A warning for Trump:

You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you're the asshole,

Game theory would seem to point to sooner rather than later. As of right now, there is almost zero downside (and quite a few perks available if done right.) Of course, this assumes the GOP congresscritters could organize a piss up in a brewery, something that hasn't been a surefire thing since the 90s.

Florida AG Who Dropped Case Against Trump University to Get White House Job

Can we just call him President Swamp Thing? Would make things easier for everybody.

Yeeeeesh. Kinda the opposite of the The Force Awakens, weirdly: There's an actual serviceable plot, but none of the characters are given time to develop personalities or motivations. Also, between shitty lines and an underfunded costuming department, Vader looked and sounded like an idiot.

There are a couple of cool moments, and there's a certain satisfaction and integrity present in the fact that R:O is a (mostly) standalone story. But, one thing a Star Wars shouldn't be is boring, and this delivers in spades on that front.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio to hold press conference on Obama birth certificate investigation

Verily tingling with anticipation.

In related news, Cornell Belcher details how race and racism still had a part to play in the 2016 election:
 

Jenée Desmond-Harris

A question a lot of people ask around the question of the role race and racism played in Trumpâ(TM)s election is, âoeHow can you say Americans are concerned with race when they elected Obama?â I know the long answer is in the data presented in your book, but whatâ(TM)s the simple response to that?

Cornell Belcher

They didnâ(TM)t. Thatâ(TM)s the thing here. The majority of whites did not elect Obama, and thatâ(TM)s the wolf at the door. The vast majority of whites did not support President Obama and President Obama won back-to-back majorities, and that caused the realization of their power waning. Mitt Romney ran up a higher score among white voters than Ronald Reagan, when Reagan had a landslide in 1984.

Conservatives may want to take note of this, however:
 

In battleground states, particularly more diverse states, the percentage of white people voting Democrat decreases significantly as that population gets more diverse. So diversity is having an opposite impact that is harmful to Democrats.

Trump offers Goldman executive Cohn key economic post

This is actually good news. Stacking the deck with all these Wall Street chumps means that recession we've been waiting on will happen sooner rather than later. Speaking of which, anyone got any tips for profiting from another major US economic meltdown that doesn't involve the stock market?

Trump Picks Foreclosure King Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary

So much for the swamp, I guess.

That, right there, is one very useful phrase, I'll have to admit. I've used it in all kinds of contexts, and for different effects, and it works great. It's like a rhetorical swiss army knife.

Moving on, talk about getting shafted! I'm glad my political gambling is a hobby, not an addiction, cuz Cheeto Mussolini just fucked me out of 5K. Although I'm even more glad of my Senate side bet since it helps take the sting out of it.

Congratulations to all the Republicans out there! It's been exhausting work pretending to care about the deficit, unemployment numbers, and whether or not the rest of the world thinks the US is a laughingstock, so I'm sure you'll all be glad for the break.

Last but not least, commiserations to all the kids out there, the ones who'll get punched repeatedly in the face as they struggle through life because global warming as a solvable problem is gone for at least a generation, whilst us Boomers and Gen Xers get to pop our clogs before the really bad shit starts. Time to start volunteering for those Mars missions, I guess.

For any non-Yanks out there, there is a small silver lining: Between, incompetence, corruption, and taking advantage of these historic circumstances to finally bury the Dem party forever, the incoming administration may be too busy trying to fuck over the US to have any time to fuck over the rest of the planet any more than they have already have. Fingers crossed!

The idea "Hey, what if I line up powers of 20, multiply them by sort of coefficients, and add them...?" - is a huge intellectual leap. So far as I can determine, it only happened twice. It never happened in Europe.

http://fredoneverything.org/the-maya-who-woulda-thunk-it/

Trump's attack lines on this are spot on:

and

Those are valid statements. I find it hard to to argue with these.

http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20160711&t=2&i=1145024204&w=976&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=2016-07-11T232013Z_2799_S1AETORGYTAA_RTRMADP_0_USA-POLICE-PROTESTS

Where on EARTH is the /. UI for starting a journal entry? LOL!

I don't know how it's done, if you don't just know to navigate http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=edit

After a year, active as a wag and shameless flirt on Twitter, it looks exactly the same in hindsight.

Not that having a spinal column was ever a regular feature of your average politician, but the absolute cluelessness of major UK political figures in the last couple of days is stunning. As far as I can tell, only Nicola Sturgeon has managed to avoid dumping large amounts of shit on herself.

Personally, I lay a lot of the blame at Tony Blair's feet. If he'd hadn't been such a mendacious prick, most of the current crop of British pols wouldn't even exist today.

On his overwhelming Brexit win. *tips Fedora*