Weeks after a series of digitally altered photos went viral, Kid Rock is capitalizing on the phenomenon by unveiling a line of pro- (and profane) Donald Trump merchandise.

Fans had circulated Photoshopped pictures of Rock, an avowed Trump supporter, bearing T-shirt slogans applauding the president-elect and his successful campaign. While the images' authenticity was promptly debunked, the viral success led the Detroit rocker to roll out his own line of similarly themed merchandise, including a Trump-style hat that reads "MAKE AMERICA BADASS AGAIN," a shirt reading "GOD GUNS & TRUMP" and another declaring America's vast swath of red states to be the genuine "United States of America."

"Due to overwhelming demand, we decided to go ahead and make this & other current event merch," he posted today.

Rock is one of several Detroit music stars to take a high-profile stand this election year, joined on the pro-Trump side by rocker Ted Nugent. Eminem, meantime, issued a web single dissing the candidate's supporters, while Jack White played off a White Stripes album title by selling "Icky Trump" T-shirts. In more recent days, Rochester Hills-raised Madonna has been making headlines for her slams of the incoming Republican president.

<snip>

BuzzFeed News reviewed 26,234 of Trump’s 34,062 tweets, which we received through the Twitter API and developer Brendan Brown, who has archived Trump’s tweets beyond what is accessible via the API (a stream of data that includes information like tweet text, time, and date). We filtered that data down to the 2,687 hyperlinks tweeted by Trump’s personal Twitter account since he announced his candidacy in June 2015. By programmatically expanding the shortened links in his tweets we were able to group and count them to generate a rudimentary portrait of the news and opinion he publicizes and, presumably, consumes.

<snip>

Our analysis revealed a media ecosystem that appears to largely reinforce and affirm the views publicly expressed by Trump and his closest advisers. The news stories Trump tweets share several characteristics: 1) They often favor sensationalism over facts and reporting; 2) They frequently echo direct quotes from Trump himself or his closest advisers; and 3) They routinely malign his enemies and vindicate his most controversial opinions.

When it comes to news sources, the stories tweeted by Trump (and the staffers who sometimes manage his Twitter account) suggest that he is unfazed by news of questionable accuracy, likely to rely on hyper-partisan news, and apt to promote mainstream news only when it validates his opinions. While politicians from both sides of the aisle use their Twitter accounts to share content that furthers their agendas, Trump’s reliance on sources and stories of questionable accuracy stands out both in frequency and in engagement. The stories shared by Trump’s account throughout his campaign suggest the president-elect has constructed a powerful online filter bubble that largely flatters and confirms that which he claims to be true.

Using his tweeted links as a guide, Trump’s favorite information source appears to be Twitter itself. Nearly half of the hyperlinks shared by Trump’s account during his presidential campaign come from Twitter URLs. Many show Trump retweeting his fans, including — according to Fortune — at least 75 retweets of white supremacists and a false claim about gun violence demographics. Trump’s other most frequently tweeted links are to his Facebook page (266 links) and his website (201 links — most referring to statements, event schedules, and voter information).

<snip>

Since then candidates such as Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, and Gary Johnson have all answered questions from ScienceDebate.org. But Otto has also seen a gradual erosion of science content in major media outlets. He’s horrified that the three presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton didn’t feature a single question about climate change.

“ScienceDebate was the only place that asked President-elect Trump any questions about climate change on the campaign trail,” he says. “Which was kind of a remarkable and sad development in our media.”

<snip>

“The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence,” Otto says. “Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being.”

<snip>

Shawn Otto on the media:

“I was on a TV show not long ago, and we were talking about the book, and we were talking about climate, and the reporter clearly understood what the evidence was indicating about climate change, but when we were on the air he was very cautious about indicating what the evidence actually suggested. … And I talked to him about it afterward, and he said, ‘If I say that we think that climate change is actually happening—that that’s supported by the evidence—we’re going to just get tons of letters and emails, and it’s going to upset the news director and the station ownership, because it may affect our bottom line.’ And that is a great example of exactly what’s happening here.”

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) argues the Democratic Party will not win elections if the liberal wing of the party takes over.

"Here is my fear about the future of the Democratic Party. In a way, relatively speaking, Hillary Clinton was representative of ... center-left of the Democratic Party, not the pure left," Lieberman said in a radio interview with John Catsimatidis on Sunday.

"Now I think there will be a real attempt by the left-left of the Democratic Party to take over the party, and I don't think that's the way to go to make it an effective party," he continued.

"It's certainly not the party that I got drawn to ... it's not the party that I worked so hard for when Bill Clinton was president and it's not going to be a winning party."

<snip>

"To me, both parties better watch out not to go back to the extremes — left and right — and not working with each other. I think that the public really wants both parties to get together, work together and solve some of the problems of our country, make the future better," he said.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan was one of the most devastating environmental events of our time, with its overall impact rippling across the globe for years to come. But just as stated in Newton’s third law—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction—so too did the people of Japan respond to the magnitude of the destruction in an effort to rebuild their country anew as captured in this staggering new artwork by Manabu Ikeda titled Rebirth. Starting in July of 2013, Ikeda toiled away on the 13 x 10 foot piece for 10 hours a day inside a basement studio at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin. He finished work just last week.

At its core, Rebirth depicts a tree rising from the debris of the tsunami as enormous waves crash nearby, but a closer inspection reveals thousands of tiny details, the individual stories of anonymous people, plants, and animals as they fight for survival and try to return their world to a semblance of order. Ikeda says that in his work he seeks to replicate the beautiful chaos of life that rarely fits a simple linear narrative. Instead, everything crashes together and interacts in unknown and unexpected ways, an idea that applies directly to his process as he often doesn’t know what each day will bring as he works inch by inch on the near endless canvas before him.

While Ikeda sketches broad details in pencil on the canvas beforehand, he primarily works with pen and acrylic ink using various forms of cross-hatching and brushwork to fill areas so dense with details, the true nature of the artwork isn’t revealed until staring at it from only a few inches away. Mountains of vehicles, gnarled tree branches, and train tracks sit tangled at the base of a tree, and flower blooms comprised of umbrellas and emergency tents fill the sky above. Everywhere a collision of humankind and nature, for better or worse.

“My goal is to faithfully express my view of the world in my composition, but I don’t intentionally depict detailed images,” he tells the Chazen. “Because I see details when I observe things, rather than the whole, I find pen and ink to be the best tools to express how I see them.”














vimeo.com/192649900