I'm split on the shithole comment. On the obvious hand, it's so undeniable and boldly, grossly racist - it's hard not to take a moment to just boggle. But really, on the other hand, of course Trump thinks any poor country, let alone a poor country filled with brown people, is a shithole. I mean, this guy thinks that gold gilt makes for the beautifulest toilets and the hardest he's ever concentrated was on making his presidential coin bigger 3/2 larger than Obama's. This is the least surprising not-even-Freudian non-slip of a tongue possible.

I suppose, as noted in the comments in the Dumpster Fire thread, the extent of the story is that the media is forced to report it and you really can't sugarcoat it? The story, perhaps is how Trump manages to tie the hands of those who do their best to coddle him?

My vintage Christian Dior acrylic sweaters and orlon sweaters (and sometimes it says acrylic orlon) are the softest sweaters imaginable, and machine washable and durable as all fuck. The best.

Adult day cares are big in the Rio Grande Valley:

Lindos Momentos, which roughly translates to Precious Moments, is one of 223 such centers in the Valley, many with similarly uplifting names like Mi Casa (My House), Nuestra Familia (Our Family) and Fuente de Juventud (Fountain of Youth). There's a running joke in the Valley that you can find an adult day care on every street corner. While it's an exaggeration, statistics show just how ubiquitous they really are. The Valley is home to 40 percent of the adult day care centers in Texas -- twice as many as in metro Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin combined. Nationally, almost 1 in every 20 centers is in the Valley, even though only 1 in 250 Americans live here.

The Valley has some unique characteristics:

The prevalence of adult day cares in the Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic, is part cultural, part economic. Hispanic seniors are more likely than Anglos to live at home with their children or other family members. The Valley also has a persistently high poverty rate and a percentage of seniors with diabetes, heart disease, depression and dementia that is alarmingly higher than the national average. This points to a paradox: Despite higher rates of chronic illness nationwide, Hispanic seniors have a significantly higher life expectancy than Anglos or African Americans, in part due to robust networks of family and social support. While a 65-year-old Hispanic senior can expect to live to 86, on average he or she will spend almost half those years living with serious physical or cognitive impairment that necessitates the kind of low-level long-term care an adult day care can provide.

Anyway, I doubt my own parents would go for it, because they're kind of snobby and think they're too smart for plebes, but who knows how personalities would change if dementia set in. I personally think this has the potential to really help family caretakers from being wildly overburdened by aging family members, without also leaving them completely bankrupt. And I personally think I wouldn't find it insulting or annoying to be dropped off each morning, if it meant I could keep living with my kids in my 80s or whatever.

I would have posted last week about the hackiest hack move by Sen Grassley to move the DoJ to file charges against Steele, but I was traveling. Instead I'll post about Feinstein releasing the Fusion GPS testimony. Good.

Snarkout writes: This is an amazing story -- the Toast's Nicole Cliffe has heard from two different sources that Katie "The Morning After" Roiphe has a cover story in next month's Harper's that will out the author of the Shitty Media Men list. She's paying writers to withdraw their work from that issue as a protest.

Heebie's take: wow. Good on Cliffle and others for trying to shut it down. Here's a link I found for more context.

It's not quite "how many five-year-olds can you take in a fight" but it might be as close as we get in this lifetime.

Or not, if someone makes five-year-old-equivalent robots.

Nothing to see here. Just three Japanese internationals vs. 100 school children lining up in a 30-30-30-10 formation. pic.twitter.com/yz5zkovKIK

— Ball Street (@BallStreet) January 8, 2018

Did anyone get anything good for Christmas? or over the holidays? I got Jammies this Bug-A-Salt rifle that lets you shoot table salt to kill bugs. I got myself some sweaters.

Slightly related, do you all believe in skincare? do you all believe that if Twin A is a dedicated moisturizer user from ages 20 to 50 then stops, and Twin B never does anything, that you'd be able to tell the difference at age 60? Sunscreen and sun/wind exposure excluded from the question.

For that matter, sometimes I don't believe in exercise, or at least continuous accumulated exercise. What I mean is, if Twin A exercises from age 20 on, for the rest of their life, and Twin B begins exercising at age 50, would you be able to tell a difference at age 55?

Or, what if the twins' exercise habits matched their skincare habits: Twin A exercises from age 20 to 50 and then stops, and Twin B never exercises. Would you be able to tell the difference at age 60?

Is being in good shape really only something that protects you at that moment in time, and everything else is just habit-formation?

I spent the weekend cuddling tiny little twin babies in Tennessee. In the background, MSNBC was on a lot of the time. It turns out - and I mean this in the most pretentious way possible - that I don't know what anyone looks like or sounds like. Wait, which one is Axios? He has a British accent?

Anyway, having background news is slightly different in that you exercise less control over how much time you care to spend on a topic, and you can't be as erratic and short-attention-span as you please. But they weren't saying super aggravatingly dumb stuff and I didn't feel the need to argue with Mika and Joe and the people one Meet the Press.

My big takeaway from my recent tentative forays into TV, after a long hiatus, is that you cede control of your attention. The internet is such a pellet bar for your attention, because you exercise total control of how long you want to view any particular content. Video is so bossy and dominating.

I have made and consumed my first "bowl of red". I now have one good thing to say about Texas.

It's surprisingly hard to find the canonical version of the dish. I gathered the "no beans, no tomatoes" rule, but even ostensibly classic versions call for things like Tabasco (that can't be right!) and modern versions like that of J Kenji McMillan Lopez Polyakov Alt call for fish sauce (come on!) (though I did mostly follow his instructions for preparing the chilies. The linked version seemed suitably concise (I used the bacon grease, but didn't add the bacon back in.) If you have a source of good dried chilies, go for it; it's delicious.