At The Guardian, journalists who identify themselves as Guardian employees in their Twitter bios are advised to include a disclaimer such as, “These are my personal views and not those of my employer.”

Yeah, that’s because the legal department would rather not carry all employees at all times on their libel insurance. So if you work in the media, at some places you’re encouraged (sometimes even commanded) to use things like Twitter — but also apparently sometimes you’re encouraged to actually make a disclaimer that your social media output isn’t “work product.” Shady! So then when you get sued, well, off you go, enjoy hiring your own defense. It’s not any less libelous just because you said it as an individual; it’s just employers managing their reputational risk — and selling you down the river when they can. Likely, also, because they “advised” you to make this disclaimer, then they can make the case that you’re acting individually even if you don’t carry such a disclaimer. Neato.

“The grim truth is that, at this point, we’d be better off if the House Republicans really were the handmaidens of corporate America, rather than ideologues who prefer crisis to compromise.”

Here it is: the hot new track from Nina Katchadourian, the artist who brought you Sky Mall Kitties. In it, she asks: what is the jitney? (There’s a SPOILER in the video title!)

Ah, life! Every time you think it can’t get any more bizarre or offensive it goes and ups the ante on you. (WARNING: Clicking on that link will very likely engender a deep sense of self-loathing, particularly if you read all the way through. Side effects include, but are not limited to, hatred of the Internet, an abiding sense of shame and profound and upsetting considerations concerning the future of humanity.) [Via]

Everyone knows you can’t dust for vomit. But, man, Pink Floyd’s fingerprints are all over this new song from the wonderful San Francisco band, Girls. (I know that metaphor is sort of backwards, since the thief, or “borrower,” leaves his or her fingerprints on the thing they stole from somebody else, rather than vice versa, but for chronological reasons, it doesn’t make sense to set it up that way.) You can hear very distinct elements of two different eras of Pink Floyd music here.

I know mentioning this will be fodder for our friends who bemoan Girls frontman Christopher Owens as just another “deep dude in the dorm who’s just so, like, misunderstood.”

But we should also point out that this particular type of cribbing has been done before. It’s well documented.

I however will continue to love Christopher Owens and Girls, regardless. I really like the song. And I can’t wait ’til the whole new album, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, comes out next month.

I’ve got 99 problems and that ain’t one RT @davidbitton I’d like to know what can be done about the smells around exit 15E on the Tpkless than a minute ago via web

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Cory Booker
CoryBooker

It’s a fair point. That smell is going to be there long after we’re all gone.

What is the deal with the mysterious orange goo that has attacked a remote fishing village in Alaska? Is it a harbinger of the forthcoming apocalypse? An early warning sign from a planet that has had enough of humanity’s despoilment and is now preparing a grim but gratifying revenge? The start of a new era of environmental terror in which we will all be choked to death by the very toxicities which we have inflicted upon the earth in our shallow pursuit of bigger cars and frigid living rooms? Yes. Yes, it is all those things.

“After the 4th of July,” my grandmother used to say, “summer is over.” And while that may have been something of an exaggeration, it is not necessarily untrue. Despite what the calendar shows, let’s admit it: summer is done. The plans you made have either fallen through or have been executed half-heartedly and with regret. The failures of the season have already been written in the Book of Life underneath all the failures of summers past. You are even now looking ahead to autumn, with all its inevitable disappointment and uncertainty. That swirling sense of anxiety that sits in your chest is a concrete reminder that despite the lofty ambitions you had for the dog days, you wound up with the same collection of missed opportunities and recrimination that always pile up in your emotional inbox. You are in a holding pattern, where one season is dead and the next has yet to assert itself. Hang your head low and slouch your way toward fall, which is the next stop on your slow march to the tomb. Summer? It’s finished. Now somebody please tell the weather that. Good lord, it’s hot outside. There will supposedly be some relief over the next couple of days, but if life works the way I think it does that is probably only a brief fakeout designed to make the next spate of spirit-sapping humidity even more depressing. Summer may be over, but it still sucks.

Photo by Satish Krishnamurthy

After Mark Duggan was shot by police in North London, in Tottenham, four days ago, the family conducted a peaceful vigil and march to the police station (as one does in black communities around the world; standard practice in Oakland, East New York, etc.). There were discrepancies in the account of Duggan’s death, as usual. (Police said he’d shot an officer; instead, as usual, an officer apparently shot an officer.) Family and friends waited outside the police station for hours and were ignored. Later that night, a different kind of demonstration emerged, and 26 police were injured in what ensued. Over the weekend, riots and mini-riots “broke out” from Tottenham to Brixton all the way down to Oxford Circus. “Most of the looters were young teenagers, many of them girls,” says the Telegraph — interesting: how many looters were there? How many of them were girls? — and here it’s helpful to note that Tottenham has the highest unemployment rate in London. Local businesses were trashed; in pictures, demonstrators seem nearly all young and of all races. Like many episodes of unrest, this is a fairly inarticulate class uprising, with a few goons and a lot of people without jobs who are pissed off about the police shooting people. And the further you get from London, it seems, the more the riots are treated as some act of chav hooliganry; it’s paragraph 13 in the Times where Tottenham is described as a place where “a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse” — and Mark Duggan’s name doesn’t make an appearance until paragraph 15. Unfortunately, we don’t get many good accounts of what’s really happening, or why people are furious enough to put themselves in harm’s way, at least in part because most members of the media didn’t feel safe reporting from the area, and as well a few were attacked. (Photo by Tom Kay.)

Every Sunday, while you brunch and have a life, politicians and other professional chatterers take to the TV shows. There, they reposition the events of the week — and, if you watch closely (or watch at all), you can see them straight up lying about things. This weekend, the best liars were Congressfolks Paul Ryan and John McCain. “McCain agrees that there is dysfunction in government, but he thinks that the Tea Party isn’t responsible for it. He then just straight up lies: ‘The fact is that the president never came forward with a plan. I was gratified to hear that he had plans, but there was never a specific plan. There was always the so called leading from behind….’ There was a plan put forward by the White House, in July, that was in all the newspapers, that included $4 trillion in cuts/$1 trillion in revenues/entitlement reform, and the RNC remembers it well enough to criticize the White House for wanting to make cuts to Medicare (the same thing the RNC wants to do).”

Nice one. Paul Ryan gets in on the act pretty well. “Ryan also lies about what the White House offered in terms of the debt ceiling negotiation — per Ryan, it was ‘blank check’ to ‘big tax increase.’ In actuality, the guy who made the ‘blank check’ proposal was Mitch McConnell, and the White House, most notably, offered four trillion in cuts and included changes to Medicare eligibility. Because it hurt the GOP’s chances of being able to tag the White House as unserious, they rejected it, predicting (correctly, as it turns out) that the media wouldn’t remember the ‘grand bargain’ and its terms.” Democracy!