A cloud of ash belches out of Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano as seen from Paso de Cortes, in the Mexican central state of Puebla on May 20, 2013.
[Credit : Arturo Andrade/AFP/Getty Images]
a very happy birthday to me indeed.
fuck finals, i’ll see all y’all jokers in france.
How Are We Supposed to Know What the Government Does?
You should probably be afraid, at least a little, of the federal government. The reason for this doesn’t have anything to do with conspiracy theories about fluoridation or the Obama administration hoarding ammo to keep it out of the hands of True Patriots. It’s simpler than that: you should be worried about the US government because it is huge and well funded and powerful and, most importantly, you don’t know what it’s doing.
The civics class version of government—that there are three branches, each with its own checks and balances and blah blah blah—is hopelessly outdated. For one thing, the legislative branch is paralyzed by partisanship and a set of rules that make it impossible for it to do anything but stop laws from getting enacted. For another, as documented by the Washington Post in 2010, the governmental agencies that are in charge of “national security” have grown like not-all-that-benign tumors, consuming billions of tax dollars, constructing massive top-secret facilities, and employing hundreds of thousands of people whose job descriptions you don’t have the security clearance to know. The national security state is vast and unknowable, practically its own branch of government at this point, with its own secret history. Millions upon millions of documents are classified, many unnecessarily. By some counts, there are more pages of classified documents in the US than there are unclassified—and the government spends $12 billion a year keeping all that information under wraps.
luvin it.
relevant.
anybody ever watch the credits to dead man? meet hildegaard bongarts? talk to nemo “hangin’-out guy” labrizzi? whahappan?
all bowie. all day. all night.
foie:
Cat Diary
Franz Kafka interviewing Gregor Samsa and Friend, 1915.
bday. bee day. bidet.
Aftermath
A woman in red heels holds a copy of Aftermath by the Rolling Stones at a market somewhere in Mexico
March 1972
(via Yahoo to acquire Tumblr in $1.1 billion cash deal)
That cat’s out of the bag a day early, it seems. Yahoo’s board has approved a $1.1 billion cash deal to purchase the blogging site Tumblr, according to The Wall Street Journal. We were expecting Yahoo to announce the acquisition during tomorrow’s NYC media event — CEO Marissa Mayer may instead use the last-minute gathering to detail the company’s plans for integrating the popular platform. It’s unclear how Yahoo intends to utilize its latest procurement, but with a 10-figure price tag now public, we can only imagine that Tumblr will be put to good use. We’ll be covering tomorrow afternoon’s event live, so stay tuned for more details from New York City.
uh oh.
