#like. when they announced the singles it was never explicitly said that these are singles/vault tracks/etc from other albums

[ilostyou]

the choice to brand the singles as songs from albums that were already released is soosososos so interesting dare i say suspicious however. very very intentional

[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: July 12, 2019

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court, in a decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, blocked the attempt by the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. In his opinion, Roberts explicitly stated that a citizenship question is Constitutional, and in fact dozens of previous censuses included such a question, but rather it was the reasoning given by the Trump administration in support of the citizenship question that, according to Roberts, “appeared contrived.” While a citizenship question has indeed been included several previous census questionnaires, the argument against including one in the 2020 Census is that, in the context of this administration’s approach to immigration and current migrants who have overstayed their status, such a question is an attempt to weaponized the census as a means to suppress minority responses. The significance of this is that the census was not, and never has been, meant to be used as a means to measure “citizens,” but rather of the total number of people residing in the United States. Regardless, within 24 hours of the Court’s decision, lawyers with the Justice Department appeared to announce that they would not pursue a citizenship question any further, only to be directly contradicted by the president the very next day. In addition to conjecturing that a citizenship question could be added on a supplement—the primary questionnaires began printing almost immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision—Trump even floated the possibility of delaying the census. This was never a realistic possibility as federal law mandates that the census begin no later than April 2020. Even so, yesterday morning the White House announced that the president may attempt to force a citizenship question into the census by means of an executive order. When it became clear that this would likely be thwarted by judicial action, the White House finally relented and by yesterday afternoon it was officially acknowledged that the president would no longer seek to add the question.

 Yesterday, the House of Representatives, following through on its attempts to aggressively probe the Trump administration, authorized up to a dozen subpoenas to current and former administration officials in order to question whether the president ever engaged in any activities that could be construed as obstruction of justice—the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller now, famously, having said that if the OSC thought that the president did not obstruct justice, they would have said so. The most prominent names on this list of subpoenas includes former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and current White House advisor, and presidential son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The White House has already pushed back on numerous other subpoenas, and it would not be surprising at all if they seek to block both Kushner and Sessions from testifying, or invoking privilege to limit what they can speak to. Neither will likely need much convincing.

The number of four-year, bachelor’s degree granting colleges and universities peaked in 2013-2014. Since then it has entered into a decline, as small, largely private liberal arts schools with relatively open admissions standards, are experiencing financial collapse. Even though the number of college applicants is the highest ever, the population downturn in certain parts of the country, notably New England, has led to fewer high school graduates, while the selectivity of students has led them to focus their applications on more selective schools. This is the story of Newbury College in Massachusetts, which closed its doors after graduating its last class of students in May 2019. But, as the article points out, it could be the story of numerous other schools around the country and particularly on the east coast, which already boasts a plethora of elite and Ivy League level institutions. And as population shifts changed—first having moved westward and then southeastern—it is possible that over the next decade, we will see this swathe of school closures follow, across the country mimicking Manifest Destiny.

In June 2009, a man calling himself Peter Bergmann, arrived in Sligo, on the north coast of the Republic of Ireland and asked to be driven by a taxi to an inexpensive hotel. Upon arriving, he paid for three nights in advance with cash, gave his aforementioned name which was not checked by front desk staff against any ID, and promptly moved into his room. Over the next three days, Bergmann left his room, according to CC television cameras, 13 times. Each time, he appeared to be carrying a purple plastic bag filled with…something. Each time he returned, he was no longer carrying the bag—which was likely folded up in a pocket—and there is no indication of where he deposited the contents of the bag. After three nights, Bergmann checked out of his hotel room and sought a bus to a nearby beach popular for bathers. At each stop along the way, Bermann spoke to no one except in transactional terms, never showed an ID, and never revealed anything about himself other than his name, later proven to be a fabrication, and that he was from Austria. The morning of what would have been his fourth day in Sligo, Bergmann’s body was found on the beach at Rosses Point. Some of the clothing he had been spotted wearing the day before was found folded neatly atop a rock nearby, but no purple plastic bag was found. The autopsy later revealed that Bergmann, or ‘Bergmann’ since police do not regard that as his real name, had not died of drowning, but instead of a heart attack and, perhaps notably, his body was riven with cancer and, according to the medical examiner, he had only weeks to live. The rest of Peter Bergmann’s life, his intentions in Sligo, his actual name, and what he did over the last week of his life, remain a mystery.

On June 1, 2008, a series of shingles on the roof of a building on the Universal Studios backlot had been repaired by maintenance workers, using a blowtorch. They finished their work at 3am and stuck around for an hour to make sure that the shingles were not still warm, and then departed.  At least one shingle was still too hot, and ignited the rest of the roof, starting a fire which ripped through much of the famed backlot and by 5:45am, threatened, a large but otherwise non-descript building nearby. This climate-controlled warehouse consistently mostly of hundreds of thousands of old movie film reels, but 2,400 sq. ft. was cordoned off from the rest and held the entire West Coast vault of masters belonging the Universal Music Group. UMG is the largest music label in the world—recently valued at around $33 billion—and through a series of conglomerations and corporate takeovers, has come to own hundreds of thousands of master tapes of some of the most significant recording studios of the mid-to-late 20th century. This vault contained the recording history of entire studios, including famed smaller studios like AVI and Chess, but also significant labels like A&M; estimates are that anywhere between 120,000 and 175,000 masters in the form of everything from magnetic tapes to digital drives were housed in the vault and the fire consumed almost all of them. Masters from Buddy Holly, John Coltrane, Etta James, The Mamas the Papas, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and even perhaps Guns N’ Roses, among many, many others were lost in the conflagration. This essay is about more than the events of June 1, 2008 or even the corporate response from UMG which played down the loss, it is instead about the philosophy behind preserving art, especially from obscure artists, the financial toll of preservation, and the lack of will that apparently exists to preserve a gigantic swathe of American history.

If you have ever traveled through southern Louisiana, one thing you may have noticed is that every single town, large or small, apparently has a Daiquiri stand with a drive-thru lane. Though the word ‘Daiquiri’ is Cuban in origin and was spread to the American lexicon after the Spanish-American War, during which time the U.S. invaded and occupied Cuba, it gained widespread use in the American South starting in the 1980s. In 1982, David Ervin was a college student in Lafayette, Louisiana, which was then situated in a dry parish. Ervin would drive to the neighboring parish to buy alcohol at a store just over the parish line. It was at this store, that Ervin witnessed how the store’s general manager had used a shipment of otherwise unpopular canned cocktails to make alcoholic fruit slushees, which were enormously popular and required virtually no bartending skills to create and serve. Ervin had a vision where this drink could be married to more efficient delivery and decide that a small store with no seating, but only a drive-thru to serve customers in their cars. This is the delightful story of how Ervin, who still owns a drive-thru daiquiri shop today, turned a small investment into a $100,000 per week business.

Finally, Kyle Kondik and Larry Sabato of the Center for Politics, discuss the death of political oddity and Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, the current state of the 2020 Senate elections, and what the departure of Rep. Justin Amash from the GOP means for his congressional seat. It remains very early in the 2020 cycle, but events have already occurred which will have an outsized influence on the outcomes of the 2020 election.

  Welcome to the weekend.