Christopher.kantos

Lions ate at least two rhinoceros poachers trespassing on a game preserve in Kenton-on-Sea, South Africa. Along with the poachers' remains, rangers found a high-powered rifle and axe.

"They strayed into a pride of lions - it's a big pride so they didn't have too much time," Sibuya reserve owner Nick Fox was quoted as saying. "We're not sure how many there were - there's not much left of them."

More in this press release from the Sibuya Game Reserve.

(BBC)

Today is my last day at Deadspin after seven years of forcing you to watch dumb shit I saw on TV. To commemorate my departure, I went through all 5,128 animated GIFs I created during my tenure here to select, and rank, the best of them.

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Ah, the truth comes out. The line dance song that's popular at celebrations like weddings and bat/bar mitzvahs is about a SEX TOY. LGBTQ news and entertainment site Aazios is reporting that Neville Livingston aka Bunny Wailer, the songwriter behind "Electric Boogie" (the song also known as "The Electric Slide") has confirmed rumors that it's about a vibrator:

Rumors of the songs meaning began circulating on social media a few weeks ago and everyone has been desperate for answers. According to a source close to Livingston, word of the question about the origins of the song reached him in Kingston, Jamaica where he currently resides and he put the rumors to rest. "I'm surprised it took people this long to figure out" the source tells us he said. Apparently Livingston wrote the song after a girlfriend told him she didn't need him because she had a toy she nicknamed the "electric slide"

Here's a taste of those naughty lyrics:

It's Electric! You can't see it It's electric! You gotta feel it It's electric! Ooh, it's shakin' It's electric! Jiggle-a-mesa-cara She's a pumpin' like a matic She's a movin' like electric She sure got the boogie You gotta know it It's electric Boogie woogie, woogie! Now you can't hold it It's electric Boogie woogie, woogie! But you know it's there Yeah here there everywhere I've got to move I'm going on a party ride I've got to groove, groove, groove And from this music I just can't hide Are you comin' with me? Come let me take you on a party ride And I'll teach you, teach you, teach you I'll teach you the electric slide

Thanks, Dixie!

In 1969, United Nations Command negotiator and US Maj. Gen. James B. Kapp and North Korean Maj. Gen. Ri Choon-Sun sat across the table from one another for 11.5 hours without eating or using the restroom. The delegates were only permitted to leave the room if the person who called the meeting proposes a recess. Ri never did. In fact, the two men spent the last 4.5 hours of the meeting silently staring at one another. At 10:30pm, Ri stood up and walked out.

During the meeting, Knapp had asked Ri for North Korea to begin a four-step process to calm tensions in the region.

The infamous meeting was featured in Jeffrey Z Rubin and Bert R. Brown's book "The Social Psychology of Bargaining and Negotiation" which sounds like a rather useful read.

"A long, awkward silence" (Weird Universe)

Today I learned that Donald Glover got his rapper name Childish Gambino from this online Wu-Tang Clan name generator. It's not new news (though the info was new to me, and perhaps to you as well), as he mentions it in this 2016 Hollywood Reporter roundtable discussion. He says, "If I had known it was going to be something for real, I wouldn't have used it."

Thanks, Robin!

Jessica Pressler's long, gripping profile of con artist Anna Sorokin (AKA Anna Delvey) has all the making of a first-rate grifter novel, where the likable, unflappable rogue is revealed by inches to be a sociopath, a broken person who can't herself tell truth from fiction. (more…)

The fine folks of This American Life got a tip about a meat plant selling pig intestines as fake calamari. They investigated and now I can never eat Calamari again.

Listen in.

Jack Sock, who just a few months ago was hoisting the coolest-looking trophy in tennis and leaping to a career-high No. 8 ranking, has doddered through the 2018 season. It’s late May and the American has yet to log two consecutive wins. Sock lost at the French Open today in five sets to world No. 136 Jürgen Zopp; his…

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When parents ask their daughters why Prince Harry is getting married, the younger of the two says, "Harry is getting married because they want to get married." But when asked what you do when you get married, the younger girl is stumped. That's when her older sister jumps in with a hand gesture that could be interpreted as crude.

She points her index finger with one hand and sticks it into a circle made with the other hand. "Don't do that!" a man – presumably her father – says. "Whoooa! What are you doing?" a woman – presumably her mother – says.

The girl responds with a heartwarming, logical and very innocent answer. Or, maybe the girl is just really great at thinking on her feet.

Master self-publisher and world-renowned author Chuck Tingle has penned a dramatic take on Sean Hannity's failure to disclose.

Thanks to BBS commenter Sosumi for pointing this out.

News Commentator Sam Hannity Pounded In The Butt By The Fact That He Didn't Disclose He Has The Same Lawyer As The President via Amazon

Earlier today, while waiting on my porch for some delivery guys to turn up, I checked in on what was happening in Deadspin’s work chat—my job requires me to surveil the staffs of the various Gizmodo Media Group sites to make sure they’re diligently working for the betterment of our corporate overlords—and immediately…

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Opioid overdoses now kill more Americans every year than guns, breast cancer, or car accidents. 20 million Americans suffer from addiction to alcohol, illicit, or prescription drugs. On the second anniversary of Prince’s death from fentanyl overdose last weekend, the President of the United States demonstrated a deep ignorance of this medical epidemic, calling someone he considers an alcoholic and addict a “drunk/drugged up loser.”

Days later we learn that Dr. Ronny Jackson, the physician Trump nominated to lead the country’s largest healthcare system, the Veterans Administration, is known to have a drinking problem and is nicknamed “The Candyman” because of his reputation for freely distributing controlled substances to White House staff. With 1 in 10 soldiers seen by the VA for problems with alcohol or drugs – the majority as an outgrowth of being treated for chronic pain – Jackson was a dangerously ignorant choice.

Both the president’s regressive drug policy and his impulsive social media outbursts are conflicting, misinformed, and poorly executed, so his recent post about addicts being “losers” must seem pedestrian to most. In the same tweet he also managed to insult a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and engage in thinly veiled witness tampering before taking off for a round of golf while his wife attended Barbara Bush’s funeral. Numbed and spotty outcries ensued, and we moved along to the next week’s insults. It became just more white noise.

Leadership and policy drive the public’s attitudes about addiction and these opinions have very real consequences in people’s lives, as it did for Prince. After his death, I wrote a Boing Boing piece about the influence these negative perspectives about addiction had on the way Prince pursued treatment options for a pain management regimen that became a dependency, and ultimately an addiction. That’s a common risk in treating chronic pain with opioids. Prince used back channels to get help. He used cover stories. People covered for him. In other words, he and everyone around him behaved as though addiction was something to be ashamed of. As a result, treatment was delayed because concealment was prioritized. The California specialist in addiction and pain management who was privately deployed to Paisley Park to begin Prince’s treatment with Suboxone arrived that morning to a dead body.

Prince may not have been happy about the need for addiction treatment, but he knew it was time, and he had a close enough call on the plane to ponder the thought that his addiction could end his life. Clearly, he wanted to live. But he didn’t want anyone to know. Sadly, addiction is particularly lethal in the case of performing artists with egos and identities whose destruction could mean the end of their careers. Hide it, hide it, hide it. Hide it from you. Hide it from us.

From my perspective, lumping Prince into the bin of rock stars done in by overdose, dismissing the tragedy as another example of excess and bad choices, is not only inaccurate, it perpetuates dangerous attitudes and ignorance about chronic pain and addiction. Every medical treatment has inherent risks. So why the shame?

The shame has long been broadcast from the top down. Since the Nixon era, the trend of drug policy drifted away from rehabilitative treatment towards criminalization and punishment. The result? The prison population jumped by 1000% in the last 40 years, giving rise to the for-profit private prison industry. Those imprisoned for alcohol and drug-related offenses became a reliable and steady supply of bodies for their bottom line.

Obama finally set guidelines curtailing the use of for-profit prisons, which have no financial incentive for treating prisoners incarcerated for drug use offenses, but now Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reversing those guidelines and indulging his personal fetish for rebooting the war on drugs and criminalizing addiction. In general, the current administration appears to be clueless about the epidemic.

This was immediately evident after the election when Trump praised Philippine President Duterte's drug policy, which primarily involves murdering addicts and dealers on the street, saying he was “doing a good job.” He even invited Duterte to the White House. There was little uproar. In the social media hellscape at the time, anyone taking offense to negative attitudes towards addicts would probably get them called a “snowflake.” But it’s not political correctness that’s upsetting. When the new president-elect is lauding the murder of people with a specific medical condition as good drug policy, it’s broadcasting dangerous myths about addiction from the very top down in a terrifying way.

For most Americans, especially those who continue to insist that addiction is a choice and not a medical condition, there was a big piece of news that came out a week after the 2016 election proving otherwise. But it got buried and didn’t capture much attention from the American public, perhaps because our media diet had been so dominated and infested with pussy grabbing, email servers, anchor babies, and the minutiae of every pendulum swing from the alt-right to the alt-left. Post election, it just got louder and increasingly exhausting.

On November 16, 2016, the Surgeon General released the results of an exhaustive and comprehensive study, in a report called “Facing Addiction in America: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health.” Though it contained hundreds of newsworthy findings and data, one stood out: addiction was reclassified as a chronic brain disorder. It was not a choice, a character flaw, or weakness. It wasn’t caused by bad parents or drug dealers or laziness or video games or stupidity. The substance being abused didn’t cause the disorder, it revealed it. Addiction was caused by atypical reward system wiring in some people’s brains.

"For far too long, too many in our country have viewed addiction as a moral failing,” Murthy said in the report. “It is a chronic illness that we must approach with the same skill and compassion with which we approach heart disease, diabetes and cancer.” –-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy

The unsexy “Alcoholism and Addiction reclassified as chronic brain disorder” headline probably got skipped over in everyone’s juicy news feeds at the time. Facebook was still busy spoon-feeding everyone Russian propaganda, and it wasn’t trending on Twitter the way #MAGA, #NeverTrump, #LockHerUp, and all the misspelled #BasketofDeplorables hashtags did. In a nation where there are now more people with substance abuse disorders than people with cancer, it was terrible timing for such revolutionary and significant news that impacted so many lives: addiction is a brain disorder.

Here is a short list of some common brain disorders. Which ones do you think it is reasonable to be ashamed of or killed for?

Alzheimer’s Disease
Epilepsy
Multiple Sclerosis
Addiction
Parkinson’s

We used to think mental illness was caused by demonic possession, pneumonia was caused by “night air,” that your stomach would explode if you ate Pop Rocks and drank soda at the same time, that you can get warts from holding a frog or toad, and that dipping people’s hands In warm water while they sleep will make them wet the bed. Add addiction to the list of things we didn’t get right until the realities of science were fully applied.

Some people will never be convinced. They believe it’s another excuse for someone’s bad choices and need for their help. But whether we realize it or not, the public has skin in the game and needs to wise up. Ignorance about addiction is not only dangerous to those who might suffer from it, it’s costly to every American. According to the National Institutes of Health, addiction, whether it’s alcohol, illicit drugs, or prescription opioids, costs the public $520.5 billion dollars a year in costs related to crime, lost work productivity and health care. The problem is more than hurt feelings of “drunks and drugged up losers.” It’s $520.5 BILLION DOLLARS.

•That’s the amount of our current federal deficit.
•That’s the entire budget of the U.S. Department of Education nine times over.
•That’s the cost of 25 F-16 Fighter Jets.
•That’s the entire valuation of Facebook, depending on the news day.

It’s a lot of damn money that could change American life in a huge way if it weren’t being spent on the consequences of millions living with an untreated brain disorder. Instead, common wisdom about addiction is that “you people just need to behave.” It’s like telling a nearsighted person they don’t need glasses, they just need to look a little harder. The myths persist despite the evidence.

From the LA Times:

The 426-page report, titled "Facing Addiction in America," was modeled on the 1964 surgeon general's report on smoking and health, which first linked cigarettes to cancer and led to a successful national campaign against tobacco use.

Murthy described the report as "a new call to action." It lays out recommendations for elected officials, the medical community, law enforcement and the public to improve the way addiction is treated.

More than 20 million Americans suffer from substance abuse disorders, far more than are diagnosed with cancer, but only about 10% receive treatment, according to the report. Murthy said that stigma surrounding addiction dissuades people from getting help and the report repeatedly referred to addiction as "a chronic brain disease.

When Trump fired the Surgeon General a few months later, the Surgeon General’s “call to action” was essentially killed along with the hope that the American public would finally understand that addiction was not a choice but a disorder present even when the substance of abuse was not being used. Instead, it’s a largely unknown revelation.

An eye disorder affects your vision. A skin disorder affects your complexion. But a brain disorder affects your personality – your thoughts, mood, behavior, and feelings, so it’s far more complicated to detect and treat. Also, let’s face it, we judge people and hold them responsible for their choices. I don’t want to over-simplify a 426-page report, but basically, when an addiction-disordered brain finds a substance – or activity – that gives them relief from their symptoms, they are self-medicating. But the best treatment plan for a brain disorder is not a DIY application of whatever’s on the drink menu at TGIFriday’s.

However, once the alcohol or drugs hit a disordered brain, it triggers the phenomenon of craving, they lose the normal capacity to choose. Can they still choose? Sure. But the reward system in their brain is telling them that they need to drink or use more drugs as if they needed it for survival – a primal instinct. “Choosing” to stop is like choosing not to run from a lion chasing you. It goes against every driving instinct in your body and mind. It’s not the same kind of choice a regular person feels about whether or not to drink or do drugs. That’s why it’s called a disorder. It’s fucked up and it sucks.

As an addict with 15 years of physical sobriety, I can assure you, the problems with my thinking and decision making didn’t begin when I started drinking and taking drugs and they didn’t end when I stopped. An alcoholic or addict – someone with this type of wiring – who is not using alcohol or drugs is still an alcoholic and an addict. Physical sobriety from whatever substance is being abused doesn’t cure the problem, because the brain is still programmed for pursuit of the biochemical reaction, the short-term gratification, regardless of consequences.

This is why people need treatment and many go to AA meetings long after they stop drinking or using drugs, in fact especially after they stop. It’s their brain – their thought life – that needs continued treatment. I am one of those who attends AA meetings, and they are filled with people from all walks of life, races, genders, economic and education backgrounds. My first sponsor was a kindergarten teacher. These are regular people that didn’t know they were walking around with a brain glitch that, left untreated, could destroy their lives. That’s why the Surgeon General’s report is such a revelation.

From LA Times:

[U.S. Surgeon General] Murthy said that stigma surrounding addiction dissuades people from getting help. Some of the top government scientists studying addiction showed an audience of advocates, recovering addicts and family members brain scans that they said made clear addicts were suffering from a legitimate illness rather than moral weakness.

"Science tells us clearly that addiction is a disease of the brain," Murthy said.

I know Trump name-calling someone on Twitter isn’t news. But this report on addiction should still be big news. When we see Trump mock a disabled reporter we are rightly outraged, but when we hear him refer to someone who might have a substance abuse problem as a "drunk/drugged up loser," it doesn’t get much of a reaction. Just Trump being Trump. That’s a bad sign. A really bad sign o’ the times.

Image: majo1122331/Shutterstock

Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and everyone else is graded accordingly. (more…)

An underground tribute to a SoHo legend

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Unlike the introductions for the adult Jeopardy! contestants, who stand there with a slight smile indicating either either smugness or paralyzing terror and no emotion in between, the college kids are allowed to “have fun with it.” Last night’s trio put together a little routine involving an invisible basketball. You…

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Here’s a rock-dumb hypothetical the staff has been arguing about for a few hours: If you were forced to choose two groups of fighters from the following draft class of eight kinds of animals and one guy with a gun, what’s the best possible defense you can construct for yourself against the remaining seven?

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It doesn’t have the name recognition or wireless connectivity of Anova, but this Aicok sous-vide circulator is incredibly affordable at just $58 (with code 3W7AOILO), if you’ve been curious to try out sous-vide.

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In his long and illustrious career, Cristiano Ronaldo has won a billion trophies and scored a zillion goals. Today, just now, at the ripe old age of 33, he has scored one of his most sensational, athletic, instantly iconic goals in Real Madrid’s Champions League match against Juventus:

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Every night LeBron James plays a basketball game, there is a strong probability he does something you’ve never seen a human being do before. So here’s one of those things.

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These three tools are invaluable when cleaning up, or cooking with, your cast iron skillet.

This threesome of scraper, chainmail scrubber and a silicone hot-handle-holder is pretty great. I use all three of these tools frequently, and certainly paid more for them individually. The pot-handle and hard plastic scraper are wear items and will eventually be tossed, but the chainmail should outlast you.

Chainmail will not hurt your cast iron.

Stainless Steel Chainmail Scrubber XL 8x6, Cast-iron Cleaner + Silicone Hot Handle Holder via Amazon

Image via Amazon

In 1662, while a student at Cambridge, 19-year-old Isaac Newton made a list of 57 sins he’d committed:

Before Whitsunday 1662

Using the word (God) openly
Eating an apple at Thy house
Making a feather while on Thy day
Denying that I made it.
Making a mousetrap on Thy day
Contriving of the chimes on Thy day
Squirting water on Thy day
Making pies on Sunday night
Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons
Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.
Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
Wishing death and hoping it to some
Striking many
Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
Denying that I did so
Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it
Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
A relapse
A relapse
A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.
Punching my sister
Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
Calling Dorothy Rose a jade
Glutiny in my sickness.
Peevishness with my mother.
With my sister.
Falling out with the servants
Divers commissions of alle my duties
Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times
Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections
Not living according to my belief
Not loving Thee for Thy self
Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us
Not desiring Thy ordinances
Not [longing] for Thee in [illegible]
Fearing man above Thee
Using unlawful means to bring us out of distresses
Caring for worldly things more than God
Not craving a blessing from God on our honest endeavors.
Missing chapel.
Beating Arthur Storer.
Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter.
Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne.
Twisting a cord on Sunday morning
Reading the history of the Christian champions on Sunday

Since Whitsunday 1662

Glutony
Glutony
Using Wilfords towel to spare my own
Negligence at the chapel.
Sermons at Saint Marys (4)
Lying about a louse
Denying my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a [illegible] sot.
Neglecting to pray 3
Helping Pettit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Saturday night

“We aren’t sure what prompted this confession,” writes Mitch Stokes in his 2010 biography of the physicist. “Some biographers think that it was in response to an inner crisis. Perhaps it was the occasion of his conversion, or at least of his ‘owning his faith.’ We simply don’t know.”

So here’s something weird: The other night, Chicago’s ABC 7 ran a graphic about the “P.F. Chang Olympics” during a report on the Pyeongchang Olympics. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro is an American casual dining restaurant. (Like many chain restaurants, there is no one person named P.F. Chang—it’s a combination of the…

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At the Under the Radar Festival in New York City earlier this month, a crowd of soon-to-be singers rehearsed "back ups" for David Bowie's "Heroes." After an hour, they were performing the song with David Byrne as a Choir! Choir! Choir! tribute to Bowie.

According to Consequence of Sound, Byrne gave his thoughts on working with the choir group, in a press release:

"There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up. So, the reward experience is part of the show.”

Byrne is beginning an ambitious tour in March for his new album, American Utopia. The album is his first solo LP in 14 years.

Ken Bone has logged on, and for a guy who has pounded three beers in under 20 minutes, he’s making some reasonable points.

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According to writer G. Willow Wilson, living in an authoritarian society does not look like “something off the Syfy channel”.

It’s a mistake to think a dictatorship feels intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does. I’ve lived in one dictatorship and visited several others—there are still movies and work and school and shopping and memes and holidays.

The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal.” Certain books vanish from the libraries.

How does a society go from a democracy to an autocracy? It’s like that line of Hemingway’s from The Sun Also Rises about how to go bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.

Until one day we wake up and discover the regime has decided to postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other. Or until it can ‘ensure’ that the voting process is ‘fair.’

I don’t know about you, but Trump and the Republican Congress working to “postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other” seems like a completely plausible scenario. I would not be surprised if we see conservative pundits start floating this idea, slowly normalizing it over a matter of months until it seems like a plausible option. After all, it’s much easier for Republicans to remain in office if they got rid of those pesky elections (in lieu of gerrymandering and voter ID laws).

Update: In a poll from August 2017, 56% of Republicans polled said that they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump and Republicans in Congress were in favor of it. (via @taestell)

Google’s flight booking service just added two updates that could make flying slightly less frustrating—or at least help you manage your expectations.

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With its pink hairless body and huge incisors hanging out of its mouth, the naked mole rat isn't a particularly handsome creature. A rodent that is neither rat nor mole but the only species currently classified in the genus Heterocephalus, the nearly blind, nearly hairless naked mole rat lives in almost complete darkness its entire life. It has also recently been discovered that these rodents live to around 35 years, as opposed to a "regular" rat's six years, and the naked mole rat doesn't seem to actually age before it dies.

According to Phys Org:

A team of researchers at Google-owned Calico Life Sciences LLC has found that the naked mole rat defies Gompertz's mortality law. In their paper published in eLife, the group describes their study of the unusual-looking rodent and describe some of its unusual traits.

Naked mole rats are very nearly hairless. They evolved that way by living in a harsh underground environment. They are also almost ectothermic (cold blooded). And now, it seems they do not age—at least in the traditional sense. Reports of long-lived mole rats prompted the team at Calico to take a closer look—they have a specimen in their lab that has lived to be 35 years old. Most "normal" rats, in comparison, live to be just six years old, and they age as they do so.

The team collected what they describe as 3,000 points of data regarding the lifespan of the naked mole rat, and found that many had lived for 30 years. But perhaps more surprisingly, they found that the chance of dying for the mole rats did not increase as they aged. All other mammals that have been studied have been found to conform to what is known as Gompertz's mortality law, which states that the risk of death for a typical mammal grows exponentially after they reach sexual maturity—for humans, that means the odds of dying double every eight years after reaching age 30. This, the researchers claim, suggests that mole rats do not age—at least in the conventional sense. They do eventually die, after all.

To see these delightful creatures in action, here's a short National Geographic clip from 2012: https://youtu.be/A5DcOEzW1wA

Image by Jedimentat44