February 15, 2016

I Have Found the Perfect VP for Donald Trump

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From the Guardian today:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money….

This ought to be good. Please go on:

In further news from the always attractive intersection of Kanye West, Twitter, and money, the businessman Martin Shkreli — known for price gouging on Aids drugs and paying $2m for the one copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album — has claimed he was swindled out of $15m when he attempted to buy the exclusive rights to The Life of Pablo. Shkreli tweeted that “someone named Daquan”, claiming to be “Kanye’s boy”, contacted him to follow through on the deal, which he did. “I hope you all enjoy this stupid music SO much, and the fact it has brought me so much pain and suffering. I quit rap,” Shkreli tweeted.

Assuming he really had given $15m to someone named Daquan claiming to be Kanye’s boy, Shkreli was able to secure a happy ending. He later tweeted that the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto was going to help him get his money back. “I always win,” he concluded.

Maybe Donald Trump will pick Shkreli as his running mate. It sounds like a match made in heaven.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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