Trump Universitygate →

John Cassidy, writing for The New Yorker:

When it began, Trump University offered online classes, but it quickly switched its focus to live classes and seminars, the first of which was free to attend. One of the company’s ads said of Trump, “He’s the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth. . . . And now he’s ready to share—with Americans like you—the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market.” The ad said that Trump had “hand-picked” Trump University’s instructors, and it ended with a quote from him: “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”

In fact, Trump hadn’t handpicked the instructors, and he didn’t attend the three-day seminars. Moreover, the complaint said, “no specific Donald Trump techniques or strategies were taught during the seminars, Donald Trump ‘never’ reviewed any of Trump University’s curricula or programming materials, nor did he review any of the content for the free seminars or the three day seminars.” So what were the attendees taught? According to the complaint, “the contents and material presented by Trump University were developed in large part by a third-party company that creates and develops materials for an array of motivational speakers and Seminar and timeshare rental companies.” The closest that the attendees at the seminars got to Trump was when they were encouraged to have their picture taken with a life-size photo of him.

It's amazing, the lengths that so many people (the writer, the judges, the DAs, the employees, etc., etc.) will go to to paint this patriot in such a negative light.

(On a serious note, if you uprooted this entire story and Donald Trump himself from reality and made it fiction, nobody would publish the story. That's how on-the-nose the entire situation is re: Trump University as a metaphor for his presidential run.)

Elon Musk Thinks We All Live in a Video Game. So What If We Do? →

David Roberts, writing for Vox:

Everything we know about the world comes to us through our five senses, which we experience internally (as neurons firing, though Descartes wouldn't have put it that way). How do we know those firing neurons correspond to anything real out in the world?

After all, if our senses were being systematically and ubiquitously deceived, whether by demon or daemon, we would have no way of knowing. How would we? We have no tools other than our senses with which to fact-check our senses.

Because we can't rule out the possibility of such deception, we can't know for certain that our world is the real world. We could all just be suckers.

This kind of skepticism sent Descartes on an internal journey, searching for something he could know with absolute confidence, something that could serve as a foundation upon which to build a true philosophy. He ended up with cogito, ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am" — but that has not fared well with subsequent philosophers.

Start your Friday off right and get those meaning-of-existence wheels spinning in your brain!

(Bonus comment: imagine trying to explain this concept to Donald Trump? Better yet, imagine Donald Trump trying to explain this concept to someone else?)

Primitive Technology →

Giri Nathan, writing for Adequate Man:

There is a man in Australia who goes out into the bushland of Far North Queensland to live out his caveman fantasies. The practice is called primitive technology, which he describes as “a hobby where you make things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials.” Lest the vagueness of “things” mislead you into thinking he’s building tire swings and humble tree forts, just play his videos and know that my dude is building functional weapons and livable huts, chronicled in his wordless, tightly edited, hypnotic tutorials.

I have one rule for this guy's videos—never start them before bed. You will wind up staying up much later than you planned. Please make sure you watch the one I included above. Don't balk at the run-time; you won't even notice the time going by, I promise.

Inside A White Nationalist Conference Energized By Trump’s Rise →

Rose Gray, writing for BuzzFeed:

I introduced myself to Taylor as he tried to adjust the fluorescent lights in the beige conference room that would play host to the weekend’s lectures. He had invited me to cover the conference and when I approached, he invited me to sit at a table near the front so we could talk.

We were unable to get a word in edgewise as soon as we sat down. First, a tall college-age man approached Taylor and asked shyly if he would autograph one of his books. Taylor did. He asked Taylor if he would translate into Japanese the “14 Words,” a white supremacist slogan that is a cornerstone of the movement. (Taylor grew up partly in Japan, the son of missionary parents.) Taylor demurred.

A second man came up, bearing a gift for Taylor: a round ceramic plate, about the size of a saucer, with markings on it. He made Taylor guess what it was. Part of a pulley system, maybe? No, the gift was a tribal Ethiopian lip plate, which the man had picked up on his travels. Taylor, who has written that Africa is an “utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy,” accepted it with enthusiasm.

Most years, the American Renaissance conference is an obscure event in an obscure park, attended by a handful of the same fringe figures and elsewise only sparking the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

That was before Donald Trump.

Now, I know what Trump supporters are going to say. These aren't the views of Trump himself. He's not at the rallies. He doesn't have a say in who decides to support him. And they are right. But it's not like we see white nationalists lining up to support Hillary Clinton. Or Bernie Sanders. Or hell, even Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or any of the rest of the inhabitants of the Republican clown car. When Donald Trump loses the election in November, white nationalists and neo-Nazis are going to be disappointed.

That means something.

How New York Harbor Pilots Master These Treacherous Waters →

Shayla Love, writing for Gothamist:

He was tall for 13, but lanky. The burly crewmen dwarfed him. The captain offered the pair black coffee and Blake accepted, to feel like one of the grown-ups. The ship was transporting molasses and the air had a thick sweet smell, overpowering enough that when Blake steps on a molasses ship today, he is immediately taken back to that moment: the bitter black coffee, and the warm, sickly smell of sugar.

“That was not a good night,” Blake said. “But when my father walked up on the bridge of the ship, it was like he was king. He’s in charge. Ever since then, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a pilot.”

I happen to be very good friends with a Sandy Hook harbor pilot and I can vouch for the article; everything he has explained to me about the job over the years really is that fucking crazy.

The Backstory Behind David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech

Sam Levine, writing for The Huffington Post:

David Foster Wallace wanted to know who had thought bringing him to Kenyon College to deliver its commencement address was a good idea.

Meredith Farmer, an English and philosophy double major in the class of 2005, nervously claimed responsibility.  

“Go fuck yourself,” Wallace told her. “Fuck you.”

As a famous embracer of cliche, D.F.W. would appreciate the fact that the only way the 'This is Water' speech can be described now is by saying that is has "taken on a life of its own."

/via The Howling Fantods

Donald Trump Wants to Build a Seawall to Protect His Golf Course from Climate Change →

Seth Weintraub, writing for Electrek:

As far as presidential candidates are concerned, it’s hard to find one with scarier implications for the planet than Donald Trump. As Politico points out, the presumptive Republican Presidential Candidate has called global warming “a total hoax,” “BS” and “pseudoscience.”

But that’s just the candidate trying to win the Republican endorsement for president. As a businessman with properties on the coasts, Trump takes a decidedly different tack.

As far as galling hypocrisy goes, this is par for the course (pun intended) for the presumptive Republican nominee for president. But the bigger takeaway here is that, for better and for worse, this is the circumstance under which climate change will inevitably come to be dealt with.

When it starts affecting the business interests of rich white men.

Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves →

Nina Bernstein, writing for The New York Times:

New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there.

To reclaim their stories from erasure is to confront the unnoticed heartbreak inherent in a great metropolis, in the striving and missed chances of so many lives gone by. Bad childhoods, bad choices or just bad luck — the chronic calamities of the human condition figure in many of these narratives. Here are the harshest consequences of mental illness, addiction or families scattered or distracted by their own misfortunes.

But if Hart Island hides individual tragedies, it also obscures systemic failings, ones that stack the odds against people too poor, too old or too isolated to defend themselves. In the face of an end-of-life industry that can drain the resources of the most prudent, these people are especially vulnerable.

Indeed, this graveyard of last resort hides wrongdoing by some of the very individuals and institutions charged with protecting New Yorkers, including court-appointed guardians and nursing homes. And at a time when many still fear a potter’s field as the ultimate indignity, the secrecy that shrouds Hart Island’s dead also veils the city’s haphazard treatment of their remains.

These cases are among hundreds unearthed through an investigation by The New York Times that draws on a database of people buried on the island since 1980. The records make it possible for the first time to trace the lives of the dead, revealing the many paths that led New Yorkers to a common grave.

Matched with other public records, including guardianship proceedings, court dockets and hundreds of pages of unclaimed cadaver records obtained from the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, the database becomes a road map to unlocking Hart Island’s secrets.

When I got my tattoo of a basic map of the Bronx, I made sure to include Hart Island.

Sanders's Campaign Manager Previews an Undemocratic Strategy for the Dem. Primary →

Ezra Klein, writing for Vox:

First, Sanders blasted New York's primary for being closed to independents. "Today, 3 million people in the state of New York who are independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary," Bernie Sanders said. "That’s wrong."

But later that same night, Sanders's campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, went on MSNBC and said that the campaign's plan is to win the election by persuading superdelegates to dump Hillary Clinton.

This isn't the first time the Sanders campaign has previewed this strategy. They began talking about it in March, arguing that if they could finish the primaries strong, then even if they trailed Clinton in delegates, they could use their strong poll numbers, tremendous small-donors fundraising, and general momentum to persuade superdelegates to switch sides and hand them the nomination.

Despicable. On so many levels. First, the idea that New York Independents didn't know that they couldn't vote in the Democratic primary is bullshit, plain and simple. I've known that since I was twelve. You want to say that it's unfair, or arcane, or whatever, that's fine, but to act as though this is the first election that this is the case, or worse, that somehow it is indicative of some strawman establishment pulling dirty tricks to throw the election for Hillary, is just idiotic and indicative of a desire not to be an active part of the democratic process, but just to burn shit down (pun intended).

On top of that, the inference of voter disenfranchisement from Bernie Sanders, of all people, is rich. Just, like, ignore-the-children-who-want-breakfast-and-post-about-this-because-you're-so-pissed rich. This is a candidate who has show that he can only win in states that hold caucuses rather than primaries, mostly because of how disenfranchising and limiting the caucus process is.

And to hear talk of superdelegates—the same superdelegates that Bernie Sanders supporters were frothing at the mouth over a couple of months ago!—being used to overturn the will of the popular vote (I don't actually see it that way, but you understand my point)—it's laughable. It really is.

I, like many liberals, understand and am in agreement with many of Bernie Sanders' policies from a theoretical perspective. But in watching eight years of President Obama, I've also learned a lot about what it takes to overcome the obstructionism of the Republican Party. I've been planning on proudly voting for Hillary Clinton for some time now. I'll do so in less than a week. But as the days go by, and the insults and the hypocrisy mounts, I'm also voting against Bernie Sanders.

Donald Trump, American Preacher →

Jeff Sharlet, writing for The New York Times Magazine:

The ethos of the prosperity gospel is the key to Trump’s power to persuade people that his victories can be theirs — that the greatness of Trump is the means of making America great again. All that is ugly within it, the violence and the hate, is part of an expression of the sense of lack Trumpism both feeds and assuages. It is sorrow, a mourning of the chance that never was or won’t be. The left responds with redemption, the promise of justice; Trump sells revenge, “hitting back 10 times as hard.” But that’s just the drama, the conflict before the resolution, the sales pitch for which Trumpism is the solution: greatness, the truths all prosperity-gospel preachers embody for those who believe.

Trump knows his followers want what he has, and that what Trump has, that for which the plane and the gold and all the “green,” too, are merely symbols, is freedom from want. Trump does not want; Trump is. “Is Trump strong?” Trump asks rhetorically. Those constrained by ordinary manners hear in the question evidence of insecurity. His admirers hear rejoicing. Why not take pleasure in power? It feels good to be strong. It is, for the believers, those whom Trump calls “my people,” a blessing.

I've read, and posted, a lot of great writing about Donald Trump's presidential run. This one might be my favorite. I think it gets the closest, in the clearest language, to understanding just what is going on here. To what is fueling all of this.