The Onion on the 15% of Americans who are just plain bonkers

Somme of you may be familiar with the ‘crazifiction factor‘, a term invented by John Rogers to explain the 27% of Americans who seem to be willing to vote for the most bizarre candidates. The Onion reports that the Pew Research organization that conducts polls on various aspects of American life has come up with a different figure.

WASHINGTON—Classifying millions of citizens around the country as “total goddamn mysteries,” a resigned Pew Research study released Friday found it was impossible to determine what the fuck was going on with 15% of Americans. “After an exhaustive, year-long venture, we are still just as confused, if not more confused, about what the deal is with all these indecipherable weirdos,” said lead researcher Jenna Kirkman, before throwing her arms into the air, and calling a large portion of Americans “lost causes.” “According to our very frustrating research, a large portion of Americans are just freaks who will never be understood, no matter how hard we try. Are they happy? Sad? Old? Young? Unfortunately, because so much of the nation are just total fucking randos, we may never actually know.” At press time, Kirkman added that the remaining 85% of Americans were basic as shit, allowing researchers to easily parse every detail about their boring, miserable lives.

(This is of course satire.)

How to make a comedy show during the quarantine

I have been impressed at how these shows have been able to put out such good stuff while everyone is at home. Samantha Bee takes us behind the scenes to show how she and her team did it. It is interesting to see all the people involved who are normally behind the scenes explain what they do. They all look so young! No wonder the show has such energy and topicality.
Part 1:

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The Karen bestiary

‘Karens’ have been much in the news recently. I was generally familiar with the ‘Karen’ concept as the name given to middle-aged white women who have a great sense of entitlement and do not hesitate to demand that the authorities (police, managers, and the like) immediately act to satisfy any grievance that they think they have experienced at the hands of those they think are inferiors. Very often these inferiors are black people committing the offense of living while black.

What I had not realized is that Karen is an umbrella term that covers a spectrum of people. Communications professor Apryl Williams has studied the Karen phenomenon and says that Karens can be split by age and different economic and social classes. A ‘Kylie’ is the name given to 15-20 year olds, ‘Becky’ is from 20 to the mid-thirties, the paradigmatic Karens are in the mid-30s to mid-40s range and have reached the stage of being used to getting their own way and the ones who demand that the authority figure take their side. Then of course we have the names given to people in specific cases of Kanrenism, such as BBQBecky, PermitPatty, Golfcart Gail, and most recently CentralPark Amy. Karen is a form of behavior that is not gender exclusive in that men like GymSecurity Tom also fall under the umbrella.
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Sarah Cooper exposes Trump’s incoherence

One of the things that some people have noticed is that you have to read the transcripts of Trump’s utterances to fully appreciate how incoherent or crazy are the things he says. Peter Wade gives an example of this with the transcript of Trump’s response to question asked him by one of his Fox News sycophants who realizes that Trump has lost the plot entirely and tries vainly to get him back on point.

But comedian Sarah Cooper has found another way and made a couple of short online videos where she lip syncs to Trump’s words. Others have done this lip-syncing too but the way she does it really captures his craziness. In the above link, she explains to Lawrence O’Donnell how she does it.

Here is one of her clips.

What defunding the police means

There has been much discussion over the demands of protestors to ‘defund the police’, with right-wingers seizing upon the term and interpreting it in the most extreme way in order to discredit the idea, by raising scary images of (white) people being attacked by marauding (black) hordes who will come to take away their stuff if there are no police to protect them. But various commentators have been pushing back at the distortions.

Here is Seth Meyers on what defunding the police implies.


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