I see you’re considering opening a store in Seattle. That might be a problem. This piece, for example, says that you might have problems because of your owner’s intolerance of gay rights. Certainly, the hateful nature of his opposition to gay rights is disquieting in a city that favors such rights. That said, it’s fortunate that KIRO 7 managed to avoid the trap of presuming that because he’s a Christian, he opposes gay rights.

Sure, Washington consistently ranks among the least religious states in the country. But in a country that’s 85% Christian, a relatively secular city in a relatively secular state is still overwhelmingly Christian. The Seattle Christians tend believe that love your neighbor bits are more important than some clobber verses here and there. And Seattle Christians tend to say that the Biblical injunction against gay people isn’t particularly strong anyway. And Seattle Christians realize that when you bring up Sodom as proof that God hates same sex relationships, for example, the case isn’t as strong as you make it out to be.

So yes, sales will probably be lower than they might be in places with a more hateful interpretation of the Bible, because some folks from Seattle — Christian and otherwise — don’t want to support that sort of hate. But the real problem you’ll find is that Seattle has Ezell’s. Trying to compete in Seattle on fried chicken makes no damn sense. Seriously, try some Ezell’s before you open, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort.

Love,

Carl Ballard

The hat tip for the linked piece goes to Ivan on Facebook.

There is nothing more haunting than a once-thriving town that has been abandoned and consumed by the elements. Here are images from some of the most incredible ghost towns in the world.

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The chief astronomer at SETI believes we will find extraterrestrial life within the next 25 years. He says it will most likely be a radio transmission from super-smart robots. Awesome.

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Octogenarian bastion of hate Pat Robertson has lost his fight to keep his "Gays Aids Ring" comments off the Internet. Guess the world will have to live with his theory that gay people spread AIDS by cutting people with special rings.

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Microsoft has pulled a series of ads making fun of the new iPhone for being sucky and not-at-all-funny.

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The wreckage of the car that Jonathan Ferrell, 24, had pulled himself out of before seeking help, only to be shot fatally by police.

CREDIT: NBC News

Officer Randall Kerrick, 27, of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) in North Carolina is facing charges of voluntary manslaughter after fatally shooting Jonathan Ferrell, 24, a former Florida A&M football player who had apparently been seeking help after surviving a major car crash early Saturday morning.

CMPD officials called the shooting “excessive.” “Our investigation has shown that Officer Kerrick did not have a lawful right to discharge his weapon during this encounter,” said CMPD Chief Rodney Monroe in a statement. “It’s with heavy hearts and significant regrets it’s come to this… Our hearts go out to the Ferrell family and many members of the CMPD family. This is never something easy.”

The Charlotte Observer reports that the car crash was so severe that Ferrell likely had to “pull himself out” of the wreckage. He then walked to the nearest house, about a half mile away, to seek assistance. But the local resident whose home Ferrell arrived at was frightened that he was attempting to burglarize her after not recognizing him.

The resident then made a 911 call and three officers arrived at the scene. According to police accounts, Ferrell, who is African-American, acted “aggressively” and charged towards the officers. Officer Thornell Little of the Hickory Grove division of the CMPD responded with an unsuccessful attempt to fire his Taser at Ferrell. Police say that when Ferrell continued to charge toward the police, 27-year-old officer Randall Kerrick discharged his weapon several times, eventually killing Ferrell.

Monroe said that he did not believe Ferrell had threatened the woman who placed the 911 call, and that Kerrick’s use of excess force was unwarranted, according to the Charlotte Observer. No signs of alcohol were found at the scene of the wreckage, although officials said an official toxicology report will take weeks.

While the FBI keeps detailed information on the numbers and types of crimes that are committed throughout the United States, there is no comprehensive tracking mechanism for police shootings. FBI spokespeople have said there is no mandate for them to keep such statistics and that it would take an act of Congress in order to establish a database. Congress, so far, has refused to ask for one.

The post Police Fatally Shoot Unarmed Former Football Player Who May Have Been Seeking Help After A Car Crash appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Comic W. Kamau Bell's new show, produced by Chris Rock, mixes standup, sketches and interviews. Bell tells Fresh Air about the origins of his political humor and why it's important for him to have a multiracial audience.

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The actress played Kelly Kapoor on The Office, a role she also wrote and produced. Now she runs a new Fox comedy, The Mindy Project, in which she stars as an obstetrician whose personal life is a mess. Kaling tells Fresh Air that her late mother inspired her character's career.

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Smoker? Rich? Get ready to get high as a kite with these 24k Gold Rolling Papers by 'shine'. Fact: Smoking gold makes you a beautiful person. That is a fact.

Tropical Storm Ingrid forms in the Gulf of Mexico; warnings in effect for parts of Mexico. (AP)

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I’m always surprised when I critique certain unlovely aspects of religion and some people suggest that this only happens in fundamentalist denominations in the USA. Not! This can happen anywhere in the world in any organization.

Someone sent me this link, 6 Reasons to Not Send Your Daughter to College, written by a Roman Catholic. Here they are:

1. She will attract the wrong types of men.
2. She will be in a near occasion of sin.
3. She will not learn to be a wife and mother.
4. The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup.
5. You don’t have to prove anything to the world.
6. It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents.
7. She will regret it.
8. It could interfere with a religious vocation.

So, right off the bat you have to wonder if this person went to college because that’s 8 reasons, not 6.

In one sentence, Raylan Alleman shares his deepest fear with his readers:

“Is a degree worth the loss of your daughter’s purity, dignity, and soul?”

Fear. Make people afraid and they will do stupid things.

I like one of the comments left by a woman:

“So, please, what is an 18yo girl to do then? Bag groceries till a prince charming comes along to give a few kids?”

I believe all the comments oppose the post.

One commenter claims that this isn’t the authorized teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It doesn’t matter. Sexually abusing boys isn’t either. These kinds of things are what find avenues for expression in such institutions. Not just Roman Catholic, but across the religious and denominational spectrum.

Either stupidity is increasing or the publication of it. Let’s hope it’s just the latter. However, the publication of stupidity increases its popularity. It may normalize it.

I wrote a post yesterday, Silence as Key to Pastor Dad Mark Driscoll’s Ministry in which I critique his view of women and the role women are expected to play in his congregation. So it is not a marginalized suppression of women we are talking about here, but one that seems rather popular in some circles and growing in others.

We live in a time when misogyny awareness is increasing but also when misogynist leaders are being chosen to lead countries and other institutions.

This should concern us.

YouTube

This post originally appeared at NationalMemo.com.

At the "Exempt America" rally on Tuesday, Rep. Louis Gohmert managed to spread every tired lie about the Affordable Care Act in about two minutes. In call-and-reponse mode, he asked the crowd a series of (mis)leading questions that the assemblage answered with a shrill "Yes!"

Here is each lie, debunked for your convenience. Enjoy.

Was Obamacare passed against the will of the people?

Nope. It was passed by a president who won the largest landslide in two decades and a Democratic House and Senate with huge majorities. It was passed with more support than the Bush tax cuts and Medicare Part D, both of which were entirely unfunded. And the law had a mostly favorable perception in 2010 before Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading misinformation about it.

Is Obamacare still against the will of American people?

Actually, most Americans want it implemented. Only 6 percent said they wanted to defund or delay it in a recent poll.

Does it take away your freedom to make decisions about health care?

No, you can still make any decision about health care you need. And soon more people will be able to afford more services. Obamacare requires that you have health insurance if you can afford it or pay a penalty. But taxpayers are currently paying that penalty in the cost of covering the uninsured in emergency rooms.

Of course, your insurance company can still try to deny you services as they do now. But Obamacare regulates their decisions based on a "Patients' Bill of Rights."

Does it put the government between you and your health care?

This is sort of true. It puts the government there to make sure your insurer can't drop you and has to spend 80-85 percent of your premiums on actual care. It also makes sure that your health care covers your kids who are in school, until they're 26.

Here we get to the central fallacy of the arguments against Obamacare -- they're more true about Medicare. But you don't see Republicans ranting about Medicare in public. In fact, they ran -- falsely -- on protecting it, twice.

Does it give the government information about every single aspect of your personal, private health?

No, all policies still have to adhere to the The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. If you trust Medicare, Medicaid and veterans health care, you can trust Obamacare.

Does Obamacare violate your right to privacy?

No.

Can you count on the government to keep your physical health secrets?

Unless Edward Snowden gets ahold of them, your secrets are as safe with the government as with any private insurer.

Will Obamacare keep senior citizens from getting the services they need and deserve?

No. It's added to Medicare's benefits and lowered their prescription medicine costs.

Under Obamacare, will young people be saddled with the cost of everybody else?

No. Thanks to the coverage for students, tax credits, Medicaid expansion and the fact that most young people don't earn that much, most young people won't be paying anything or very much for health care. And nearly everyone in their twenties will see premiums far less than people in their 40s and 50s. If you're young, out of school and earning more than 400 percent of the poverty level, you may be paying a bit more, but for better insurance.

Does Obamacare prevent the free exercise of your religious beliefs?

No. But it does stop you from forcing your beliefs on others. Employers that provide insurance have to offer policies that provide birth control to women. Religious organizations have been exempted from paying for this coverage but no one will ever be required to take birth control if their religion restricts it -- they just can't keep people from having access to this crucial, cost-saving medication for free.

Does it provide health care for people here illegally?

No.

So was Joe "You Lie!" Wilson right?

No.

Does Obamacare fund abortions?

You're confusing it with Romneycare. Obamacare sticks to existing federal law for Medicaid that bars any funding of abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.

Photo: @oxdspalla via Twitter.com

Get the latest from @LOLGOP in the National Memo's free daily newsletter.

Michelle Obama Encourages Americans to Drink Water.

So Michelle Obama is trying to get people to drink more water? How long before conservatives start dying of dehydration?

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) September 13, 2013

liartownusa:

The Occult Art of Dildomancy by Purina Blackthorne

I’ll say it again: liartownusa is a national treasure.

thecarlosramos:

TGIF

Do any so-called “Superfoods” really have super powers?

Our pain-staking, hand-curated and now interactively visualized scientific evidence can answer.

See the visualization.
See the data.

Oh and we updated our classic Snake Oil: Supplements viz with all the latest evidence too.

Thanks to our head researcher Miriam Quick for amazing work. (It took months!)

Our Recipe

We’ve spent months reviewing the evidence, deep mining scientific studies, reviews, and meta-analyses, to find foods that actually have a demonstrable “super” effect on medical conditions or health in general.

What we found was a soup of mixed results (albeit a yummy one with hemp seeds in it)

An important note about the data

Unlike medicines and supplements, superfoods are difficult to test in controlled conditions. In usual medical studies, participants are ‘blinded’ to what they are receiving: a real treatment or a fake ‘placebo’ one. It’s hard to create convincing placebo foods, so these kind of controlled studies are scarce. So, for some of our evidence, we’ve had to use (less reliable) studies that statistically survey large populations of people (epidemiology) to find results.

Several foods – such as several promising seaweeds – only fall below the “worth it” threshold because a lack of studies.

What we discovered

» Folkloric confirmation Prunes really do keep you regular, and oats really do lower cholesterol.
» The fish oil controversy continues – it’s good for cancer patients and lowers levels of markers for cardiovascular disease risk. But evidence of its cognitive benefits is less clear.
» Want to lose weight? Eating eggs for breakfast can reduce your appetite for up to 36 hours.
» Fruit & veg have some role in cancer prevention – but which and in what amounts is unclear
» Eat your greens Cabbage and bladder cancer is an interesting one.
» Diabetes – No super foods seem to help the condition – we couldn’t find anything solid

Myths overturned

» Overall fruit & veg intake only plays a minor role in cancer prevention – but eating some types of veg (cabbages, broccoli, raw veg) may help protect you against some types of cancer.
» Cranberry juice does not prevent urinary tract infections. Does it help treat them? Not enough studies exist yet to be sure.

Foods of the Future

We’ll be maintaining this viz for the foreseeable future and updating it with new evidence as it appears. If you spot any, feel free to contact us or comment below the viz.

Until then, enjoy a daily bowl of barley porridge with almonds & honey. Mix garlic and sage into your scrambled eggs & salmon. Wash it down with a coffee and a glass of beetroot juice. Super!

Notes:

A video on reddit was really my last choice of what to do right after Subbable. I wanted to have something really involved and complicated -- but I also didn't want to make people wait for three months. So, since spent the summer talking about The Interent (read: reddit) to my family this was a topic on my mind that I figured wouldn't take too long to ship.

Subreddits Mentioned in the Video:

• r/politics (Though that was a mistake on my part, I meant for it to be r/NeutralPolitics
• r/programming
• r/AdviceAnimals
• r/DotA2
• r/starcraft
• r/london
• r/unitedkingdom
• r/europe
• r/firefly
• r/thewire
• r/technology
• r/vexillology
• r/vexillologytechnology
• r/aww
• r/ukpolitics
• r/battlestations
• r/birdswitharms
• r/hitlerinsocks
• r/explainlikeiama
• r/InfrastructurePorn
• r/prisonarchitect
• r/apple
• r/mildlyinteresting
• r/changemyview
• r/askscience
• r/iama
• r/meetup
• r/assistance
• r/secretsanta

Special Thanks:

To www.articulateventures.com & youtube.com/kurzgesagt

Credits:

Broke for Free, meini, italintheheart, cliche, Dante Orpilla, cygnus921, nhadfield, sachin sandhu, theowl84, dexxus

While fans have been crying out for a sequel to Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog since the original was launched the sad reality is we will not see one any time soon. The cast and producers of Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog have been so successful in recent years that they are all too busy with various projects to coordinate time to produce a sequel.

The good news is you can continue to enjoy Niel Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother, Felicia Day is busy with geek entertainment community Geek & Sundry, Nathan Fillion is starting his sixth season of Castle and after his huge success with The Avengers Joss has teamed up with fellow Doctor Horrible Executive Producers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen to produce the new ABC television series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which premiers later this month on ABC.

So while a sequel was written, unfortunately, at least for now, there’s no sequel on the horizon.

Check out the S.H.I.E.L.D. Viewer Community for news and information on the series. www.shieldtv.net

Every now and again, you just need a moment to watch an incredibly soothing time-lapse video of fog rolling in over the San Francisco Bay. Well, today is your lucky day.

“Adrift” was shot by photographer Simon Christen over the course of two years (!). I lived in the North Bay for many years, and saw the fog rolling in like a living thing many times. Christen has really captured the essence of it. There were times I would see it moving over the tops of cliffs and hills so quickly that time-lapse wasn’t really needed. It was astonishing.

This video is a strong reminder that air is, by definition, a fluid: It flows. Watching it bump and roil and surge reminds me too of the fiercely complicated field of hydrodynamics; the mathematical modeling of how fluids flow. The equations are intensely complex, and made all the worse by being subject to turbulence, which is fiendishly difficult to model. The final blow is that understanding the real behavior of fluids means having to use three dimensions in the calculations, all of which interact with other. The complexity is immense.

Nature, of course, solves these equations naturally. I’d accept that as an axiom, in fact. The rules of nature are physics, and the language is mathematics. Together, they create amazing complexity, and out of that comes beauty.

Tip o’ the Rice-A-Roni to Dawn Sumner.

After a marathon hearing that wrapped up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the City Council of Richmond, Calif., voted to allow the use of eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages, becoming the first city in the nation to take such a concrete step toward the novel and risky strategy for helping people avoid foreclosure.

The night of impassioned debate — featuring six feuding council members, a mayor firmly committed to the plan, and several dozen speeches from the public — showed the power of litigation to sow doubt, and the power of personal stories to stir hearts.

Opponents of the eminent domain plan rounded up college students to hand out T-shirts and wave signs. (Lydia DePillis)

Also on display: The challenge of public participation in a complicated new process that’s very hard to understand and very easy to mischaracterize.

“The city is trying to force the people to get into this Wall Street thing,” explained Richmond resident Carol Smith, indignantly, when asked to summarize the city’s plan. At a rally across from Richmond City Hall, she was wearing one of the lipstick-red T-shirts distributed by the plan’s opponents, labeled “STOP INVESTOR GREED.” Her daughter Kisha Smith, also wearing the red T-shirt, was equally cynical. ”They can put it any way they want, but at the end of the day, the banks are going to get paid,” she said. “It looks good right now, because we’re desperate, of course we’re going to snatch anything out of the air that’s tangible.”

From those statements, they could just as easily have been sporting the yellow T-shirts distributed by the group backing the plan as they could the red shirts supplied by the Realtors (also suited up in red: A gaggle of college students who declined to answer questions, and left soon after the meeting started). And they weren’t the only ones without a clear understanding of how the plan works: The run-down city hall auditorium was full of people talking about it and getting details not quite right.

As the meeting’s official business commenced, Richmond’s well-respected city manager BIll Lindsay tried his best to explain. He laid out the need for a creative solution, cautioned that he’d try to avoid using eminent domain if alternatives were available, and described the risks. Among them: The bond market is already miffed at the city for trying to stiff the investors who own Richmond’s mortgages. When the city went out to issue $34 million in bonds, nobody bought them, forcing the city to withdraw.

“When investors have choices in the market, they tend to choose the safe, plain vanilla option, rather than an option that require them to research and fully understand the story,” Lindsay said. “Those bonds are called ‘story bonds,’ and investors tend to avoid them.”

Lindsay says he heard from a few municipal finance experts, including former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Thurbeville, who said that any nervousness about eminent domain plan on the part of investors was “baseless” and should fade away. But as long as Richmond is the only city pursuing the option, it becomes much easier for bond-buyers to punish.

“One of the things that’s been really difficult is going forward as a single entity,” Lindsay told the council. “We’re really the only city right now that’s on board with the program. That is an an issue also for you to consider, that right now, we are the only one.”

And then there’s the banks’ lawsuit against Richmond, which will get its first hearing tomorrow. To further deepen the Council’s worries about forging into unknown territory, Mortgage Resolution Partners — the firm that’s already spent $7 million lining up new investors to take over the loans once they’ve been taken — has said that while it will pay for the city’s legal defense, it can’t buy insurance to cover a large judgment against the city.

The plan’s defenders, most prominently Robert Hockett, the Cornell Law professor who designed it, assure the city that it’s on rock-solid legal ground and shouldn’t fear catastrophic losses. But that’s hardly a sure thing. And for those on the Council who remember having to fire a third of the city’s workforce after a fiscal crisis in the early 2000s, it’s an untenable risk — especially for the lower-income areas that are disproportionately impacted by a loss of city services.

“We knew the empire was going to strike back. This is no surprise,” said Council member Jim Rogers. “And we have to look at the seriousness of their threats. We have to look at the damage they could wreak on is. A 1 percent chance of bankruptcy for this program is a deal breaker for me.”

And as the debate continued, it largely turned on the question of whether the city should take that chance, sticking its neck out for cities around the country that might want to explore the option. The two council members staunchly opposed to the plan, Corky Booze and Nat Bates, argued it wasn’t worth it.

“We cannot fight with Wall Street and their big money,” said Booze. “If we lose in court, I’ll be sitting here and say ‘I told you so.’”

“We are the guinea pig,” agreed Bates. “Is 110,000 people worth fighting Wall Street?”

After the Council laid out its positions, 100 people from the audience lined up to take two-minute turns at the mic. Opposition came from prim Realtors and polished businessmen from the posher areas of town fearing the repercussions of being cut off from credit. But it also came from some smaller retail associations, and plenty of individuals skeptical about a map from the San Francisco Chronicle that showed many of the 624 homes on the city’s seizure list aren’t in poor neighborhoods, because of a decision to include underwater homeowners who are current on their payments as well as those who are delinquent:

As the hearing crossed into the morning hours, though, more and more proponents of the plan came forward. In a fight that often still comes down to a difference of opinion over whether underwater homeowners should have just taken more personal responsibility for their financial decisions in the first place, stories like Ali Marshall’s had an impact. She bought her house 13 years ago, she said, but is $112,000 underwater after Fannie Mae refused to reduce the principal on the loan.

“None of this could’ve been predicted,” she said. “We’re paying currently, but any day, we could face foreclosure, because of the financial stress. We love our home. It is our first home. My daughter was born in our home. We want to do the honorable thing, we want to pay our debt. We simply deserve a new loan.”

At around one in the morning, the politics of the situation got ugly. Bates and Booze, who are African American, accused white Mayor Gayle McLaughlin’s Richmond Progressive Alliance of attempting to speak for the black community, and derided her black allies on the council as being “not African American.” As the race-based squabbling escalated, McLaughlin gaveled the session into a recess to cool things off.

In the end, the Council defeated the resolution to kill the eminent domain plan, and approved another one to set up a Joint Powers Authority that could administer it. The city is still a long way from actually exercising its power to seize property. For now, it’s decided the safe route of inaction carries greater consequences than the one that’s unknown.

“Nothing in life is 100 percent risk-free,” McLaughlin said. “But leadership demands that we sometimes take risks on behalf of our community.”

The full auditorium. (author photo)

The iodine clock is a common chemistry experiment in which two clear liquids are mixed together to produce a dark, opaque color. But as you'll see in this video, the speed at which this reaction happens is nothing short of remarkable.

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Wired got a glimpse of how German VFX company Pixomondo created Daenerys' three dragons, and the terrifying amount of work that went into it. Researching how big the wings needed to be, figuring out flight patterns, waving tennis balls on sticks at the actors — all this and more was required to bring Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion to life. Mainly so they could

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We could watch acetone devour styrofoam all. Day. Long.

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