As always, everything that comes out of the White House is a pile of pure horseshit:

Add all of these factors together, and it becomes clear that an immigrant won’t be able to bring that many relatives to the US over the course of his or her lifetime. Vaughan’s study found that as of 2015, immigrants who came to the US from 1981 to 2000 had sponsored an average of 1.77 relatives to come join them. The most recent immigrants in the study — those who came to the US in the late 1990s — had sponsored the most relatives: 3.46. But both of those numbers include the minor children they brought with them at the time: In other words, they were hardly starting 3.46 new “chains.”

A human chain with 3.46 links, two of which are the minor children of the immigrants, isn't much of a chain.

But, yet again, we have to sit and watch "conservatives" work themselves into an ignorant fury over a complete lie.

Hawaii Gov. David Ige said he and his team took so long to post a message to social media about the recent missile alert being a false alarm because he didn't know his Twitter username and password. Ige told reporters Monday he has since put his username and password into his cellphone. He says he can now use social media without waiting for his staff.

Maybe a password manager like LastPass would help?

Update:

'Instagrammability'

How do you pick your holiday spots? Weather? Value for money? Lack of other tourists? There are various factors at play, but it turns out the most important thing millennials consider when choosing a holiday destination is how Instagrammable it is. A recent study has revealed that two-fifths (40.1 per cent) of millennials choose a travel spot based on its Instagrammability.

sigh

Actual CNN headline:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here comes the government shutdown

And the attribution at the end of the article:

CNN's Phil Mattingly contributed emoji to this report.

Strictly speaking, that is not an emoji. That's an emoticon.

NPR:

I know far more today about albums I hated in 1990 than I do about my favorite albums released last year.

Sigh.

Yeah.

The ease of purchase and my adult income have made buying records far too easy. IT just piles up. And though I never really got into the pirating thing, I did dabble. I scooped up a lot of stuff all at once. And most of that is now just gathering dust out in the seldom-visited sectors of my network storage box.

The author of the linked piece tried to get back in the habit of fully-absorbing a new record in a rather rigid way - which is why it failed. But I'm trying to do it by simply buying less new/new-to-me music. And if I find something new I really like, I'm not rushing out and grab everything else by that band; I just absorb that one record as best I can.

This is the screen that set off the ballistic missile alert on Saturday. The operator clicked the PACOM (CDW) State Only link. The drill link is the one that was supposed to be clicked. #Hawaii pic.twitter.com/lDVnqUmyHa

— Honolulu Civil Beat (@CivilBeat) January 16, 2018

("BMD False Alarm" is a new link, just added)

They couldn't even bother to separate the DRILL/DEMO/Test stuff from the real stuff with boxes or some colors or a bold font? Put them on different tabs with giant "DRILL" and "REAL" labels at the top?

Every time some new report about Trump being totally out of touch with policy matters and how his staff tries to keep him away from the levers of power, I think back to this:

Donald Trump and John Kasich's teams are at war over whether the Republican presidential nominee ever seriously wanted the Ohio governor to join the ticket.

Multiple sources close to Kasich said Trump's son, Donald Jr., tried to entice Kasich with a position as the most powerful vice president in history, but he turned it down. Kasich would have been in charge of all domestic and foreign policy in a Trump White House, Kasich sources said.

Sure he denied it because it makes him look seem weak and out of his depth. But he denies everything, and he is weak and out of his depth.

Trump never wanted to be President. Maybe he wanted to win the contest, but he was never up for the job. And we've known this the whole time.

He saw that these Arc proteins assemble into hollow, spherical shells that look uncannily like viruses. “When we looked at them, we thought: What are these things?” says Shepherd. They reminded him of textbook pictures of HIV, and when he showed the images to HIV experts, they confirmed his suspicions. That, to put it bluntly, was a huge surprise. “Here was a brain gene that makes something that looks like a virus,” Shepherd says.

That’s not a coincidence. The team showed that Arc descends from an ancient group of genes called gypsy retrotransposons, which exist in the genomes of various animals, but can behave like their own independent entities.* They can make new copies of themselves, and paste those duplicates elsewhere in their host genomes. At some point, some of these genes gained the ability to enclose themselves in a shell of proteins and leave their host cells entirely. That was the origin of retroviruses—the virus family that includes HIV.

The recent It movie is good and actually quite scary at times (I never read the book or saw the earlier movie).

But, wow, Stranger Things (season two especially) is pretty much a clone of it!

Are they simply set in the same universe? Probably not. But it's a nice tease.

Mudhoney's Steve Turner, the Big Muff on Superfuzz Bigmuff is selling his Big Muff on eBay.

Big Muff.