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Once again: before I get into thick of a bunch of timely and often infuriating/saddening/exasperating news here is a palette cleanser of a very random and fun chart detailing animal sleep times.
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The Decline Of The Empire
What The Heck America??
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I've talked about the reality and dangers of the QAnon cult/conspiracy theory in several prior issues of WesRecs (this Atlantic piece remains my favorite summation thus far). This movement is very real and very scary and you need to be aware of it because it is playing an outsized part in the upcoming election and will continue to do so beyond November. This podcast episode goes very deep in exploring its origins and how it spread and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the specific technical aspects of how it started and grew to go mainstream.
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Eat, Pray, Conspiracy: How the Wellness World Embraced QAnon - Jezebel
An elaboration on a specific segment and new phase of the unfolding QA disaster. They've given the message a facelift and tapped into an shocking/not-shocking new co-hort. As someone who definitely recognizes a tendency in myself to try and find "hidden clues" and "deeper meaning" I *almost* empathize...but then I remember that I've been to middle school and some basic media literacy kicks in. Sigh.
"It’s no surprise that wellness adherents—people who earnestly believe that there is a deeper truth out there, accessible to those who seek it out—would find an easy overlap with the ideas that animate QAnon. After all, the wellness industry has been built on questioning, often understandably, established science and the medical industry, successfully mainstreaming fringe ideas and providing easy solutions to complex problems."
...
"The ease with which growing numbers of wellness adherents have seamlessly incorporated QAnon into their worldview illustrates a broader point—that QAnon, far from a new phenomenon, is scaffolding onto a strand of conspiratorial thinking that has always been part of our DNA. As many have pointed out, including my former Jezebel colleague Anna Merlan in her book Republic of Lies, there is a sort of twisted logic to conspiracy theories, built as they are on half-truths. In an increasingly chaotic world, many of us are searching for meaning; many of us are looking for someone easy to blame; many of us feel disempowered, feel helpless, distrust our government, and the institutions that shape our lives. Seen from this angle, the tenets of both QAnon and the wellness world are remarkably alike—it’s a shorter leap than one might assume from believing that Big Pharma is pushing dangerous vaccines onto an unsuspecting public to believing that Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Bill Gates are part of a global network of Satanists who kidnap children and drink their blood."
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A Deal on Drug Prices Undone by White House Insistence on ‘Trump Cards’ - NYT
The heads of the pharmaceutical instry were ready to do *something* sane about healthcare/drug prices, as little as it was, and it was tanked because this dude needed to turn it into an election bone to throw and have his name all over it.
$750 folks.
“Regardless, one drug company executive said they worried about the optics of having the chief executives of the country’s leading pharmaceutical makers stand with the president in the Rose Garden as he hoisted an oversized card and gloated about helping a crucial bloc of voters.”
...
“We could not agree to the administration’s plan to issue one-time savings cards right before a presidential election,” said Priscilla VanderVeer, the vice president of public affairs at PhRMA, the industry’s largest trade group. “One-time savings cards will neither provide lasting help, nor advance the fundamental reforms necessary to help seniors better afford their medicines.”
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Race & Policing
Towards The Reduction Of Harm
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The End of Police (Documentary Short)
An interesting blend of the U.S. and Brazil discussing the world that is and the world that could be. I completely understand the fear that's keeping us where we are, it makes perfect sense to me. But for so many people that fear of the potential is dwarfed by the terror of the actual and if we keep up with the way we're going the reach of that terror will only grow.
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In case you were wondering if there were in fact separate rules for the ultra rich vs the rest of us, here we go:
The lesson if you read nothing else: if you get caught up in a massive vice sting by the police where clear video of you paying for the services of a sex worker is captured by the authorities, just try and make sure that you're in the same dragnet as a billionaire personal friend of the President of the United States.
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Remember that time when very rich man Bob Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, got caught on camera having sexual acts performed on him at a massage parlor in Florida? It wasn't long ago (March 2019). He was nabbed almost immediately after leaving the establishment, the authorities had tape, and Kraft issued a kind-of admission/apology soon after.
Now, just a year and a half later his $$$ and name and influence have worked on his behalf to get all charges cleared (plus those of the other, non-billionaire, men who visited the same place and were caught on video around the same time as Kraft) and prevent the video, which definitely exists, from ever seeing the light of day.
Look, I think consensual sex work should 100% be legalized and that both workers and clients should be shielded from any kind of prosecution for it. And while the police here initially tried to tie this to sex trafficking, that angle, has (to my knowledge) been disproven. So yeah, good for Kraft et. al for beating a vice rap but if Bob Kraft worked security or drove a truck or coached HS football, or did literally anything that didn't provide him with unlimited resources to fight a rapacious legal system slightly pixelated video of his 79-year-old junk would be on the internet right now and he would no longer have a job of any kind.
I just really can't think of a more obvious case of wealth and privilege *buying* a completely different (and obviously less damaging) legal outcome than any other citizen would receive.
Ya'll knew this but: it's a rigged game.
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When Police Violence Is a Dog Bite - The Marshall Project
We still sic dogs on people in this country on a regular basis. Whut?
"The police called in a K-9 handler and his dog, Niko, to search 3809 Cresta Circle. The dog lunged, found a man and bit down, according to court records. It took almost two minutes for the handler to pull the dog off. And before long, their suspect, a 51-year-old Black man, bled to death. The dog had torn an artery in his groin."
...
"Though our data shows dog bites in nearly every state, some cities use biting dogs far more often than others. Police in Chicago almost never deploy dogs for arrests and had only one incident from 2017 to 2019. Washington had five. Seattle had 23. New York City, where policy limits their use mostly to felony cases, reported 25. By contrast, Indianapolis had more than 220 bites, and Los Angeles reported more than 200 bites or dog-related injuries, while Phoenix had 169. The Sheriff’s Department in Jacksonville, Florida, had 160 bites in this period."
...
"Handling dogs is more art than science, some in the business say. “The handler’s personality will go right down that leash,” said Ernie Burwell, a former canine handler for the Los Angeles County Sheriff who now testifies as an expert witness in excessive force cases. “If the handler’s an idiot, the dog will be, too.”"
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🎵To The Left! To The Left!🎵
On That Commie Pinko Tip
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Where in The U.S. Are You Most Likely to Be Audited by the IRS? - ProPublica
It costs a lot to be poor. If you barely scrape by each year on $26,000 you have a far higher chance of being audited for claiming a tax credit that's supposed to help the financially vulnerable than if you make half a million a year and intentionally fudge your numbers.
"In a baffling twist of logic, the intense IRS focus on Humphreys County is actually because so many of its taxpayers are poor. More than half of the county’s taxpayers claim the earned income tax credit, a program designed to help boost low-income workers out of poverty. As we reported last year, the IRS audits EITC recipients at higher rates than all but the richest Americans, a response to pressure from congressional Republicans to root out incorrect payments of the credit.
The study estimates that Humphreys, with a median annual household income of just $26,000, is audited at a rate 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, which boasts a median income of $130,000, the highest in the country."
...
"The map reveals wide variations in the audit rate from place to place, but also how certain groups of Americans are disproportionately affected by the IRS’ policies. The five counties with the highest audit rates are all predominantly African American, rural counties in the Deep South. The audit rate is also very high in South Texas’ largely Hispanic counties and in counties with Native American reservations, such as in South Dakota. Primarily poor, white counties, such as those in eastern Kentucky in Appalachia, also have elevated audit rates."
...
"In an email, an IRS spokesperson said that tax returns are selected for audit without regard to race or where the taxpayer lives.
EITC audits can be punishing for taxpayers, since they routinely start with a refund being held, and can drag on for well over a year. The IRS does sponsor a program to provide free legal help to low-income taxpayers, but in Mississippi, the state with the highest audit rate in the country (according to Bloomquist’s estimates, the IRS audits about 11,000 returns there each year), there is only one attorney for the program."
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Things Read
Worthwhile Words
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Gary Gulman’s Comedy Tips: The Complete Collection 366 bits of wisdom, advice, and encouragement from the stand-up veteran. - Vulture
I mentioned Gary Gulman's 2019 Daily Comedy Tips Twitter project way back in WesRecs XIII but I hadn't seen them all compiled in one place until just this week so I definitely wanted to share. Gary is an amazing comic and human being (def check out his latest HBO special The Great Depresh) and on each day of last year he tweeted out indispensable nuggets of veteran advice for young comics (much of which is applicable to anyone in any creative pursuit). It was a hell of a commitment but he pulled it off and now you get to check the tips out in one convenient place, indexed by category and popularity. Dope stuff.
"By necessity, this undertaking had to morph from writing tips into general tips about mood maintenance and inspiration. Some of it came from things I learned in therapy, like my insistence on exercising or getting out of the house, that I was applying on a daily basis. There was one tip about not suffering for your art but letting your art suffer for you, which meant that if you are really sick like I was with my depression, then it’s okay to take time off from it to get well. It will still be there when you return. The response to that made me realize that people were thirsty for something more than just tips on organizational habits. Also, I’m not very organized, so you have to figure out your own system there.
In the end, these tips aren’t proclamations from Mount Comedy — it’s like any other craft in that it can be improved with some helpful information. You don’t have to follow all of them to the letter. I hope you question some of them, I hope that you’ll embrace some of them, and I hope you’ll adjust some of them for your personal makeup. Whether you’re new to comedy or even 25 years into it, I think if you use a handful of them regularly, you’ll get a lot out of it. And if you don’t, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and you can get your money back."
Some personal favs:
Tip No. 5: Mark Twain said, and I’m paraphrasing, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” You’ve been meaning to do this. Go through your jokes and add some lightning today.
Tip No. 310: When it comes to solving the puzzles that are our jokes, draw on every area of knowledge, expertise, and talent. It’s so gratifying to use a fact, a lesson, or a memory from elementary school, high school, or elsewhere to fill in the joke.
Tip No. 340: Volunteer! Especially if you don’t have a day job. There are so many opportunities to help. You will do good and have something new to write about. In NYC we have New York Cares. One year we decorated an elementary school for Halloween.
Tip No. 127: “I’m not for everyone” is a valuable position to acknowledge and embrace. You can have great success by being appealing to the type of audiences you enjoy. I’ve heard it said that trying to please everyone is a certain path to failure and frustration.
Tip No. 16: Be the comedian you wanted to see. Think about the things that you wished someone made jokes about when you sat in the audience. Make a list of topics and ideas that you’d be excited to see someone discuss. Become that comedian. You’ve got 30 years.
Tip No. 109: How long to stick with a joke? If it’s truly original and funny to you and/or especially personal, you should keep working on it until you figure it out. A more pedestrian joke? Give it three tries. My favorite joke took 19 years to solve.
Tip No. 14: Best insight I ever got came two shows in: Nearly all of your work will come from other comedians. Be a good co-worker. Don’t run the light. Be original. Be supportive. Write a lot! Be kind!
Tip No. 88: On patience: It’s better to be seen by the comedy “industry” two years too late than one second too early. It’s hard to undo a bad first impression, and you change and grow so much year to year the first ten years of your career.
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The Cheating Scandal That Ripped the Poker World Apart - Wired
Stop me if you've heard this one before: Woman accuses a well-known, well-liked man of personal/professional transgressions . She’s not believed and gets vilified for trying to wreck a good guy's reputation. Another well-known, well-liked man, discovers her original work detailing the first man's wrongdoing, confirms it’s sound, tells other men, and the accusations are now generally believed. The offending man denies all claims, lays low for a while, and then re-emerges, perhaps with a stain on his reputation but largely free of any real consequences.
This is that, but with card sharping instead of sexual harassment/assault. It's a case that's as frustrating for its lack of resolution as it as fascinating for providing a window into such a lucrative, ritualistic, hierarchical world as professional poker. I'll admit that I've never really been much into poker. I have played it, it is fun, and I definitely respect people who are experts at it but I think I recognized early on that I would never be good enough at math/statistics to play at even the semi-skilled amateur level. I remember when the popularity of Texas Hold 'em *exploded* into the mainstream, right when I was in college. Poker went from being that thing that suburban sitcom husbands regularly met up once-a-month for in the service of the show's plot and the activity that the 1994 Mel Gibson movie "Maverick" was centered around, to all of a sudden being broadcast on ESPN, and finding legions of online players in university dorm rooms (seriously, so many dudes I knew, mostly computer science majors and marketing bros, got straight up addicted to online poker for a good stretch in sophomore and junior years).
This article, in addition to serving up an A1 mystery/scandal also does a great job of outlining how that mainstream boom was fueled in large part by the emergence of Moneyball-esque statistical analysis into the game and how that same rigorousness eventually became so complex and difficult to master that casual players were eventually pushed out of the game. I love reading about fanatical sub-cultures that have nothing to do with my daily life, this delivered.
"Brill, a self-described analytics geek whose day job is building medical software, was among those who got clobbered by Postle at the table, and she served as a livestream commentator during much of his streak too. By early 2019, she had seen enough to surmise that Postle's success didn't make mathematical sense. She thought he was winning far too often, particularly for a player whose strategy didn't jibe with game theory optimal, or GTO, the prevailing strategy in Texas Hold 'Em today.
The fundamental idea behind GTO is that there's a single best decision for every imaginable betting scenario—a decision that will maximize a player's winnings over time. In any given hand, a player who perfectly executes game theory optimal may still lose; there's only so much you can do if your opponent lucks into the nuts. But in the course of thousands of hours of poker, a player who adheres to GTO at every moment is virtually guaranteed to come out ahead.
Tremendous effort is required to develop the ability to know which single move to make in the millions of possible betting situations. There are 2,598,960 possible hands in five-card poker, a figure that vastly understates the game's intricacy. Players must also have a feel for how their opponents are likely to react to each gambit. To hone their GTO chops, top pros spend hours a day analyzing past hands with software that pinpoints the precise moments when they flubbed a probability calculation."
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Things Seen
Watched Recently By Wes
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Wow.
Um.....I found this documentary while browsing through the video offerings of the 2020 Virtual NYC Anarchist Book Fair (highly recommended btw, also the source of the police documentary short above) and uh...I WAS NOT READY for "Turn on the lights" (Acende a Luz). This Brazilian short follows Isabel Dias, a sexagenarian (perfect descriptor here) who, after leaving a marriage of 32 years with the only man she'd ever been with due to his infidelity, begins to truly explore her own sexuality and sexual pleasure for the very first time. She talks about being extremely sexually reserved for most of her life but...it did not take long for her to jump all the way into the deep end once she started to get more liberated. I really loved her perspective on life re: "no one gives you your life" you need to seize it, and the importance of loving your body, knowing yourself and doing it NOW.
Humans are sexual beings and despite what Hollywood would have us believe that doesn't just stop because you get your AARP card, but geriatric sexuality is so very rarely discussed, much less seen, in the mainstream so it was great to see it examined so lovingly here. And examine it they do...with not much reservation. NSFW warning in *full effect* on this one. Seriously if you don't want to see a 64 year old woman full appreciating herself do not hit play, but if you are interested in that kind of affirmation then by all means.
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Recitation of Euripides (Medea)
Some insomniac nights you go down a social media rabbit hole and find yourself watching unsourced videos of an elderly man with a raspy yet powerful voice reciting ancient plays and poetry in the original Greek. I loved all of these. This man was almost certainly a classics professor back in the day and man he is making Euripides SING. I have no idea what's being said but just close your eyes and float.
Here is another one from The Odyssey (The Song of the Sirens)
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- I promise you, the talent of this Harlem double dutch squad in the mid 80s performing at Lincoln Center will leave you speechless. Just WOW.
- Kimberly Dinaro is a NYC based comic, musician, & bartender who has been serving up hilarious and extremely sharp mixology-themed comedy observations during the entirety of the pandemic. She's done her time in the service industry trenches and it really shows in her *spot on* breakdowns of various drink orders and bar patron archetypes. Here she is dropping knowledge on What Your Bachelor Party Drink Says About You.
- MONEY CHANGES PEOPLE. And not just when you have it, but when other people *think* you have it. It can mean power, deference, jealousy, hatred, sexual desire, awe, esteem, and so much more. Most days I think that structuring our society such that the accumulation of wealth is in itself considered a virtue (with the very richest among us thus being considered the most worthy and best of us) is a piss poor way to go about things, but I've gotta say that watching people getting tricked into suddenly believing that their friends and family have "12 million, six hundred and seventeen thousand, two hundred and ninety dollars and fifty six cents" for 2+ minutes is pretty damned entertaining.
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Word of The Week
Up That Vocab Game
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Ultion, n.
[ ULL - shun ]
Obsolete. rare.
Meaning: Vengeance, revenge, avengement.
Origin: Latin ultiōn-, ultio, noun of action < the stem of ulciscī to avenge. So Old French ultion, ulcion, Italian ulzione.
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Fun Facts
Trivia To Bend Your Brain
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- -Bones found on Seymour island off of Antarctica show that prehistoric penguins stood at six feet tall and weighed over 250 lbs.
- An average cumulus cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds
- In July 2001 Beaver college official changed it’s name to Arcadia University. This was due at least in part because anti-porn web browser filters routinely restricted access to its website. The institution also founded that 30% fewer potential applicants had a favorable impression of the school due to the name.
- Star Wars is “only” the 5th highest grossing media franchise (with about $70B banked from films, TV shows, toys, books, video games, etc). It is topped by Mickey Mouse & Friends, Winnie the Pooh, & Hello Kitty. Pokemon takes the top spot.
- There are more fake flamingos in the world than real ones.
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