Linkee-poo, did it need to be so high

"Former prisoners of Auschwitz gathered at the former Nazi concentration camp on the 74th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet forces."

"The coldest weather in years will put millions of people and animals throughout the midwestern United States at risk for hypothermia and frostbite to occur in minutes during the final days of January." The polar vortex is migrating again this year. Last time it moved out of position it was because of a weakened jet stream due to climate change.

"Over the past 30 years, Feldman Barrett has found evidence that anger isn't one emotion but rather a whole family of emotions. And learning to identify different members of the family is a powerful tool for regulating your anger, studies have shown." I sense a Lucy van Pelt moment coming on.

"This image, taken during the historic Jan. 1 flyby of what's informally known as Ultima Thule, is the clearest view yet of this remarkable, ancient object in the far reaches of the solar system – and the first small "KBO" ever explored by a spacecraft." Just a reminder that at this distance, New Horizons' communications to Earth are very low bandwidth.

Oh look, the old, "They ain't speakin' English and I think they may be makin' fun of me" argument comes back. "A Duke University professor who warned Chinese students against communicating in their native language and urged them to speak English instead has stepped down as the head of a master's program after her emails sparked outrage on campus and on social media." What is hilarious is this is in the medical department. You know, the profession where we use a lot of latinate words and speak in a specialized dialect that anyone not trained in it to have a hard time understanding what we're saying.

"The death toll from the collapse of a dam near the southeast Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte rose to 58 on Sunday as searchers laboring in deep mud uncovered more bodies. Several hundred people are still reported missing."

"On January 28, 1969, an oil well off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., experienced a blowout. The result was an oil spill that at the time ranked as the largest in U.S. history… The disaster, which made headlines across the nation, helped create the modern environmental movement. It also led to restrictions on offshore drilling — restrictions the Trump Administration is trying to loosen." Because of course they are. Who needs any regulation?

One of the problems we face in rural America. "The problem isn't just that the plant is in a rural town with a population of less than 2,000. It's that fewer than one in five adults in the entire surrounding Humphreys County have at least an associate degree, according to census data analyzed by the nonprofit advocacy organization Complete Tennessee." Companies moved into rural areas because of cheap land, cheap labor, cheap water, and lax regulatory regimes. But now that we've burned through one generation of skilled workers, they're realizing the next generations aren't as skilled. This is due to many reasons, including the culture of rural communities which don't prepare the next generation to do anything more than stay close to home and perceive the senior year in high school to being the pinnacle of what the kids will achieve in life. That may sound cynical, but I'm telling you the absolute truth here. I have neighbors who have quit their own jobs (usually the second income earners) to focus on giving their kids the best senior year they could.

One of the problems of building things in the US. "After creating months of delay, Apple ended up ordering the screws from China. Eventually, Apple found a supplier in Texas that could produce 28,000 custom screws, although they weren’t the exact screws needed nor in the right quantity, according to the NYT. And they were delivered over 22 trips, often in a Lexus driven by the maker’s owner." Back in the early 2000s I remember a friend talking about the difficulty of finding metal stamping workers. Most of the old people who knew how were retired, and industry hadn't really been interesting in educating the next generation, and the trade schools neither had the equipment or the skills to train new people. The best he could find were sheet metal workers (who worked in HVAC). They didn't have the skills he needed. Oh, forgot to mention, management had no idea how to run their own equipment properly either. And when you're talking about a 10-ton press (the kind of thing that sets off the siesmometers in the area) that's a dangerous thing to operate when you don't know what you're doing.

"Stock markets mostly fell Monday on caution over China-U.S. trade talks and over the ability of U.S. congressional negotiators to forge a government funding bill acceptable to President Donald Trump."

"A new government report says that the U.S. budget deficit is set to hit $897 billion this year and predicts that economic growth will slow as the effects of President Donald Trump’s tax cut on business investment begin to drop off… The CBO predicts in a report released Monday that the economy will grow by 2.3 percent this year, a slowdown from 3.1 percent last year." Anything that the negotiation between Congress and Trump for the wall or beefed up border security will go right on top of that.

"For Americans under the age of 40, the 21st century has resembled one long recession… Look at incomes, for starters. People between the ages of 25 and 34 were earning slightly less in 2017 than people in that same age group had been in 2000…" Yes, yes, things are terrible for Millennials, but there's one generation in the middle of that discussion who doesn't even get mentioned in the article. Why? Because Millennials are mostly Boomers' kids. So Boomers and Millennials get all the attention. In that first chart on incomes by age groups, you can follow along and see the echo of that generation. Hint, it's the big dip that hits the changing age categories as the years progress. (Grokked from Elizabeth Bear)

"The Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion cut tax package appeared to have no major impact on businesses’ capital investment or hiring plans, according to a survey released a year after the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years." Okay, who had the "didn't do shit" bet in the office pool? And the republican response I predict will be, "We didn't cut taxes enough." Just like the last 3 tax cuts. (Grokked from Kathryn Cramer)

"The Anti-Defamation League’s annual report on extremist killings in the United States, released Wednesday, found that individuals linked to right-wing extremist movements committed every single extremist-related murder in the country in 2018." This is my shocked face. (Grokked from Xopher Halftongue)

"Wing was one of many journalists who were let go by BuzzFeed and HuffPost this week and were sent death threats from trolls organizing their efforts on the far-right message board 4chan. Many of those targeted by the harassment campaign did not cover the far-right, including Wing, whose beat focused on inequality and guns." Serious sick and deranged fucks. (Grokked from Xeni Jardin)

"President Donald Trump is prepared to shut down the government again or declare a national emergency if Congress won’t give him the border wall money he wants, the White House said Sunday." Of course he is. The only thing different about this Republican failure of governance is that there's no remorse, no concept of the damage done.

"It's as if President Donald Trump's humiliation over the government shutdown and his failed push to honor his core campaign promise never happened."

"On January 23, the Russian Defense Ministry’s official media outlet TV Zvezda reported that the Organization for Security and Cooperation and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region spotted Ukrainian armored vehicles in the area. Specifically, it mentioned three types of armored vehicles… It should be noted, that the armored vehicles in question belong to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and were on Ukrainian territory. More importantly, it appears none of the vehicles cited by TV Zvezda… violate the Minsk agreement." It's the propaganda dance, everybody bow to your partners.

"The Trump administration on Sunday lifted sanctions against the business empire of Oleg V. Deripaska, one of Russia’s most influential oligarchs." And today there's word they lifted sanctions against a few more oligarchs. Because of course they would.

That NYT story with timeline charts that all the cool kids are talking about. "Among these contacts are more than 100 in-person meetings, phone calls, text messages, emails and private messages on Twitter. Mr. Trump and his campaign repeatedly denied having such contacts with Russians during the 2016 election." For no collusion, there sure are a lot of fucking Russians hanging around.