Luke.stirling

I’m connected on this lovely site called BookBub — they watch the booksellers and send email notifications of all the free/cheap e-books offered that day, so it’s a way to build up a fine collection of reading material at little cost, and also get introduced to new authors. Except for a few quirks…

I signed up to be notified of any science books that are bargains. There never are any.

I signed up for the science fiction category. There’s a regular flood of those — but I’ve noticed a familiar and tiring theme: so many books about the end of the world, zombies, plagues, etc., all about doughty heroes and heroines bravely surviving the aftermath and boldly going forth to battle the undead/bad humans who are now infesting the depauperate world. So not only is the story about 99% of the human population dying horribly, but then the story swirls around the protagonist marching about, fighting and killing other survivors (see also The Walking Dead). It makes no sense (ditto, The Walking Dead).

There is an apocalyptic novel I’ve enjoyed: Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. But that one isn’t about a battlin’ hyper-competent survivalist type who defeats his enemies and rebuilds the world by conquest — it’s about a lost soul numbed by the deaths who builds a cooperative community to survive, and that community rarely acts as an arm of the hero’s will. That’s a lot harder to write about than slash, slash, slash, as David Brin discusses.

No, the plague of zombies and apocalypses and illogically red-eyed dystopias has one central cause — laziness. Plotting is vastly easier when there are no helpful institutions or professionals, when power is automatically and simplistically evil, when there’s no citizenship and the hero’s neighbors are all bleating sheep. Relax any of those clichés? Then suddenly an author or director has to put down the joint (s)he’s smoking and think. That is why “competence porn” – about folks taking on tomorrow’s problems with energy, focus and good will – is so rare. It is also why a cliche-fatigued public is starting to turn eyes, raising them from fields of undead, looking not toward demigods, but toward engineers. See this explicated in my article, The Idiot Plot.

The yearning for more engineers in stories is Brin’s, not mine — I’d like to see more human beings struggling with complexity using a diverse toolkit, rather than pulling a soldering iron, a 3-D printer, and a rifle out of their back pocket, and solving all human problems by reconnecting the hydroelectric dam. But the laziness and simplification idea is dead on, and probably explains why a cheap book service is telling me about works by novice authors trying to build an audience and a reputation. Not that there is anything wrong with that — it’s good for new writers to have an outlet. But it’s bad news when genre writing digs itself an even deeper subgenre rut.

I am also cliche-fatigued and turning my eyes to new fields. Not engineering, though. I just logged in to BookBub and closed my eyes and clicked randomly on the page of preferences. We’ll see what happens.

itsbabyanimals:

feeling sad? look at this baby animal blog!

After last year’s E3, we produced a gender breakdown of the games showcased at the press conferences held by Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and other companies. There was a lot of discussion during last year’s show about perceived improvements to female representation, and while the numbers indicated that things could have been worse, they also showed that they could be a lot better. 9% of games featured last year centered on playable female protagonists, with 32% centering on playable male protagonists.

This year, however, it’s unfortunately clear that whatever positive momentum may have existed on this front going into last year’s E3 has dissipated. Of the 59 games showcased at press conferences held by Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda and Ubisoft, as well as on the first part of Nintendo’s Treehouse stream, only a paltry two feature exclusively female protagonists, and both of these games were returns from last year’s E3: ReCore and Horizon: Zero Dawn. (Bound is a gorgeous-looking game with a female protagonist coming to PlayStation but it was not featured during the press conference.) Meanwhile, 12 times as many featured games–24 in all–are centered on defined male protagonists or groups of men. These games include the newly announced titles Days Gone, God of War, Dead Rising 4, and Death Stranding.

We were encouraged to see, however, that the showcase of Dishonored 2 once again focused on the playable female character, Emily, and that in the trailer for Mass Effect: Andromeda, the female version of protagonist Ryder was featured, whereas with the original Mass Effect trilogy, almost all promotional materials used the male version of Shepard. Dishonored 2 and Mass Effect: Andromeda were two of 29 games in which you either choose to play as male or female characters, or in which the gender of your character or characters appears to be unspecified, such as Fe. Of course, the option to choose is welcome. However, a purely binary understanding of gender was once again on display, with no games indicating the ability to choose from a wider range of gender identities and expressions. Furthermore, the fact that a whopping 12 times as many featured games center exclusively male protagonists than exclusively female ones indicates that the video game industry still has an extremely long way to go before approaching anything resembling gender parity.

This massive discrepancy means that for now, games continue to reinforce the deeply entrenched cultural notion that heroes are male by default. We live in a culture that regularly encourages girls and women to project themselves onto and fully empathize with male characters, but rarely encourages boys and men to fully project themselves onto female characters. When players are encouraged to see a game universe exclusively through the eyes of a humanized female character, it helps challenge the idea that men can’t or shouldn’t identify with women as full human beings.

Games can be a powerful tool for generating empathy. But as long as games continue to give us significantly more stories centered on men than on women, they will continue to reinforce the idea that female experiences are secondary to male ones.

Of course, the games presented during these press conferences don’t reflect the sum total of video games or games culture. They are, however, how the biggest developers and publishers choose to represent themselves at the industry’s largest annual event, and as such, they are a strong indicator of what some of the most powerful forces in the industry consider emblematic of the best and most exciting things that gaming has to offer.

How we came up with our data:

We counted only those upcoming games which were given full trailers, announcements, or demonstrations on stage, so games that only appear briefly in montages or sizzle reels or for which only a very small amount of teaser footage is shown (such as the upcoming Star Wars game from Visceral) are not included.

Survey on combat:

Of the 59 games featured, only 11 are nonviolent or appear as if they might not have mechanics involving combat or violence. (The card games Gwent and Elder Scrolls Legends use cards to symbolize battle, but we opted to count these two as nonviolent games.) In other words, about four out of every five games showcased employ combat mechanics, meaning that the player is either required to or can choose to engage in violence as a means of conflict resolution. (Last year, the ratio of games incorporating violent mechanics was closer to three out of every four.)

This isn’t about passing judgment, or equating the cartoonish pirate ship battles of Sea of Thieves with the far more realistic gun violence of Ghost Recon Wildlands. Rather, the data is presented simply to indicate how prevalent violence remains as an element in games across the board, because when violence is seen as a core component of game design, it limits our sense of what is possible and of the kinds of stories that can be told. There remains tremendous unexplored potential for games as a medium, and it’s necessary that the industry put more effort into exploring new mechanics and storytelling techniques rather than continuing to rely so heavily on established norms if the medium is ever going to achieve that potential.

Found in the Data is Beautiful subreddit, where there is some discussion.

I thought of sending this to a friend of mine who is a climate change skeptic, but I know his response will be that the changes reflect 1) instrumentation error and 2) normal cyclic variation.  *sigh*

Congresswoman Who Used To Receive Welfare Wants To Drug Test Rich People Who Get Tax Breaks:

laughterkey:

section9:

shyfeminist:

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) has had enough of the growing movement to drug test poor people who need government assistance. So on Tuesday, she’s introducing a bill that she says will make things fairer.

Her “Top 1% Accountability Act” would require anyone claiming itemized tax deductions of over $150,000 in a given year to submit a clean drug test. If a filer doesn’t submit a clean test within three months of filing, he won’t be able to take advantage of tax deductions like the mortgage interest deduction or health insurance tax breaks. Instead he would have to make use of the standard deduction.

Her office has calculated that the people impacted will be those who make at least $500,000 a year. “By drug testing those with itemized deductions over $150,000, this bill will level the playing field for drug testing people who are the recipients of social programs,” a memo on her bill notes.

Moore has a personal stake in the fight. “I am a former welfare recipient,” she explained. “I’ve used food stamps, I’ve received Aid for Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, Head Start for my kids, Title XX daycare [subsidies]. I’m truly grateful for the social safety net.”

I am 100% behind this idea.

YESYESYESYESYES

This is brilliant, and should absolutely happen.

Or it shouldn’t happen, and the insane, racist, classist policy of drug testing welfare recipients should be ended immediately.

bobbycaputo:

Close-Up of the First Mechanical Gear Ever Found in Nature

The biological form of a mechanical gear was observed in nature for the first time in juvenile planthoppers (Genus: Issus), a common insect that can be found in gardens across Europe.

The insect has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing ‘teeth’ that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronize the animal’s legs when it launches into a jump. The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent.

(Continue Reading)

r/woahdude

I don’t read comics much — I was a fan and collector in my teenage years, but every time I pick one up now, there’s so much prior knowledge needed to make sense of what’s going on, that I just put it back down and walk away. It’s like a lot of art, in that it is constructed in an environment of art, and comments on that environment, and if you don’t know the framework it’s embedded in, you grumble about how your kid could do better than that.

So all I knew about the recent controversial story line in Captain America that revealed he’s been a secret agent of the evil organization Hydra all along is that this was not the Captain America I enjoyed in the 1960s and early 70s. This was a betrayal! I hadn’t been reading the comic book anyway, but now for sure I wasn’t going to read it ever again.

I didn’t have the context.

Now an article fills me in on what I’d missed about Captain America’s trajectory, and it all makes sense. You see, Marvel had first tried to introduce a black successor to Steve Rogers, white hero, and the fan base erupted. So Marvel brought back Steve Rogers…with a message.

And just like that, White Captain America was back. And to make Steve Rogers a Nazi was an excellent commentary not only on the fandom, but on the country itself.

See, the only reason there is a Captain America: Steve Rogers series is that the fandom wanted Steve Rogers back. And the reasons they wanted him back were the same kind of motivations and ideologies that are currently wreaking havoc with our election season. The fandom wanted to Make Captain America White (Great) Again. They were full of racist indignation at seeing a Black person take on the mantle of Captain America, one of the most venerated comic-book heroes. They wanted a return to the status quo. And when they got their wish, they’re dismayed that he’s kind of a fascist. Sound familiar?

Wait, wait, wait…a comic book is making a sly commentary on modern American politics and society, is holding up a mirror to its readers? Unthinkable. Only art can do that.

3inha:

Oil painting by Jeremy Mann

This could be cyberpunk, this could be 70s noir, this could be right now.

A member of the British Parliament, Jo Cox, has been assassinated by a man inflamed by the recent Brexit chaos — he shouted “Britain first!” when he was arrested. The media is reporting on the case now. I’ll bet you’ve heard this familiar refrain before.

The man being held in connection with the death of MP Jo Cox has been named as Thomas Mair, who was described as a “loner” with a history of mental health problems…

Loner. Mentally ill. Yeah, that’s it. Explains everything.

No, it doesn’t.

These are the words of convenience used to exempt a person from criticism of his particularly dangerous ideology. The media will not consider that a far right political stance might have led someone to violence, so they strategically deploy the “mentally ill” excuse.

But this reporter didn’t even seem to read their own article. A little further down the page, they report on an interview the murderer gave years ago.

In 2011, Mair spoke of how he had volunteered to work as a groundsman at the nearby Oakwell Hall County Park, which had helped ease his mental health problems.

He told a local newspaper: “I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world. “Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common mainly caused by long-term unemployment.

“All these problems are alleviated by doing voluntary work. Getting out of the house and meeting new people is a good thing, but more important in my view is doing physically demanding and useful labour.

Does that sound crazy to you? He was feeling isolated and disconnected, thanks to a social attitude that resorts to blaming mental illness for all kinds of unrelated problems. And here’s a reporter doing the same thing!

Then, of course, you’ve got to interview the neighbors to find out what kind of juicy deranged things the killer had been doing.

Kathleen Cooke, 62, said: “I am really shocked. He walked past my house this morning and said hello like he always does. He was wearing a grey T shirt and his white baseball cap like he always does and he was carrying a small rucksack.

“He is just a quiet bloke who keeps himself to himself. “He is very helpful and he helps local people with their gardens. There is one neighbour who is a bit frail and he keeps her garden tidy. He has helped me cut my hedge a couple of times.

“He has lived here for 40 years and has never been in any trouble and has never caused any trouble. He sometimes used to shout at the local kids if they played too near his house but that is fairly normal.

A quiet bloke who helps elderly neighbors with their gardens? INSANE. They should have seen all the signals right there.

How about a different story. Here was a lonely fellow, isolated and vulnerable, and what probably happened instead is that he was poisoned by an evil ideology.

Despite being born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, a decade-old website posting identified Mair as a subscriber to S. A. Patriot, a South African magazine that was published by the pro-apartheid group, the White Rhino Club.

The club describes the magazine’s editorial stance as being against “multi-cultural societies” and “expansionist Islam”. A blog post attributed to the group, dated January 2006, described Mair as “one of the earliest subscribers and supporters of S. A. Patriot.”

Racism, and anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim bigotry, fed by a hate organization — that’s what led Mair to murder, not “mental illness”.

You don’t get to label Mair as dangerously insane unless you’re also ready to label these attendees at a Trump rally as “mentally ill”.

And now, everyone's* favorite:
MISSED MARKS!!!

(*May not be your favorite. You may prefer cakes that look like wangs. Which is totally cool. Weirdo.)

 

Ashton H. wanted a pretty princess carriage like this:

 

...but I think she picked it up after midnight.

Womp WOMP.

 

Felicia F. ordered this stunner for her Uncle's birthday:

"I like... GOOOOLD!"

 

But instead, she just got stunned:

Shoulda gone with a schmoke an' a pancake.

Also, sometimes I like to amuse myself by referencing Austin Powers villains.
Because everyone needs a hobby.

 

Jyoti K. asked for this adorable princess cake:

D'awww.

 

But instead, got this:

D'aaaaauuuugh!

 

Nicholas W. actually had his baker send HIM this photo, saying this is what the cake would look like:

Nice!

Soooo...

Turns out...

It didn't really look like that.

 

And finally, Roshnid H. ordered this peacock cake:

Now, I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if Roshnid's cake ended up looking like the Loch Ness monster with a bunch of shaving cream on its nose?"

Well, my friend, YOU ARE IN LUCK.

Because yes:

Yes, it would.

 

Thanks to Ashton H., Felicia F., Jyoti K., Nicholas W., & Roshnid H., who suspects that may actually just be a floating log - but WE BELIEVE.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

It has been pointed out many times that there is one almost perfect correlation in the US’s mass shootings: it’s not that they’re done by Muslims (that would be laughably false, if it weren’t a conclusion that is harming innocents). It’s that almost all of the mass shootings are done by men. Soraya Chemaly points out something that is almost as terrible: most of their murder sprees begin with killing women and children.

As Huffington Post reporter Melissa Jeltsen wrote last year, “The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence.” According to a conservative estimate by the FBI, 57 percent of the mass shootings (involving more than four victims) between January 2009 and June 2014 involved a perpetrator killing an intimate partner or other family member. In other words, men killing women intimates and their children and relatives are the country’s prototypical mass shooters; these killings are horrifyingly common. In fact, on Sunday, while the world watched in horror as news poured out of Orlando, a man in New Mexico was arrested in the fatal shooting deaths of his wife and four daughters.

Even when intimate partners are not involved, gender and the dynamics of gender are salient. According to one detailed analysis, 64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children, and yet the role that masculinity and aggrieved male entitlement plays is largely sidelined. Schools, for example, make up 10 percent of the sites of mass shootings in the U.S., and women and girls are twice as likely to die in school shootings. Gyms, shopping malls and places of worship are also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and girls are predictably present in greater numbers.

Also chilling is how we look the other way.

The Washington Post reported Monday that “although family members said Mateen had expressed anger about homosexuality, the shooter had no record of previous hate crimes.” But that depends on how you categorize domestic violence.

There are people who think domestic violence doesn’t even count as violence. The Bible condones beating your wife, so do some factions in Islam, and there are always idiots who argue that rape in marriage is impossible.

It makes me wonder how much courage it takes for a woman to enter into any kind of relationship with a man.

micdotcom:

rapgamekimmygibbler:

The morning after the Pulse shooting I made this Facebook post and it ended up being shared by over 2,000 people over the course of the past couple days. This morning I wake up and see this. Facebook literally removed my post because it’s apparently offensive or inappropriate in some way. Read my post and tell me where I’m being offensive? Apparently queer and trans people aren’t allowed to be angry about tragedies that happen within our community and we’re not allowed to encourage straight people to hold themselves accountable in any regard. This is fucking disgusting.

This is really appalling. And it turns out its removal wasn’t because Michete used the f-word slur in the post.

gameraboy:

William Shatner for the Commodore VIC-20

I love this commercial, and I love the VIC-20 … I also love that he’s all THIS IS NOT JUST FOR GAMES and then the commercial goes HEY LOOK AT THESE GREAT GAMES THAT ARE COMING OUT FOR IT.

Very clever, Commodore.

Radical Islam is a great evil. It’s poison in people’s brains that conflicts with the modern world, with basic human ethics, and with cooperation with unbelievers. It has to be defeated.

There are ideas promoted by radical Islamists that are inimical to our peaceful coexistence, and that are sustained in a culture of hatred that leads people to kill. The father of the Orlando shooter, while claiming that it was not the place of people to take action, was clear in his othering of homosexuals.

He then adds: “God will punish those involved in homosexuality,” saying it’s, “not an issue that humans should deal with.”

You can also see this in a video Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar, a Muslim cleric who spoke in Orlando and thinks it is right for homosexuals to die, although of course we must not hurry God’s will along.

It’s poorly plausible denial. Consider the logic: God is good; God is great; God hates and despises gay people; they should all die for their sins and suffer for eternity in hell; but oh, by the way, you don’t need to do anything about them, but God’s probably going to forgive you if by some chance you should happen to murder a few of them.

And so it goes.

It’s very convenient.

So right now the right wing is howling that Obama did not name “radical Islam” at fault in his speech about the mass murder. Hillary Clinton has been praised because she openly accused “radical Islam” and called for increased military action (she’s making me very unhappy that she’s going to be the Democratic candidate now). Atheists I know are saying that this means we atheists have to step up our opposition to Islam, often not even bothering with the “radical” part. We hate religion, right, so we should especially hate Islam.

This is where they lose me. It makes no sense.

These bad ideas are not a uniquely Muslim problem. We have an American problem.

Watch Pastor Steven L. Anderson, if you can stomach it, to see what I mean. Watch Pastor Roger Jiminez preach that it’s “great” that 50 pedophiles were killed.

If we lived in a righteous government, they should round them all up and put them up against a firing wall, and blow their brains out, Jimenez said in the sermon.

They are indistinguishable from the Orlando killer’s father, or any of the dime-a-dozen Islamist preachers out there. These are home-grown Christian haters.

Look at Scott Lively, who ran for governor of Massachusetts and has been responsible for exporting Christian hate around the world. How about Mike Huckabee failed presidential candidate and governor of Arkansas?

In that 1992 questionnaire, Huckabee also called homosexuality, “an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.”

The current Republican candidate, Donald Trump, is considered the most LGBTQ-friendly Republican — that fact alone should give one pause — and he has declared that he wants to rescind marriage equality. Last I looked, well-known homophobes Steve King, Jason Chaffetz, and Louie Gohmert are still in office, and not particularly at risk of being voted out. If I had to list all the anti-LGBTQ governors, representatives, and senators in office, I’d wear all my fingers down to little stubs.

We’ve had anti-LGBTQ legislation passed recently in Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. It is politically safe to condemn and hate homosexuals in Republican strongholds; the Bible itself repudiates it; one of the foci of conservative religious thought in general is sexual purity, and America is most definitely a bastion of conservative religiosity.

And somehow, many atheists are able to assemble this idiotic chain of thought that atheists must oppose religion, radical Islam is the worst religion ever, therefore we must support the deportation of Muslims to prevent innocent gay Americans from being murdered. There’s a problem in the logic there. How can you sit stewing in this festering shitpile of of Christian bigotry and decide that this is the perfect opportunity to exercise your bigotry against Muslims? This makes no sense. Less than 1% of the American population are Muslim, and an even tinier percentage of that are the kind of radical Muslims who would kill for their faith, and you want to prevent homophobia by persecuting and exiling them?

Radical Islam is not the problem here. The problem is a widespread culture of hatred supported by the dominant religion of this country. And if you think it’s just religion that is the problem, you haven’t been paying attention: Richard Dawkins is hugely popular among the alt-right (although he does not reciprocate the affection), many of those popular atheist youtubers are neo-reactionary atheists, and the alt-right treats gays with all the contempt they also give to women.

This is a deeper problem than Islam. Using the mass murder in Orlando as an excuse to persecute Muslims is a category error — it is an excuse to completely ignore the fundamental source of the problem to find yet another reason to exercise your anti-immigrant, anti-brown person bigotry. Don’t fall for it. Before we deport generic Muslim people, your eyes should swivel to those nice white all-American homophobes who openly advocate discrimination and hatred.

And maybe we should actually take an honest look at what those generic Muslim Americans actually think. I know it goes against the stereotype, but many Muslims in countries like Iran and Turkey and Morocco and Egypt have been strongly secular, or at least in favor of tolerance and coexistence, and many of the Muslims who immigrate to the US are fleeing religious persecution, so we’re enriched for secular, non-theocratic Muslims. Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of looking at the data on Muslim attitudes in the US. Did you know that “U.S. Muslims were more accepting of homosexuality than evangelical Christians, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses”?

Similarly, U.S. Muslims are more likely to support same-sex marriage (42% support it) than are U.S. evangelicals (28%), historically black Protestants (40%), Mormons (26%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (14%). Indeed, U.S. Muslims are roughly just as likely to support same-sex marriage as Christians generally (44%).

44% isn’t great, but it does say you can’t use these numbers to support deporting Muslims unless you’re also prepared to round up just about everyone other than atheists, Jews, and Buddhists and kick them out of the country (which, I’ll confess sounds sort of appealing…but it would still be a huge injustice so I can’t support it).

Greenwald also points out the international nature of the problem.

Both China and Russia are overwhelmingly non-religious and also vehemently anti-gay; to the extent Russians are religious, they are loyal to the Orthodox Christian Church. In Cameroon, Catholic Church officials continue to spew the most vile and inflammatory anti-gay rhetoric. A prominent evangelical multi-millionaire Brazilian pastor and Congressman with a history of vile anti-gay rhetoric, Marco Feliciano, yesterday attacked the LGBT community for “using” the Orlando massacre for “self-promotion” and instead said that support for Palestinians was to blame.

Read the whole thing. Then look at the popular media. It’s amazing how quickly and thoroughly all the news networks have joined in a common message, that the Orlando attack was perpetrated by a Muslim terrorist with connections to ISIS, while the white man toting explosives and guns to a Gay Pride event suffers no such labeling, while Dylann Roof is excused from the terrorist trope because he was only terrorizing black people, while Timothy McVeigh is just a patriot who got carried away.

Face the facts. The Orlando killer was an evil person who did great harm, but if you’re going to try to find the cause in his background, you’re making a huge mistake if you stop, satisfied, at the point where you learn he was Muslim. And if you use the fact that he was Muslim to ignore the wider cultural source of this homophobia to justify broad attacks on just Islam and on immigrants, you aren’t being a rational atheist: you’re being a bigot.

Despite all this data, the standard group of hateful polemicists who literally seem to devote their lives to exploiting every news event to attack Islam wasted no time yesterday – before any facts were known, while the bodies were literally still in the club – squeezing the horrific slaughter in Orlando to depict Muslims as uniquely hateful of LGBTs. Never mind that the suspect, Omar Mateen, showed no signs of religious fanaticism, was (according to numerous close sources) suffering from mental illness, had a history of wife-beating, worked for a major defense/mercenary contractor, had no known connection to extremist groups until his 911 call citing ISIS, and was obsessed with joining the NYPD.

And never mind that white Christian Americans show the same or greater contempt for the right of LGBTQ people to exist.

The opportunity to exploit LGBT suffering to fuel the standard anti-Muslim agenda was far too attractive to resist, no matter how many facts negate it. Try to tell LGBT citizens who grew up in North America, or South America, or Europe, that anti-gay hatred is an exclusive attribute of Islam and the scorn you’ll provoke – grounded in actual personal experience rather than hateful ideology – will be intense.

I’ll be more impressed when the politicians quick to jump on the anti-Muslim bandwagon, like Hillary Clinton, are as unafraid to say the words “radical Christianity” as they are “radical Islam”.

Peter Thiel, the obnoxiously rich right-winger and Trump-supporter who sued Gawker media into bankruptcy over unseemly stories about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, is not satisfied. He’s now going after specific Trump stories he doesn’t like, and is bankrolling lawsuits about a couple of other Gawker stories.

In other words: A Thiel-funded attorney is helping a man sue Gawker Media over an article that comes nowhere near invading his privacy, concerns a clear matter of public interest, and explicitly states that the subject is not guilty of a crime.

You know what this means: we have to promote the news story that’s being attacked. And it’s actually a rather interesting story, unlikely news of Hulk Hogan’s infidelity and bedroom antics — it’s an article that tries to untangle the mystery of what the heck is going on with Trump’s weird, unnatural hair. It makes a pretty good case that what’s going on is that it is a very expensive, rather finicky specialized hair weave by a company called Ivari International, which costs about $60,000 to install and $300-$3000 a month to maintain. (You might want to file that information away for the next time someone complains about the cost of Clinton’s trips to a hair salon, because you know the media won’t ridicule a man for spending that much on vanity).

Ivari is suing for defamation, which is peculiar. Accurately describing the technology used to stitch hair extensions onto a balding man’s head is not defamatory, and the only thing I can think of that might be defamatory is that Ivari might not want its name associated with that creepy skein of floss everyone can see in every appearance of that Republican slimeball. I know that if I were in the market for fake hair, telling me that their technique produces the thinning dead animal that Trump wears would not be a selling point.

Maybe Ivari should sue Trump for flaunting his handiwork.

“I will not attend one more ‘Moment of Silence’ on the Floor. Our silence does not honor the victims, it mocks them.
 
 
“The Moments of Silence in the House have become an abomination. God will ask you, 'How did you keep my children safe’? Silence.”

-

Jim Hines (D- Connecticut) 

This right here is political courage. This is exactly the sort of thing that Hillary Clinton does not have.

Excerpts from a Reddit discussion thread:

What advice do you have for the general public who want to help in the aftermath of the Orlando tragedy (or other crisis events)? 

Do not donate your used items, just give money and in this case blood When the Fort McMurray fire happened they were overloaded with used items that they had no use for and tons of warehouses in Edmonton are filled with people's used crap...

After the earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011, the Red Cross actually published ads in newspapers giving guidance about this. They said the reason they wanted money, rather than goods, was threefold: 1) Folks tended to give the wrong things, or too many of one thing and not enough of others (so, in Christchurch, lots and lots of tinned baked beans). If they give money instead the Red Cross can just buy the stuff needed in the right amounts; 2) All the wrong stuff that people give which can't be used has to be either (a) stored or (b) disposed of. Both cost money that could be better spent helping those affected by the disaster; 3) A flood of stuff from outside the disaster area destroys the local economy just when they need help the most. For example, my sister in law runs a corner store in Christchurch. Her family had opened that store every single day, including Christmas and Easter, for over 40 years. After the earthquakes so much food was donated that they ended up closing the store for three months as they had no customers...

Providing free goods and services damages the local economy. Ex-President Clinton admitted that the trade policy his administration imposed on Haiti destroyed Haitian farmers. Small farmers could not compete with U.S. agribusiness and went out of business. Now Haitians rely on aid to buy imported food.

In an article about aid to Africa : "Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They'll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities. In a similar vein has been the approach to food aid, which historically has done little to support African farmers. Under the auspices of the U.S. Food for Peace program, each year millions of dollars are used to buy American-grown food that has to then be shipped across oceans. One wonders how a system of flooding foreign markets with American food, which puts local farmers out of business, actually helps better Africa. A better strategy would be to use aid money to buy food from farmers within the country, and then distribute that food to the local citizens in need."

I'm sure one reason disaster areas are flooded with goods is that companies can donate merchandise that isn't selling, then deduct the value from their taxes as a charitable contribution.

micdotcom:

Igor Volsky, Deputy Director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, spent much of yesterday calling out our lawmakers who claim to have thoughts and prayers for the Orlando victims but accepted money from the NRA. Ted Cruz’s tweet may have been the most hypocritical of all.

archiemcphee:

Gemma Correll demonstrates her ornithological expertise. What sort of birb are you?

astoundly:

just leaving this here

So I guess Queen Elizabeth is going to wear an outfit made from a murdered Muppet, and we’re all just going to be okay with this?!

Before going bust, the Swedish car manufacturer Saab built cars that were stereotypically driven by architects and college professors. The cars were always a bit quirky and different, which is probably one of the reasons why the company went bust. Saab didn’t start by building cars, however. Its eponymous parent company started by building aircraft for the Swedish military and it is still going strong. The Saab J 35 “Draken” (Dragon), built by Stefan Johansson, first flew in 1955 and was one of Europe’s first supersonic fighter aircraft.

Stefan’s model clearly shows the very distinctive cranked delta wing of this Cold War classic. The Swedish military typically required their aircraft to be suitable for operations from poorly prepared surfaces, in terrible weather and to be maintained by conscripts with relatively little specialised training. The resulting aircraft always looked rather different from their contemporaries. This also applies to the Draken’s replacement in Swedish service: the Saab JA-37 “Viggen” (Thunderbolt). If anything, Stefan’s model of this jet is even more impressive.

It has a large double delta wing, canard foreplanes and an unusual undercarriage with double main wheels in tandem, designed to facilitate operating from unpaved runways. Another quirky feature is that, in order for the jet to fit inside small underground hangars, its vertical tailfin can be folded down. Judging from the row of hinges this can also be done on the model. The complicated curvy shapes of fuselage are recreated very effectively using various slopes, and while I am normally not a fan of studless builds, the choice to build the model’s wings using bricks on their side works really well. Saabs are unusual fighters and an unusual choice of subject for LEGO models, but these are just more reasons to like them.

the-future-now:

Stephen Hawking’s quote speaks to the heart of why basic income has become such a popular idea in one vital industry in recent years.

Follow @the-future-now​

attndotcom:

lol

archiemcphee:

Obvious Plant (previously featured here) and his friends teamed up to write an entire newspaper’s worth of hilarious fake classified ads. Sign us up for that bag of magic beans, we want to pet that cloud dog too!

obviousplant

My friends and I wrote a bunch of fake want ads and turned it into a newspaper. See the whole paper here.

fakescience:

boredpanda:

Creative Ways To “Fix” Your Broken Phone Screen

mi writes from a report via news9.com KWTV: KWTV writes, "You may have heard of civil asset forfeiture. That's where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime. Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money." But do not worry: "If you can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past," said Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hovertext: Oh, and thank you for birthing me into a period of human history in which natural selection is really really forgiving.

New comic!
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