Adam Rogers at Wired digs deep into the workings of President Trump's lie machine. Mr. Rogers tries diligently to describe what lies are (going as far back as St. Augustine for his analysis) and what makes them evil, and his insistence that intent to do harm is critical to the definition of a lie probably makes Antonin Scalia spin in his grave. I wish he'd noted that Tha Bush Mobb were hard-core devotees of the "noble lie," though that may be personal on my part.
Government Accountability Office report finds the FCC's program subsidizing broadband for low-income working families rife with "massive fraud." Kudos to Sen. McCaskill (D-MO) for identifying the real problem here as a corporate welfare problem. And remember, kids: you don't use this news as an excuse to throw up your hands and say TEH GUBMINTZ IZ CORRUPTZ AND IT SHOULD DO TEH NOTHINGZ!!!!! Rather, you fix the program.
I'm not sure I should even be telling you that this latest push to repeal Obamacare without replacing it seems to be coming from the Koch brothers and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE). But I only bring this drama up to remind you that both the Koch brothers and Sen. Sasse couldn't stomach Donald Trump not very long ago, and now they're all working together for the common evil. Remember: right-wing politicians want you to obsess over the "fissures" between them, so they can distract you from the evil they do.
Another day, another study finding that Seattle's restaurant workers are, in fact, not hurt by the city's higher minimum wage, which will reach $15/hour in 2021. Of course, arguing that TEH HIGHER MINIMUMZ HURTZ TEH WORKURZ!!!! counts on a lot of thought experiment ("but higher wages will result in fewer hours!") that not only doesn't reflect real-world conditions, but excuses a lot of bad behavior on the part of bosses. I mean, you wouldn't approve of the morality of cutting hours just because wages go up, would you?
Finally, researches successfully develop an anti-heroin vaccine that works in monkeys. Whether it works in people will take longer to determine, but the vaccine prods the body to make antibodies to heroin that keep what makes people high from ever reaching the brain. Don't get all dystopian about the possibility that corporations will use this discovery to pacify entire populations at once, though of course they might -- the architects of dystopia will always be with us, but right now opioids restrict some Americans' freedom like nothing else.
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