Ranking of K-pop album sales in 2018

(Twice, Wanna One, and EXO are still expecting to release new albums this year)-Pann: Ranking of K-pop album sales in 20181. [+217, -8] BTS reached 4M with just two comebacks ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Amazing2. [+157, -5] BTS is really amazing and so is Twice. Both groups' physical sales are a different...

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A new WaPo trend — giving Trump credit?

It takes 4 journalists to see it, but, apparently....... Trump isn't an impetuous, wildly swinging idiot. What if he is what he says, a political genius? Let's see how far the WaPo journalists go:Again and again, President Trump was instructed not to do it. A cadre of advisers,...

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"Althouse: If you say 'Harumph' you must Link!"

Says Madison Man, in the comments to a post where I said "Harrumph!" He links to this:Fantastic! My post has an embedded clip from "Putney Swope," because it has a line — "How many syllables, Mario?" — that I have held in my memory for half a century. But there's no chance that I'd have dragged up "Harrumph," because — can you believe...

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"Banksy Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby’s."

Nice PR.The NYT reports:The work, “Girl With a Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale. It was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s.“Then...

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A retired law professor just unseriously hoped that Vox has hit rock bottom.

Here's what I'm looking at:Oh, isn't it interesting? There's a new essay that purports to see “troubling similarities” between Hitler's Germany and present-day America. And it's "different" from all the old essays that already claimed to see and be troubled by similarities....

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If Car Companies Hadn't Lied About Diesel

In 2014 the International Council on Clean Transportation discovered that the diesel cars of a number of different car manufacturers exceeded legal levels for nitrogen oxide emissions. The result of diesel cars emitting higher levels of pollution than claimed by the manufacturers has been far higher levels of air pollution across the world. This has...

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"Our Supreme Court confirmation process has been in steady decline for more than thirty years. One can only hope that the Kavanaugh nomination is where the process has finally hit rock bottom."

From the Susan Collins speech in the Senate yesterday.I read that and thought, no, this is not rock bottom. There's more ahead, lower places to sink. Why wouldn't there be? Maybe the 2018 elections will punish the Democratic Party for what it did with the Kavanaugh nomination, and everyone will realize they'd better never do anything like that again....

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At the Short Shakes Café...

... you can talk for hours.Photo taken yesterday somewhere along I-39 in Illino...

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"The Me Too movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and it is long overdue... I found [Ford's] testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling.

"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."Reported in "Collins...

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What Melania did was "like showing up to a meeting of African-American cotton farmers in a Confederate uniform."

What did she do? She wore a white pith helmet in Africa. The quote is from Matthew Carotenuto, a coordinator of African Studies at St. Lawrence University, who added "Historical context matters." That is, some people associate pith helmets with the colonial era in Africa. The quote appears in "Melania Trump Raises Eyebrows in Africa With Another White...

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