Wednesday Stupid

Jon McNaughton's new lithograph, "Crossing the Swamp", modeled on Emanuel Leutze's "Crossing the Delaware", 1851. After setting the Capitol on fire (you can see the flames illuminating the building's interior clear up into the Rotunda dome), the Emperor and his comrades make their escape across an unexpected bog surrounded by dead hemlocks. Mattis, Carson (face turned to the burning halls of Congress), Huckabee-Sanders, and Kelly in the stern ply the oars, while Conway, Bolton (looking as if he wandered in from a duck hunt) and Two-Gun Sessions in the foreground keep their guns at the ready in case Kelly tries to make a break; Pompeo lower his binoculars, slowly, as if he'd just spotted something truly alarming. The Emperor, possibly drugged to keep him calm, stares at the haunting though ineffectual fire of his hurricane lamp, Mrs. Trump grasps Pence around the loins while he performs an unspeakable act with a flag, and Ivanka Trump looks on in horror. In the bow, Ambassador Haley tries to prod an intruding alligator out of the way (or is she spearing it?), thrusting her leg out as if making ready to leap out and wrestle the beast. Jared and Junior have perhaps already been locked up. The moon is a ghostly galleon, but aren't they all?

Gas Hogs Keep You Safe

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration says people would drive more and be exposed to increased risk if their cars get better gas mileage, an argument intended to justify freezing Obama-era toughening of fuel standards.

Transportation experts dispute the arguments, contained in a draft of the administration’s proposals prepared this summer, excerpts of which were obtained by The Associated Press.

It's not obvious how this works. Maybe drivers alienated by their unpleasantly lightweight vehicles would end up driving them too much, aimlessly: "improvements over time have better longer-term effects simply by not alienating consumers, as compared to great leaps forward". They claim keeping fuel standards at 2020 levels could save up to 1000 lives a year.

In other administration news, the Department of Education is said to be considering new restrictions on college loans because recent research suggests that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Art by Infowars portraying New York University Professor Michael Rectenwald and his dark fears announced on a recent Facebook post: "We’re undergoing a Maoist-like Cultural Revolution — with the power of the corporate mass media, corporate social media, the academy, most of corporate America, the deep state, the shadow government, and most of the legal apparatuses behind it," wrote the professor, adding that, "Anti-western, anti-individual, anti-Christian, anti-liberty monsters are ravaging our cultural legacies as well as our contemporary arts and letters." So far Rectenwald has not been forced to parade before the students in a dunce cap, bow, and perform a self-criticism in fear of getting mobbed and beaten bloody, though he has been forced to sue the university (which promoted him to full clinical professor of Liberal Studies in 2016) for allowing four colleagues to send out department-wide emails that "sought to maliciously portray” him as “a racist, sexist, misogynistic, dishonest, drug user and/or drug addict suffering from mental illness and/or instability." What kind of crappy cultural revolution is this, people, the guy hasn't criticized himself at all!