Facebook’s 2016 Year in Review

Rump Trump

—Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones documentary, Crossfire Hurricane

Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I’ll piss on ’em
That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ’em to death
And get it over with and just dump ’em on the boulevard

—Dirty Boulevard by Lou Reed

There is no art without laziness.

—Mladen Stilinović

via this isn’t happiness

Tracy Morgan is right.

Taken from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Regular readers of Daily Exhaust know I’m not a fan of Microsoft. I feel this way for a lot of reasons. I think they’re always a day late and a dollar short with new products (see Windows Phone, Nokia, Microsoft Stores, etc), they historically have not valued design, and every attempt at being cool ends up being very, very, very uncool.

The latest example is a recruitment email aimed at interns (via Twitter):

You’re not cool, Microsoft, you’re fuckin’ chilly, and chilly ain’t never been cool.

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

—e.e. cummings

via Brain Pickings

Over at The Washington Post, Max Ehrenfreund on the four cryptic words Donald Trump can’t stop saying:

“There’s something going on,” Trump said. “It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

That phrase, according to political scientists who study conspiracy theories, is characteristic of politicians who seek to exploit the psychology of suspicion and cynicism to win votes.

The idea that people in positions of power or influence are conspiring to conceal sinister truths from the public can be inherently appealing, because it helps make sense of tragedy and satisfies the human need for certainty and order. Yet politicians hoping to take advantage of these tendencies must rely on vague and suggestive statements, since any specific accusation could be easily disproved.

Donald Trump is a master manipulator of language and it’s one of the main reasons he’s made it this far in his presidential campaign (there’s other tools of demagoguery he uses I won’t get into in this post). It clearly has a strong effect on the less educated, but if you have half a brain, you can see right through his bullshit and rhetoric.

I love this detail:

Earlier in the interview, when asked why he called for Obama’s resignation, Trump said, “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other.”

Trump excels at never committing to a side, but also never appears to be equivocal on a topic. How, you ask, does he pull this off? By starting with the premise that there’s a conspiracy happening. This means he’s free to make as many assumptions as possible, because shit, how am I supposed to know what’s really happening? There’s something going on and they’re not telling us.

If this man gets in office, he’ll continue his habit of never accepting responsibility for his actions because any mistakes he makes will be the result of someone or some group hiding something from him. It’s a sign of poor character and not a quality you want in someone running for president.

—Dazed and Confused

Truth.

Her father was a fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckers—those who would hang their lamps high on the dangerous cliffs when the storm winds raged, luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard.

—Excerpt From: Gaiman, Neil. American Gods.