1. You know full well that today is the second day of Christmas, and that there are ten more days to come. In Britain and the Commonwealth countries this is still Boxing Day, a name reflecting the custom of taking around presents and sweets and savories in boxes to persons who might be in need of them. At least, that is the traditional explanation, though some believe the origins go back to the practice of distributing the contents of the alms box to the poor of the parish on the second day of the feast. Whatever the case, it is also the feast of St. Stephen, a day traditionally associated with eleemosynary obligations, at least in ages past. Today, alas, it is observed mostly as a bank holiday, which more and more has come to mean a day of shopping for special deals. You, however, will certainly not give in to these blasphemous practices, I just know it in my heart. You will keep the feast unadulterated and unprofaned. You will wassail and revel, pray and worship, fill boxes with inedible fruitcake for the less fortunate and then force it upon them as your sacred duty and their dismal lot in life. Above all, you will keep your trees alight and spangled till the dark of Twelfth Night. And should any of you think to shirk your duties, remember that Father Christmas is watching you. (That’s an Orwell joke, by the way.)
     
  2. Carlos Latuff
     

  3. Every time I read something that clearly explains how our lords of private equity play the game of “loading up a company with debt” as prelude to stripping what someone else has built for parts, I’m astonished anew. I can’t get over how a PE firm borrows money to buy a company, and that company, not Carlyle, has to pay it back—and that Carlyle gets paid to make them pay it back, in dividends and “management fees.” It’s hardly less surreal than the notion of the king personally possessing every whale and sturgeon in the kingdom for his own pleasure.

    Matt Stoller describes private equity as a “political movement,” and I find that designation brilliant. Especially now, with Carlyle leading the industry into looting a basic human need, profiting from buying up vast tracts of apartment buildings that once had responsive landlords, and putting them under the control of faraway management firms that are not.

     

  4. In other words, as soon as you move beyond hard data and facts that can be rigorously verified, you are entering into a realm where you, and like-minded people around you, can talk yourselves into believing almost anything you like to believe. And precisely because you’ve arrived at those conclusions by spelling out what seems like a rational argument, and because you’re surrounded by trustworthy-seeming people nodding their heads and signalling agreement, you feel confident that you’ve fixed beliefs solid enough to act on. It’s a human failing that Peirce identified as long ago as the 1870s, but I think that social media amplifies it.
     

  5. But as much as I love the movies, there is something that drives me crazy about them—something that your average American fan would likely never know. Unsurprisingly, most of the bad guys in the first and third movies are German—back then, it seemed like they always were—so sometimes they speak to one another in German. Or, at least it sounds like it. As is often the case with American movies, the speech goes untranslated, and the subtitles say only, “Talking in German” or, even funnier, “Talking in a foreign language.” But, being German, I can tell you that they are not speaking anything identifiable as actual German.

    My favorite example is in the first Die Hard movie, when McClane is fighting with the bad guys in a glass-walled office. McClane hides in a corner. Hans Gruber (played by the great Alan Rickman) yells at his people in German: “Schiess dem Fenster!” But they don’t understand him, so he repeats in English: “Shoot the glass!” Not only does the accent make it impossible to believe he is German, but the grammar is so wrong it makes me laugh-cry. If he wanted to say, “Shoot the glass!,” it would be “Schiess auf das Fenster!” What he actually says is gobbledygook.

    And it happens again: At one point, one bad guy says to another: “Mach los, mach los!” I have no idea what they are talking about. There’s also: “Wir sind im Heizehaus.” (“We’re in the boiler house.”) But there is no German word “Heizehaus.” Boiler room would be Kesselhaus.

    Since I am an East German, I must also mention that there is obviously no such real-life thing as the West German Volksfrei movement to which the Grubers are said to belong. And also: Volksfrei makes no sense in German. Beyond that: Hans and Simon Gruber are not even West Germans! Simon was a colonel in the East German NVA (National People’s Army). In an old picture they show of Simon in the third Die Hard movie, it looks like he’s wearing a Wehrmacht (the Nazi army) uniform. The East German army, after the ’70s, had a totally different one. For the Americans that would not make such a big difference, but for this German? Terrible!

     

  6. It turns out that getting fans to pay for music has no necessary connection to getting musicians paid. Vocational awe means that the fact that someone has induced a musician to make music doesn’t mean that the musician is getting a fair share of what you pay for music. The same goes for every kind of art, and every field where vocational awe plays a role, from nursing to librarianship.
     

  7. “A new commander came to us. We went out with him on the first patrol at six in the morning. He stops. There’s not a soul in the streets, just a little 4-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the elbow and his leg here. Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all stood there with our mouths open. Looking at him in shock … I asked the commander: "What’s your story?” He told me: These kids need to be killed from the day they are born. When a commander does that, it becomes legit.“

    :’(

     
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  10. People don’t really know about these Cabinet picks because average Americans just aren’t as read-in to the news as they once were. They watch the news on their phones in 30-second snippets. If they read, it’s headlines and social media posts, maybe. So they know, probably, that Trump nominated Dr. Oz to something or other. But do they know that he has a roughly $30 million financial stake in companies that will be doing business with the very Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that he is probably going to lead? I very much doubt it.
     

  11. Every move away from the death penalty is a move in the right direction so we must celebrate Biden’s decision to commute 37 sentences today. But we still have work to do to abolish the death penalty once and for all.

    37 is good but 40 is better. No one – not even Dylann Roof — is beyond redemption. Every time we execute a person we teach our kids the myth that violence can heal the wounds of violence.

    The death penalty does not heal the wounds of violence, it just creates new wounds. We can honor the victims of violence without killing more people. It’s time to stop killing to try to show that killing is wrong.

    Rather than asking “do they deserve to die” we should be asking “do we deserve to kill?” As Jesus said, “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.”

     
  12. Who Americans spend their time with, by age