lapse in appropriations

Having been designated as emergency-essential employees, Robert Mueller and the staff of the Special Counsel’s Office are excepted from the furlough (previously) and will be allowed to continue their investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 US presidential campaign. The timing of this failure to reach a fiduciary compromise is rather impeccable, falling on the one year anniversary since Trump delivered his inaugural address and took high office.

franking privilege

A leading pro-BREXIT campaigner chided Royal Mail for issuing a set of commemorative stamps celebrating the career of Pink Floyd, as Kottke informs, whilst refusing to do the same to mark the occasion of the UK’s departure from the European Union. The internet quickly obliged to fulfil that glaring philatelic niche.

℞

Fed up with exponentially increasing prices for staple medication due to the popularity of the rentier business model and supply-chain disruptions that lead to shortages—exacerbating the pricing regime even more—a group of US hospitals and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs have banded together to fight Big Pharma by having their own dispensaries and making their own generic drugs. We applaud them for standing up to heartless greed and doing something to redress the broken healthcare system besides just offering more concessions to drug companies and make the bill the scariest part of any medical diagnosis, but we fully too expect them to be in for a truly heroic battle since they won’t relinquish their monopoly eagerly.

clapback or twitstorm

Not to minimise what’s genuinely really awful and tone-deaf things that are hurtful and reinforce negative stereotypes and worthy of outrage, these twenty-nine stages of an unfolding tweetstorm (via Waxy) by Tom Phillips is really a fine and biting piece of satire that perfectly captures the vicious and lurid landscape we’re capable of creating if we’re not careful. Of course social media is heavily tilted towards manufacturing such tantrums but it’s important to appreciate that its isn’t only Trump (who jumps on this bandwagon at stage twenty-one) or other polemists who are conducted into a fugue state and any one of us can be easily baited. Rehashing—hook, line and sinker—eventually passes over as the next paroxysm displaces it but surely not without causing damage that’s more enduring and deleterious than the aforementioned slight.  Do check out the whole unravelling on BuzzFeed at the link above.