Is there a good way to get the original seasons of The Great British Bake Off in the US?  I can’t seem to find more than the one season that they re-branded for PBS.

http://www.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/2016/02/firearms_explosives_and_trench.html

Scalia’s reputation among his supporters was that of an originalist and an arch-conservative.  This is not true.  He was a reactionary, right-wing radical that blithely discarded any precedent or bit of originalist interpretation that didn’t suit his agenda of the moment.

I take no glee in his death, but I’m deeply glad that he’s no longer a part of the Supreme Court.  Good riddance to a bad jurist.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/us-world/article/Senior-Associate-Justice-Antonin-Scalia-found-6828930.php

Still can’t let Formation go.  This is an interesting take on some of the things that make it feel so important.

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/02/09/466142526/not-ready-to-stop-obsessing-over-beyonc-and-formation-we-got-you

“This is incredibly interesting”, says the very old man.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-teens

I can’t stop watching the video for Formation.

I’m not young enough to understand all of the moving parts and implications of its critique, but I’ve seen enough in my life to know that it’s damned important.

Also, and not least: catchy as hell.

I have student loans serviced by Navient.  Every three or four months I start getting calls from them that I’m past due, even though I have automatic payments set up to pay more than my minimums every month.  They always take a look, apologize for the error, explain that it’s due to an unavoidable problem with how bill pay checks are cut and processed, and fix everything.

I honestly attributed it to basic incompetence, but that’s because I thought that a company being that obviously and blatantly criminal in their behavior risked meaningful sanction.  In retrospect, I can see that that was naive.

I just checked over the history of my account, and over the past few years they’ve charged me$1300 in late fees, that if I hadn’t been such a stubborn ass in making them fix would have just been free money to them.

How on earth is this company still in business?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-navient_us_56b7a886e4b01d80b246b214

Tennessee Repub calls reporter a ‘b*tch’ over spending probe — then quits county job

I dare you to watch this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4korBHf2sh8) of a least a hundred masked Swedish men driving camped street children out of Stockholm’s Central Station with sticks and batons and not think of the Run Like Hell sequence from Pink Floyd’s The Wall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q68Qwgz1aXQ).

These things are never far from the surface, and I feel like the sense of progress that the late 20th century instilled in us is making it hard to see them rising up again.