Tuesday Miscellany!

Medium doesn't work with my workflow, so it's back to LiveJournalDreamwidth for me. Here we go kids!

• How, oh how, will Donald Trump lift up his pathetic approval ratings in time for the 2018 elections? How about a war with North Korea? It worked for W, didn't it?


• Trump's latest tactic to getting his stupid wall is apparently to back off on his demand for a wall as part of the budget negotiations. Which tells me that he's more interested in the wall as an act of political theater, to dangle in front of his supporters, than as an actual policy.


• Repeal-and-replace 2.0 looks like the same unpopular shit-show as Repeal-and-replace 1.0. One wonders when the GOP will embrace the most popular repeal-and-replace option, that being single payer.


• In a bit of good news, 45's DOJ is still fighting for the Obamacare contraception mandate. Don't be fooled by this; eventually white nationalism and religious conservatism need to agree here, as they both eventually seek to make women subordinate. Meanwhile, blue states are working to make contraception easier to access.


• Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Which is why Chobani is suing Alex Jones of Infowars, for slander. Jones, who as much as admits his schtick is just an act, is of course blaming George Soros.

Introducing WikiTRIBUNE

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is launching WikiTRIBUNE, a new site of actual journalism designed to fight fake news. Quoting CNN:

The site will publish news stories written by professional journalists. But in a page borrowed from Wikipedia, internet users will be able to propose factual corrections and additions. The changes will be reviewed by volunteer fact checkers.

Which of course leads to a problem: what if a swarm of people who want to promote an alternative theory, not supported by the facts, takes over the discussion on WikiTribune?

Of course, Slashdot has a discussion.