The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination used his Twitter account to apparently endorse a quote by none other than Italian fascist Benito Mussolini. This would hardly mark the first time Donald Trump raises more than a few eyebrows by retweeting a follower. But this time around the whole thing is rather striking as the account is a pretty clear parody that likens Mussolini to the real estate mogul and even goes on to attribute the well-known quote to Trump. “‘It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.’ –@realDonaldTrump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain,” reads the tweet.

The account in question is “ilduce2016” has as its Twitter avatar a composite image that puts Trump’s hair on Mussolini’s head. Mussolini’s followers often referred to him as “Il Duce.” The whole thing may be a bit subtle if you consider that earlier this year, Trump retweeted a user named “WhiteGenocideTM”—twice.

Update at 11:45 a.m.: Gawker revealed it was their doing. The website created a bot in December to periodically spit out Mussolini quotes and credit them to Trump, hoping the presidential hopeful would eventually retweet them. "At the time of the account’s creation, Gawker Media Executive Editor John Cook expressed some concern that the joke behind the account was far too obvious, and wouldn’t trick anyone but a complete idiot," writes Gawker's Alex Pareene.

Happy National Notice That Stadium Subsidies Are A Bad Deal Day, everybody!

• The Wall Street Journal notices that the soon-to-be-again Los Angeles Rams are set to join the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors in building new sports venues without much in the way of public money, and declares this a trend, in California, at least. Though the authors then note that the Sacramento Kings got plenty of public cash, and the San Diego Chargers could yet get a bunch from that city, “despite a wealth of academic studies showing that stadiums and arenas are poor investments when it comes to economic development.” I’m not exactly sure what this all is supposed to add up to, but it does provide a nice roundup of the stadium landscape for anyone who’s been living under a rock.
• The San Gabriel Valley Tribune asks if the new Rams stadium in Inglewood will provide a big economic boost to the region, and cites a couple of economists and the finance director of Foxborough, Massachusetts in answering, “Nah.” In particular, Vanderbilt’s John Vrooman replies: “The net local impact of a professional sports team is zero, if not negative sum, particularly for an NFL team playing in a monolithic space-eating stadium. … The local sports bars will probably rock, but most direct spending at the stadium stays at the stadium. The injection of new cash flow into the local economy is negligible because it’s coming at the expense of local spending someplace else. The indirect spin-offs are also small because most of the spending leaks out of the economy like a sieve and so the urban/regional multipliers are usually zero, zip … nada.” Stan Kroenke’s poor poor people are going to be awfully disappointed.
• Milwaukee’s Fox6 looks at the “arena district” the Bucks are promising to create around their new taxpayer-subsidized arena, and notes that in Columbus, while restaurants around that city’s new arena indeed did great, restaurants in other parts of town saw business decline: “Other restaurants went out of business and a lot of people started moving out of the neighborhood and into newer apartments,” said Tony Scartz, a restaurateur in the Brewery District across town from the new arena. “And most importantly, for me personally, was the office space vacancy that was created because people moved out of the Brewery District and into the newer office space down around the Arena District.” This is exactly what you’d expect from the substitution effect, as explained in the Fox6 piece by, um, me.

Tune back in tomorrow, when some city official somewhere will tout the massive economic benefits available from building a new sports venue! They will fight eternally…

Filed under: Government/Legal, Toyota, Middle East , Military

Continue reading US inquires investigates why ISIS has so many Toyota trucks

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drst:

yogaspice:

hungry-hungry-hobo13:

freedummring:

cubebreaker:

This helpful guide about what 200 calories looks like reminds us just how much healthy food we’re giving up each time we have a treat.

yeah, asshole. how dare you eat an order of french fries when you could have literally shoved 22 banana peppers in your fucking face-hole. what a piece of shit you are.

For that last comment

i’ll eat a plate full of doritos and feel no remorse

It’s back. The infographic that says “Protein? Storage? Cost? What are these strange things you speak of?”

P sure that much of any of that fruit would give me the shits tbh.

There’s a way to talk about food/diet construction/whatever with people, it starts with, “hey do you want to talk about diet construction?” And then if they say yes, whatever idk.

BUT ASK FIRST. I know it’s really hard, and I fuck it up too and slip into “yay the way I eat!” mode sometimes, but hey. Try. Keep trying. People know what works for them. If they want advice, they’ll ask. This condescending shit like “oh maybe you just aren’t aware of how calories work” is bullshit on SEVERAL levels and harmful.

(Also, people asking for weight loss advice don’t actually want to hear answers, in my experience. They want that gross ‘do this awful thing for 2 weeks and somehow magic’ diet industry lie. Sorry, can’t help you, I don’t know anything about that. All I know is how to do stuff that makes my brain feel more stable. V unglam.)

mamalovebone:

need a sex tip? Cosmo says fuck a donut. fuck a donut. just fuck the fucking donut you fucking piece of shit. fuck you

Hello! I am going to answer your question, and then I am going to talk a little bit about GENDER IN COMEDY, because this is my tumblr and I can talk about whatever I want!

The vast vast vast majority of the animal jokes on BoJack Horseman (specifically the visual gags) come from our brilliant supervising director Mike Hollingsworth (stufffedanimals on tumblr) and his team. Occasionally, we’ll write a joke like that into the script but I can promise you that your top ten favorite animal gags of the season came from the art and animation side of the show, not the writers room. Usually it happens more the second way you described— to take a couple examples from season 2, “Okay, we need to fill this hospital waiting room, what kind of animals would be in here?” or “Okay, we need some extras for this studio backlot, what would they be wearing?”

I don’t know for sure, but I would guess that the croc wearing crocs came from our head designer lisahanawalt. Lisa is in charge of all the character designs, so most of the clothing you see on the show comes straight from her brain. (One of the many things I love about working with Lisa is that T-Shirts With Dumb Things Written On Them sits squarely in the center of our Venn diagram of interests.)

NOW, it struck me that you referred to the craft services crocodile as a “he” in your question. The character, voiced by kulap Vilaysack, is a woman.

It’s possible that that was just a typo on your part, but I’m going to assume that it wasn’t because it helps me pivot into something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, which is the tendency for comedy writers, and audiences, and writers, and audiences (because it’s a cycle) to view comedy characters as inherently male, unless there is something specifically female about them. (I would guess this is mostly a problem for male comedy writers and audiences, but not exclusively.)

Here’s an example from my own life: In one of the episodes from the first season (I think it’s 109), our storyboard artists drew a gag where a big droopy dog is standing on a street corner next to a businessman and the wind from a passing car blows the dog’s tongue and slobber onto the man’s face. When Lisa designed the characters she made both the dog and the businessperson women.

My first gut reaction to the designs was, “This feels weird.” I said to Lisa, “I feel like these characters should be guys.” She said, “Why?” I thought about it for a little bit, realized I didn’t have a good reason, and went back to her and said, “You’re right, let’s make them ladies.”

I am embarrassed to admit this conversation has happened between Lisa and me multiple times, about multiple characters.

The thinking comes from a place that the cleanest version of a joke has as few pieces as possible. For the dog joke, you have the thing where the tongue slobbers all over the businessperson, but if you also have a thing where both of them ladies, then that’s an additional thing and it muddies up the joke. The audience will think, “Why are those characters female? Is that part of the joke?” The underlying assumption there is that the default mode for any character is male, so to make the characters female is an additional detail on top of that. In case I’m not being a hundred percent clear, this thinking is stupid and wrong and self-perpetuating unless you actively work against it, and I’m proud to say I mostly don’t think this way anymore. Sometimes I still do, because this kind of stuff is baked into us by years of consuming media, but usually I’m able (with some help) to take a step back and not think this way, and one of the things I love about working with Lisa is she challenges these instincts in me.

I feel like I can confidently say that this isn’t just a me problem though— this kind of thing is everywhere. The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male.

You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster.

I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT BOJACK HORSEMAN.