too many Americans believe in the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 vaccine will be merely a ruse to allow Bill Gates to insert microchips into everyone, for the purpose of tracking them. Why? Well, either because he's paving the way for the anti-Christ or because he's just super lonely and wants to know where everyone is hanging out. Who knows? The conspiracy theorists rarely get beyond the "tracking everyone" part of the explanation.

How much is way the hell too many? 28 percent of all US adults, including 50 percent of those who say Fox is their main source of news and 44 percent of all Trump supporters.

While only 12 percent of those who say they voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election said they believed this, only 63 percent were 100 percent sure this was not a thing. Was this the largest percentage of any group polled? Yes. But you know what? That is still not very good! We should be doing way better than that, considering what an incredibly stupid idea this is. Like, 25 percent of those people were like "Huh, I don't know, maybe?" and that is not okay. We should be doing better.

---

Frankly, the Jesus people who think Gates wants to implant people with a microchip for anti-Christ-related reasons are actually the most logical of this bunch. That, at least, makes some amount of narrative sense. There's an endgamme. Bill Gates wants to bring about the anti-Christ, so he's gotta get the Mark of the Beast onto everyone in some way, and his big idea is this vaccine. But what on earth do people who don't believe that think is going on? Like, why would he want that? To track people? To what end? And in what way that could not just be done with their phones?

Because of social distancing, Starbucks asking everyone to order and pay with the Starbucks app (which is a bit of a scam, by the way, because they make you load it like a bus card instead of letting you just pay with a card attached to it). That shit is "tracking" you. Or at least your caffeine habit. They don't need to implant a microchip in your brain in order to make that happen.

The irony here is that there is actually someone out there who wants to implant microchips into people's brains ... it's just not Bill Gates. It's Elon Musk, who has in fact set up a company called Neuralink that is supposed to create brain-to-computer interfaces and fix brain issues that way. Or something. But Trumpists can't really start incorporating Elon Musk into their weird conspiracy theory fantasies because in their minds, he's one of the good guys because Trump likes him.

This is not the only obviously wrong thing the poll found that Trumpists believe, though that should hardly shock you. 49 percent of them think hydroxychloroquinine is effective against COVID-19. 58 percent of them think that COVID-19 was grown in a Chinese lab and "accidentally escaped." Yeah.

In fairness, this was not a particularly large poll and it is entirely possible that there is an an unusually high proportion of weirdo conspiracy theorists on YouGov's "opt-in panel."

The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,640 U.S. adult residents interviewed online between May 20 and 21, 2020. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education, as well as 2016 presidential vote, registration status and news interest. Respondents were selected from YouGov's opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S residents. The margin of error is approximately 3.0 percent.

That being said, while we can hope that these numbers are not actually that high, they're still probably a lot higher than they should be. Frankly, anything over 1 percent ought to worry us.

The most unfortunate finding of the poll was that 50 percent of all respondents said that they would not take a vaccine if it were developed. That's bad! And it means that there are a decent amount of people on our own side who are also being weird anti-vaxxers about this. So we owe it to ourselves and those who are gonna need to rely on herd immunity to make sure our friends and loved ones are well-informed on this stuff.

[Yahoo]

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The great freedom fighters of our time appear to have turned their attention from Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins to Pottery Barn, whose employees selfishly prefer not dying of a virus over selling customers overpriced couches at all hours.

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Less than an hour after the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the state’s stay-at-home order, Wisconsinites were packed into Nick’s on 2nd, a bar in Platteville, Wisconsin.

“45 minutes after the bars open in Wisconsin…” reads the caption on a photo Nick’s tweeted out, showing patrons lined up at the bar, tossing back beers. A few drinks in, patrons were pounding their hands on the bar to the beat as “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” by the Hollies played over the speakers.

On Wednesday, the court sided with Republican lawmakers against the extension of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order. The state has had more than 10,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and over 400 deaths, according to CDC data. Though new cases are falling in New York, the epicenter of the global pandemic, cases are on the rise in other parts of the country.

The Tavern League of Wisconsin was undeterred by all that. They advised the bars in the state that the court’s decision means all Wisconsin bars can “open immediately.”

And open immediately they did.

The Tavern League advised bar employees to wear masks and to reduce capacity so that patrons could observe social distancing. It seems that not every bar in the state that opened up was following those guidelines.

At the Iron Hog Saloon in Port Washington, bar goers weren’t wearing masks. They told the local ABC affiliate that it should be their choice whether or not they have to wear one.

“After my employees haven’t been paid now in two months, I had to look out for them and their families, and I had to look out for my business,” Chad Arnt, the owner of the bar, told the local news station.

Governor Evers issued a stay-at-home order in mid-March, as the virus was spreading through the country. He’d begun formulating plans to allow some businesses to reopen, but when Evers tried to extend that order to May 26, the Republicans in the state legislature objected. And though the order was overturned on a 4–3 vote of the court based on a technicality, some of the justices on the bench voiced their skepticism of the lockdown.

“This comprehensive claim to control virtually every aspect of a person’s life is something we normally associate with a prison, not a free society governed by the rule of law,” Justice Daniel Kelly wrote in his opinion.

Justice Rebecca Dallet wrote a scathing dissenting opinion: “This decision will undoubtedly go down as one of the most blatant examples of judicial activism in this court’s history,” she wrote. “And it will be Wisconsinites who pay the price.”

Evers said he was hoping to work with Republicans on a plan to reopen the state’s economy. This decision, however, “turns the state to chaos,” he told the New York Times.

“Folks, deadly viruses don’t wait for politicians and bureaucrats to settle their differences or promulgate rules,” Evers said in a tweet following the ruling. “And just because the Supreme Court says it’s okay to open, doesn’t mean that science does.”

Wisconsin isn’t the only state where opposition to the stay-at-home orders is building up. There have been lawsuits filed against the stay-home orders in California, Illinois, Michigan, Colorado and Kentucky. None of the litigation has successfully overturned an order in any state other than Wisconsin.

Cover: The Iron Hog Saloon in Port Washington, Wisconsin opened its doors as soon as the Supreme Court in the state overturned a stay-at-home order on May 13, 2020. (Photo: WISN 12 News)

“I had no plans of making it in America,” Hannah Gadsby says in the trailer for her new Netflix special, Douglas. “If you’re here ‘cause of Nanette...why?”

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Podcast | Timeline | Catch up | States' reopening plans | Tributes

President Donald Trump tipped his hand about how he plans to make up for the loss of the roaring economy that formed the foundation of his reelection campaign -- rhetoric laced with racial overtones and a new and unfounded conspiracy theory he dubbed "Obamagate."

Photos by Amoura Productions

In Nebraska, farmhouse style meets Western flair

Located in Blair, Nebraska, about 40 minutes north of Omaha, this two-bedroom, three-bath house goes all in on the barn home concept. The sellers started with a post-and-beam kit house from Sand Creek Post and Beam and then constructed the home as the ultimate farmhouse turned barn.

The wood-clad exterior is modeled after a quintessential horse barn, with a wide dual-panel sliding door and overhanging roofs on either side. The lower level features high ceilings and a wide-open space, including oversized garage doors, a living room, and a workbench. Slide open the horse stall doors and there’s nary an animal in sight; instead, you’ll find three bedrooms decked out in reclaimed wood and taxidermy animals.

Upstairs, the architectural salvage continues in the open-concept living areas, with repurposed light fixtures, a tin accent wall, and galvanized buckets for sinks. The farmhouse-inspired kitchen boasts tractor seats as bar stools. A loft-like master suite complete with shiplap walls is tucked behind the kitchen. Ready to indulge your own barn house fantasies? 10211 Shire Point Way is on the market now for $1,200,000.

In 1991, a group of eight experts of varied disciplines headed into a self-contained structure spanning just over three acres in Oracle, Arizona, with the plan to stay there without leaving for two years. Inside the large glass polygon called Biosphere 2 were multiple biomes: a desert, rainforest, and ocean with a…

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The children, once again, are out here proving that they are indeed the future, as evidenced by this small hero’s determination to get what he wants.

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Governor Gavin Newsom decided to close Orange County beaches after 80,000 people flocked to them during a heatwave last weekend.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have baked two loaves of bread. Not very impressive, but still, that is two more loaves than I had previously ever baked in my life. They actually came out really well (I used this recipe!), and I was pretty excited about it, seeing as how I've always been more comfortable with cooking than with baking. I've even tried to do a sourdough starter thing, although I think I screwed up and so I'm just gonna try again from scratch. But still, it's been fun to pick up a new thing to do! It's something that a lot of people, obviously, have been doing in lockdown, so it also feels like some kind of solidarity. "Alone together" and all that.

But not everyone is pleased about it.

On Medium this week, one woman wrote a post titled "Why You Need To Stop Baking Bread" and subtitled 'Your new hobby is creating food insecurity in your neighborhood."

"Oh no!," practically any decent person would think upon reading that. "How? Why?"

As it turns out, we are doing that because we are buying up all of the flour and yeast to bake bread, even though a woman named Caren White (for real) needs it so she can also make bread at home:

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I was walking down the baking aisle to see if the organic flour was on sale. Organic flour is expensive and I am poor so I always try to buy it when it goes on sale. There was no sale and no flour. The shelves were bare. My eyes travelled up to the top shelf. The shelf with the leavening ingredients. Also bare.

How could this be?

When I got home, I logged on to my laptop and started reading articles on the pandemic. I had stopped reading most pandemic related articles weeks ago because they were upsetting me too much. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't concentrate. I needed to distance myself. But I knew that the pandemic had something to do with the bare shelves in the baking aisle so I exposed myself to the turmoil once more.

It seems that there has been a run on flour and yeast because people are bored so they are baking bread to pass the time.

Seriously?

Well, yeah, but also to eat? It's not as if people are going around baking bread for decorative purposes and then not eating it. Also, there are many bare shelves. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was barely any pasta on the shelves. I make pasta all the time, but I was not going around thinking "How dare these other people buy spaghetti when that's my thing? I bet they're not even Italian!" because that would be super weird. I still haven't been able to get this one kind of rice pilaf I always get, but hey — it's a pandemic. Some things aren't as easy to get right now and I, a normal person, understand that.

But I am not as fancy as Caren White, who does not eat store-bought bread.

Baking bread is a way of life for me, not a hobby. Not something to do just to pass the time. I don't eat store-bought bread. I rarely eat prepared foods of any kind. If you visited my kitchen, you would find food but nothing to eat because I only stock ingredients. I do all of my own cooking and baking. On Saturday nights, I don't order pizza, I make it. From scratch. Including the crust. I also grow my own popcorn, but that's a topic for another day.

Well la-di-da!

You see, I am one of THOSE people. You know the ones. You offer them a plate of food and they look at it suspiciously asking "Is that organic?"

I actually do not know any of THOSE people, because I do not hang out with assholes. If someone did say that to me, I would dump that plate of food directly on their head and then never speak to them again. Guess I'm one of those people.

I want to know what is in my food so I make it myself. By the way, croutons? Made from my homemade bread. Breading for fried chicken? Made from my homemade bread. Stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey? Made from my homemade bread. So when you buy up all of the flour and leavening ingredients for the sake of pretty photos on your Instagram feed you are literally taking food from my mouth. And the mouths of other families who also do their own their baking so that they can provide healthy food for their families.

No, no they're not, Caren. You don't have some kind of food allergy that prevents you from eating store-bought bread, you are just a snob, and no one has to think of you or your weird family when they bake bread or do anything. Especially when you're out here also writing about how you are hoarding things.

How I Became A Pandemic Hoarder

She continues:

Here's the problem. It's Economics 101. Supply and Demand. Before the pandemic, very few people did scratch baking so the grocery stores carried only limited supplies of flour and leavening. Both go bad, so they don't want it hanging around the shelves for too long. Hence the limited quantities. That was okay. There was always enough for those of us who needed it. But there is not enough now that we are competing with a bunch of dilettante bakers who care nothing for anyone but themselves.

I bet I can think of someone else who cares nothing for anyone but themselves!

Now, I'm just guessing here — Economics 101, you know — that supermarkets have noticed that the demand for these products has gone up and responded to that by upping their orders. That's probably why I see people who work at Wegman's filling the shelves up with flour every time I am there. Yeast, however, is another story. There's no yeast anywhere but like, Etsy. Thus everyone making their own sourdough starters and doing whatever it is they are doing with grapes. Adapt, Caren, adapt!

Yes, I know that sounds harsh, but I'm willing to bet that not a single one of them stopped to think as they grabbed the last of the flour and the yeast that they were robbing other people's children of their daily bread.

NO ONE IS ROBBING YOUR CHILDREN OF THEIR DAILY BREAD, CAREN. Your children, in an emergency, can eat store-bought bread. They won't die from it. Or perhaps you can grow and mill your own flour, I don't know.

Nope. I'm certain all they cared about was how impressed everyone was going to be with their picture perfect loaves of bread.

Or, you know, they ate it and enjoyed it just like you do with your bread that you make, Caren.

This is a freaking pandemic and we're all trying to make do with whatever is available. If the worst thing that happens to you throughout this is a thing you want not being at the store when you go there, you are a very lucky person and you should shut the hell up before a lightening bolt strikes you in the neck.

Anyway! This is now your open thread! Enjoy!

[Medium]

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After 20 days where the world didn’t know if Kim Jong Un was alive or dead, the North Korean leader has reappeared at a fertilizer factory.

A report on North Korean state-run radio claimed that Kim attended a ceremony on Friday marking the completion of a fertilizer plant in Sunchon, South Phyongan Province.

"All the participants broke into thunderous cheers of 'hurrah!' extending the greatest glory to the Supreme Leader who has brought about a new change in the development of Juche-based fertilizer industry and has led the grand revolutionary advance for strengthening self-supporting economy to a victory with his outstanding leadership," the state-run news agency said.

Kim was last seen in public on April 11 when he presided over a political bureau meeting of the ruling Workers Party.

Rumors about his ill health began swirling when he failed to appear for the high profile Day of the Sun ceremony on April 15. On April 20, a report from a website run by North Korean defectors claimed Kim had undergone heart surgery on April 12 and was struggling to recover.

Since that first report speculation about Kim being dead or alive have swirled, although South Korea’s intelligence agencies have consistently said there was no sign that Kim had died or was in ill health.

Satellite images showed that Kim’s train and luxury yachts were in Wonsan, an eastern coastal city where the Kim family has a compound.

The state media reports on Friday made no mention of Kim’s health.

The Sunchon factory Kim visited Friday has previously been linked to the country’s nuclear program. Sunchon was potentially the country's "the first phosphate fertilizer plant that will conduct uranium extraction activities at full scale,” Margaret Croy, a research associate of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey's James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said earlier this month.

The radio broadcast said that Kim was joined at the ceremony by his sister Kim Yo Jong, who some had speculated would replace Kim if he had died.

U.S. President Donald Trump was asked to comment on Kim’s reappearance at a press briefing on Friday but he refused to comment.

Cover: In this Friday, May 1, 2020, photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, visits a fertilizer factory in South Pyongan, near Pyongyang, North Korea. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)

HACKENSACK, NJ—Quickly rebranding their packaging with images of the Trail of Tears and the Ku Klux Klan blood drop cross, a host of other butter companies were scrambling this week to fill the racism void left by Land-O-Lakes. “Real Americans understand that it’s important to celebrate our shared history, and we want…

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Well, this is just beautiful. Photographer Patrick Coyne was lucky enough to capture some dolphins swimming through bioluminescent algae off the coast of Newport Beach, CA. When this kind of algae is disturbed, it emits a bluish light, which causes the dolphins to glow as they move through the water. He wrote about the experience — “one of the most magical nights of my life” — on Instagram:

Conditions have to be absolutely perfect for the bioluminescence to show up and to have an animal swim through it so we can film it. On top of all that just trying to nail the focus at such a wide aperture with something moving in the water was a nightmare. We were out for a few hours and on our final stretch back we finally had 2 Dolphins pop up to start the incredible glowing show. A few minutes later and we were greeted by a few more which was insane. I’m honestly still processing this all…

Coyne also captured some glowing waves crashing on the beach. More dolphins swimming in bioluminescent waters here. Incredible. (via bb)

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AMC Theaters says it will no longer screen films made by Universal Pictures — a serious escalation of a dispute over the merits of releasing movies in theaters before allowing the public to watch them digitally.

Time seems to stretch on interminably right now, with every day feeling like both an eternity and the briefest blip in our lives. Case in point: when did you first hear Puddle of Mudd’s viral (not in a good way) cover of Nirvana’s “About a Girl”? Was it last week? Six months ago? Truly, we can’t seem to pinpoint it.…

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Alligators are continuing to assert themselves in South Carolina as coronavirus lockdowns keep visitors from beaches and parks along parts of the coast. On Saturday, a “juvenile alligator” showed up … Click to Continue »