Oh shit, what are we gonna do now?

[Mongrel]

Trump won because of Big Data.

I've been waiting for this particular shoe to drop. This is long, but worth reading, people.

Of special interest is the fact that the same company produced data analytics for the Brexit Leave team... and the Trump Campaign.

The one caveat is because this is a retranslation, there are no direct reference links. However, I expect this to get some press, so if something is off, we should hopefully see that soon.

[Grath]

So apparently Trump has threatened to send the army in to Chicago to take away people's guns and republicans are doing all sorts of bending themselves backwards to twist how that's actually a thing that they want (rather than what they're spent the last 8 years shitting their pants over.)

[Mongrel]

NYT: The entire senior management team of the State Department has just resigned en masse

[nosimpleway]

“Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

Hasn't stopped Trump yet. Have you seen his cabinet appointments?

[Mongrel]

Oh my god, the plan to "Make Mexico Pay For the Wall" (yes, they're really going to try) goes as follows:

- Illegal immigrants are sending money back to support their families in Mexico
- To do this, they use a wire transfer or whatever
- Tons of poor families in Mexico are supported by people working in the US illegally, which means that they don't have to be supported by government welfare programs.
The plan: Forbid illegal immigrants from making wire transfers, and require checks on any wire transfers to enforce this. The Mexican gov't will then pay the US off to stop doing this because otherwise a bunch of Mexican families would no longer have the money to support themselves.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG.

[Büge]

The Doomsday Clock is two and a half minutes to midnight

[Thad]

Yahoo: Initial Cuts List

Please note that this will result in quite a few actual police being laid off. A guy I know who handles the disbursement of police grants for the state of Florida has said he was surrounded by Trump voters at work and is seeing them begin to slowly realize that Trump actually supports law enforcement less then Obama did.

Slow is relative. On the one hand, people have had forty years to figure out that Donald Trump is full of shit. On the other, within six days of the inauguration is pretty quick for your enthusiastic supporters to turn on you.

There's too much going on for me to go over all of it, but some links:

Why Trump's Staff Is Lying, by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg. A pretty fucking fantastic look at how strongmen manipulate their underlings.

Professor Smith Goes to Washington, by Ed Yong, The Atlantic. There's a new organization called 314 Action raising money to get scientists and engineers to run for office. (We could probably use a thread for worthy causes to donate to.)

Aaaaand yeah, today Trump said "If Mexico's not going to pay for the wall then Pena Nieto shouldn't even come," and Pena Nieto was all like "Well okay then, guess I'm not coming," and then Spicer was all like "We're going to put a 20% tariff on Mexican imports," and then he was all like "I dunno, maybe it'll just be 5%, we don't know," and Jesus Christ, has it really only been six days?

[Metal Slime]

Daily Show gets Trump's inauguration cake. Asks everyone what it's fate should be.

[Grath]

Jesus Christ, has it really only been six days?

[Mongrel]

There's a new organization called 314 Action raising money to get scientists and engineers to run for office.

There's an incredibly bleak Ben Carson joke in there somewhere.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

So the news story of the day is that a Getty photographer took a picture of Trump seeing Obama off, and Trump had a copy put in the White House.

A slight change was made to the White House copy.

If this man were any thinner skinned, he'd be an ambulatory pile of internal organs.

EDIT: Larger version:

[Blossom]

[Blossom]

[Mongrel]

Hold off on Handgate, looks like it's a hoax after all:

Hold up, looks like it's not really true. People went back and checked the ABC News video, and the video didn't show the picture on the wall, they just inserted the Getty image. Which, when compared to the image on Getty, is the same size. The person who originally found this has since deleted all the tweets. Either she photoshopped it, or got suckered by someone elses's photoshop and didn't check the source first.

This after I spent hours holding off linking it because I didn't trust the story for being too-good-to-be-true and waited for independent confirmation, which seemingly came by directly comparing the source from the original Getty photographer.

Something about "fake news".

[Friday]

You're Fake News Mongrel I knew it

[Mothra]

MONGREL IS FAKE NEWS

[Mongrel]

I guess it's better than being yesterday's news, heyoooooo

[Mongrel]

This is such a cheap and easy joke, but it still made me laugh for about a minute solid.

[Metal Slime]

Even Cheney is saying now that Trump's Muslim ban measures go too far.