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29 Aug 19:31

Huma Abedin Dumped Anthony Weiner After He Got Caught Bringing Their Son Into His Sexting Adventures

by Michael K

humadroppedthewiener

Anthony Weiner’s sexting ways may have finally gotten him fucked again, and not in the way he wanted.

Nothing good has come from Anthony Weiner sending dick pics to tricks. Sexting with chicks who weren’t his wife cost him his congressman gig in 2011. Weiner tried to bring his dead political career back to life when he ran for mayor of New York City in 2013, but he proved that he was already Mayor of DumbFuckVille when a sad and tragic peen pic he sent to another trick was leaked. Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin stuck with him through all of that. One would think that maybe the pile of dried dingles in Weiner’s head would produce a clue and he’d retire Carlos Danger and quit sexting with women not named Huma Abedin, but nope. Carlos Danger has once again been caught getting into some sext-a-holic antics, and this time Huma has had enough. She has left him and all it took was a crotch picture with their son in it. “Gross” doesn’t even begin to describe…

Today’s New York Post cover story is all about how Weiner is enjoying his new career as a stay-at-home dad by DM’ing with Twitter THOTS as his wife travels around the country with Hillary Clinton. One of Weiner’s sexting partners told the Post that they’ve been going back and forth since January 2015. Weiner kept asking her to visit him in NYC but she never did. He also sent her many selfies. The Post says that Weiner’s sexting friend is a Trump supporter and has bashed Hillary Clinton on her Twitter page. So yeah, Anthony Weiner sent a peen bulge picture to a supporter of his wife’s boss’ main opponent. Carlos Danger is thinking with his dick and his dick needs a lobotomy.

The chick gave the not-right picture of Weiner and his sleeping son to the Post and they put it on the cover:

That did it for Huma. She is not going to stand by as her deadbeat husband slides his peen into another trick’s DMs. She gave this statement to The New York Times:

“After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband. Anthony and I remain devoted to doing what is best for our son, who is the light of our life. During this difficult time, I ask for respect for our privacy.”

Okay, but who in Subway Jared’s Hard Drive HELL thinks it’s not creepy and is a good idea to use your kid as a prop in a crotch picture?

Without the kid, that picture is still not send-worthy thanks to those ugly Jockey chonies. But add the child and that picture goes from “meh” to “absolutely not!” Whenever a famous-ish person gets caught in a scandal, they either milk it for money and more attention by doing Dancing with the Has-Beens and Never-Wases or they go to rehab. I have a feeling that Weiner is going to check into rehab for exhaustion (sending crotch pics is tiring) and a sext addiction. But if he doesn’t, then someone needs to enroll him in a class at The Learning Annex on the Dos and Don’ts of Dick Pick Taking. Because at the very top of the Don’t list is: Don’t bring your kid into it.

Pic: Wenn.com

27 Mar 13:12

Artist draws beautiful international mermaids

by Caroline Siede

via Junk Drawer

I tend to think of Ariel from Disney’s The Little Mermaid as the Platonic ideal of mermaids, but these beautiful drawings by Tumblr artist Sully are making me reconsider my preconceived notions. Read the rest

30 Oct 10:57

New What’s in the Bible Coloring Book + $10 Family Christian giveaway

by Jolyn


Buck Denver, What's in the Bible, Coloring Book

 Are you familiar with the Buck Denver Asks What’s in the Bible series? Created by Phil Vischer (of Veggie Tales fame), the videos take a look at the bible in sections. Kids learn about the important messages and stories, vocabulary and more. Of course, each video includes catchy songs (including one to help memorize the books of the Bible in order). I’m always amazed by what my kids learn by watching What’s in the Bible? videos – big concepts like the difference between ceremonial and moral law, which books are in the canon and so on!

Needless to say, my kids are big WITB fans – and I was thrilled when I learned that there was a coloring book to accompany the series!

In Buck Denver Asks What’s in the Bible? coloring book, kids will find 200 reproducible coloring pages, featuring favorite scenes, stories, and characters from the Bible. They will color their way through the Bible, all the way from Genesis to Revelation.

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This isn’t a flimsy little coloring book – the 200 pages are printed on quality paper, making it 2-3 times as thick as a normal book. The major difference is that the book is reproducible – so you can make copies to share and use at home, in church and Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, Mom’s groups, homeschool and wherever you’d like.

I loved the pages that feature favorite bible verses – my daughter chose the Ecclesiastes 3:11 coloring page to complete and mail to her grandparents. It’s nice enough to be framed!

Take a look at the well-designed pages for yourself! You can download more free What’s in the Bible coloring pages – including Parting of the Red Sea and Parable of the Mustard Seed!

what's in the bible coloring book
Connect with What’s in the Bible: Facebook † Twitter † Pinterest

Save on What’s In the Bible!

Through October 30, you can grab Faith-Filled Resources for the Kids for only $5, including What’s in the Bible volume 10 DVD! Plus with every purchase, get a free digital episode of a new What’s in the Bible episode! When you order online, you’ll receive an email after your purchase with instructions on how to access your FREE episode. Don’t wait – the offer lasts only through October 30!

Pair the $5 What’s in the Bible? video with the coloring book to make a nice gift set!

Enter to win $10 to spend at Family Christian Store

Family Christian has provided a $10 appreciation certificate to one randomly selected Bargains to Bounty reader. With all of the great 50% off and $5 specials going on, you’ll be able to stretch $10 even further than normal!

To enter, complete the form below by November 1, 2014 at 11:59 pm EST. A winner will be randomly selected and notified via email; the winner’s name will also be posted here after the giveaway has ended.

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Disclosure: Family Christian provided me a copy of the coloring book to facilitate my honest review, along with a $10 appreciation certificate for the giveaway.

The post New What’s in the Bible Coloring Book + $10 Family Christian giveaway appeared first on Bargains to Bounty. If you are seeing this in another feed or site, it has been stolen. Please contact Jolyn.

30 Oct 21:56

Girl's Life v Boy's Life: "Do you Know When to Shut Up" vs "Jokes to impress"

by Cory Doctorow


Whtbout2ndbrkfst's comparison of the covers of Girl's Life and Boy's Life magazines is awfully trenchant and sad. It'd be interesting to do this as a monthly series, and gauge how recurrant this phenomenon is.

If you want to know why gender stereotypes exist, take a good look at the difference between Girl’s Life and Boy’s Life Magazines. While Boy’s Life pushes boys to get outside and explore nature, Girl’s Life tells girls they should be worrying about fashion. While Boy’s Life offers stories of Scouts they can model themselves after, Girl’s Life asks if Facebook is ruining their love life. And, my personal favorite, while Boy’s Life gives it’s readers jokes so they can be the center of attention Girl’s Life posits, “Do You Know When to Shut Up?”

Girl's Life vs Boy's Life (via Amanda Palmer)

    






26 Aug 18:13

Don't Feed The Bears: we'll end up having to kill them

by Maggie Koerth-Baker

Photo: FHgitarre (cc)

Island closed on account of bears.

That was the message I got earlier this summer, when my husband and I set off for our annual trip to Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands. This national park is lousy with black bears. One of the islands, Stockton, is the bear equivalent of Manhattan — boasting one of highest black bear population densities in North America. Ironically, though, that wasn’t the island the bears had shut down. Instead, park visitors had been temporarily banned from setting foot on Sand Island, 4.5 square miles of forest and sandstone cliffs, shaped vaguely like a fat, upside-down comma.

The problem at Sand Island wasn’t an abundance of bears. In fact, the issues could be traced back to a single bear, or possibly two, Julie Van Stappen, the park’s chief of planning and resource management told me later. But rangers were worried about those bears’ behavior. Within the span of few weeks, human food had been scavenged, human tents damaged, and on one memorable occasion a bear tried to snuffle its way into a tent with the people still inside. Somewhere along the line, the bears of Sand Island had been conditioned to seek out humans, rather than avoid them.

This behavior puts the humans in danger. Big as they are, bears are easily startled by humans, and a startled bear is likely to attack anything it perceives as a threat. Six people in five different states ended up on the business end of a bear mauling just this month.

Rangers hoped that, by closing the island, they’d get an opportunity to recondition the bears — effectively teaching the animals to behave like proper, human-shunning wild creatures once again.

But first, they had to invite the truant bears to a barbecue.

All you need to condition an animal is a cue and a reinforcer — let them hear or see or smell something strange and link that something with a positive experience. The most famous example, of course, are the dogs trained by 19th-century physiologist Ivan Pavlov to associate the cue of a bell with the reinforcement of food. After a while, the bell would make the dogs drool, whether or not the food ever actually appeared.

That’s classical conditioning and it’s more about creating a reflex rather than getting the animal to do anything active. But, frankly, food is a great motivator for all kinds of behavior, including active learning. And that’s especially true for omnivores like dogs … or bears. When a bear learns to associate the presence of a colorful plastic tub with the discovery of tasty food, that’s really just a minor variant on classical conditioning, says Ralph Miller, a psychologist at Binghampton University. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the bear is getting a cue and the food reinforces the idea that the cue is important.

In the places where nature and human civilization butt up against one another, that fact translates into some big risks. Bears have three key activities in life. They breed, they hibernate, and they eat — and the first two activities are very dependant on how successful they are at the third. Because of that, bears are resourceful, willing to try new things, and willing to take a few risks if they get a reward for it, said Carl Lackey, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife. When bears cross paths with humans and aren’t chased away by bear spray or whistles, they quickly learn that humans aren’t something to fear. When they find food in those humans’ trash cans or tents, the bears learn to associate people and people things with the presence of a reliable meal. Those lessons increase contact between bears and people, which, in turn increases the chances of what rangers call “bear-human conflicts”. That’s dangerous for people, obviously, but it’s also dangerous for bears, who could end up shot when all they really wanted was your leftover hamburger.

But how do you get a bear — an animal that really wants food — to avoid an easily accessible source of food? One option is aversive conditioning, a system that tries scare bears away from people by using the same psychology that brought them to the trash can to begin with.

The Sand Island barbeque was a trap. Rangers filled a grill with bratwurst and made sure the tantalizing scent of grilled meat wafted beyond the campground area and into the woods. But they never really intended to share. Instead, they were trying to lure bears into human areas so that they could then chase the bears away from those areas using harmless little firecrackers called “whizz-bangs”. The hope: To take the cue of human stuff and change the reinforcement from a positive one — food — to a negative one — loud noises.

Conditioning can involve positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement. Aversive conditioning is based on the idea that, if positive reinforcement is bringing bears closer to people, maybe negative reinforcement can drive them away. There are a lot of different ways to do it and some methods are more involved than others. A lot of times, it simply involves waiting for a bear to show up in a place where it’s not supposed to be. Then, you scare it away, using whizz-bangs, or rubber bullets, or Karelian Bear Dogs, a breed that can be trained to chase bears from human sites and to give up the chase before they injure the bear.

In the 1980s, rangers in Yellowstone National Park tried a more Pavlovian approach. They captured known nuisance bears and put radio collars on them, so they could be tracked. When the bears came looking for food, the rangers would play a bird call — from a species that didn’t live in Yellowstone — and then shoot the bears with a rubber bullet. Over time, they thought the bears would start to respond to the bird call alone, immediately leaving any area where they heard it.

But it didn’t work. Not only did the bears never really develop a reliable conditioned response to the bird calls, they also didn’t change their behavior in response to the rubber bullets — at least, not in the long term. The rangers found that they could scare bears away from a site, and maybe make the lesson stick for a few weeks or a season. But, eventually, the bears would start coming back.

Experts say that’s a problem that’s come up in lots of studies of aversive conditioning. It only seems to be a short-term solution. And there’s a good reason for that: Negative reinforcement is a lot harder to pull off than positive reinforcement.

Think about trying to train a pet. My cats like to climb up on my planters because they like to eat my plants. Every time they climb onto the planter, there’s a positive reinforcement. When I see them do it, I squirt them with a water gun. But I can’t spend my life staring at the planter. When I’m not home, when I’m asleep, the cats have plenty of opportunity to keep eating the plant. The positive reinforcement is constant and reliable. The negative reinforcement is sporadic. So guess which one wins out?

The same thing is at work with bears, Ralph Miller said. To counter constant positive reinforcement, you have to create negative reinforcement that happens just as often. But that’s difficult. It’s also expensive. Meanwhile, depending on the age of the bear, you’re not just trying to reform a short-term habit, but rather a long history of lessons that the bear has been learning since it was a cub. Carl Lackey told me that bear mothers who frequent human areas train their cubs to do the same.

Success also depends on the environment. It’s a lot easier to convince bears to look for sources of food other than tents and trash cans when those other sources of food are plentiful. The Sand Island bears never came to the barbecue thrown in their honor, so the rangers never even got a chance to try out the aversive conditioning techniques. Instead, they just kept the island closed to people for a couple of weeks, leaving bears without access to the human food they craved. Meanwhile, the late spring finally kicked in, berries blossomed, and the bears found a different food source.

There’s a lesson in the story of Sand Island — taking away the positive reinforcement of human food is more effective than trying to create a negative reinforcement by frightening bears away from that food. That’s actually why national parks have developed such stringent rules about what visitors are supposed to do with their trash, how they’re supposed to store food, and how they’re supposed to behave in bear country. It’s all about removing the positive reinforcement.

In fact, the most successful reduction in bear-human conflicts is based on his principle. In the first half of the 20th century, Yellowstone National Park averaged 138 bear-caused property damage incidents and 48 bear maulings every year. It was also a time when bears were getting LOTS of positive reinforcement from human behavior. People hand-fed bears along the highways. They left food in coolers and picnic baskets where bears could easily reach it. There were even bleachers installed at local trash dumps, so people could come and watch bears eat their garbage. Generations of bears had learned — go where the people are and you will be fed.

Then, beginning in the late 1960s, Yellowstone started to change. Dumps were closed. Trash cans were bear-proofed. Rangers educated campers about securing their food and started cracking down on tourists who fed the bears. There were still problems with some of the older bears, but the younger ones learned — there’s no reward to be had for pestering people. Today, despite the fact that human visitors have tripled, Yellowstone’s bears are involved in fewer than a dozen incidents of property damage every year and average only a single mauling. In the end, the best way to retrain bears is to retrain people.

    






16 Aug 18:30

It Costs $350 to Make an Artificial Hip. But It Will Cost You $30,000 to Get One.

by Kevin Drum

For the last few months, Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times has been working on a series of stories about the high price of healthcare in America. In July she wrote about the high cost of childbirth, and earlier this month she wrote about the truly insane cost of hip replacements in America. But Bob Somerby has noted something interesting: nobody else in the media seems to care:

These articles deal with a very important topic—the massive looting of U.S. consumers which characterizes American health care. This looting helps explain a welter of major social and political problems—our nation’s growing income inequality; our stagnant wages; the failure to provide full medical coverage; the nation’s problems with federal deficits and debt.

But so what? Despite their high profile and apparent salience, Rosenthal’s reports have met with universal silence, except for last week’s Fresh Air....It’s going to win the Pulitzer Prize—and it’s going to do so in silence!

Despite the high profile afforded this series, the silence has been general all over the press, which seems paralyzed, dead in life. At the end of this report, we’ll offer our own speculations about the resounding silence.

Is this really true? Rosenthal's piece implied that artificial hips cost about $350 to manufacture, but sell to hospitals for upwards of $5,000 or more—and are then marked up further by the hospital before they end up in an OR getting installed. It's not clear if $350 is just the manufacturing cost, or if that's the all-in burdened cost of producing a hip, but it almost doesn't matter. Even if it's the former, it means the full cost is unlikely to be more than $1,000 or so. Nonetheless, in the case of one particular implant, Rosenthal reports that U.S. hospitals pay an average of $8,000 and that even Belgian hospitals, which benefit from government-controlled pricing, pay $4,000. So everyone is paying a pretty hefty markup. Americans are just paying a super-hefty one, made worse by the fact that hospitals then add their own markup, bringing the price of the implant up to $30,000 or more.

So that's at least a 30x markup to the end user just for the cost of the part. And that's despite the fact that the technology is mature, volumes are high and increasing, and there are five companies "competing" for business. So what's going on?

Rosenthal has some ideas, but in the end it remains unclear. Where are insurance companies? Where's Medicare? Why isn't anyone outraged by this? Is it just fatigue at the never-ending tsunami of stories about the lunatic cost of all the various bits and pieces of American healthcare? Bob is right: it's a mystery.