After many, many years of befuddling students, the German language could finally get a little simpler, and it's all thanks to changing attitudes toward the sexes. Please address your thank-you notes to Feminism, college kids.
SORRY GAP, that $10/hour isn't going to keep your employees from developing a psychological and physical aversion to the odor of HEAVEN for the rest of their lives. Signed, former employee.
The Gap announced plans to raise its hourly minimum wage to $10, a move that is expected to impact more than 65,000 of its employees.
This isn't actually a law thing and I haven't watched it yet, but I BET IT IS GOOD.
The video below is well worth the 21 minutes. Serling goes into sponsors as censors, consumerism, the potential for great television, and much more. He had experience with trying to engage race issues on T.V. and finding that his story was gutted. He talks about precensorship – themes writers avoid. He explains the way the system converges to make that so. There is a great story about Lassie having puppies and some crazy controversy about that being a sex show. Want associational harm? A line was cut about gas chambers from Judgment at Nuremberg because a sponsor that sold gas stoves for kitchens did not want that connection. As I recall another story was set in the British navy and so asked for tea. A sponsor sold coffee. The compromise. A tray of unspecified drinks was served.
Behold a man. Smart. Dedicated. Passionate. Turned to science fiction from drama. The reason? To avoid that place he created, The Twilight Zone.
by Robert T. Gonzalez on io9, shared by Doug Barry to Jezebel
A seven-year-old girl named Charlotte has taken LEGO to task for not only making more "boy people" than "lego girls," but sending the former on adventures while the latter "sit at home."
From 1900 to 2011, the State of Florida operated the Florida School for Boys (under a few different names) in order to house children with checkered and/or criminal pasts. Survivors of the school have come forward to allege systemic rape, torture, abuse, and murder by staff. As long ago as 1968, the state acknowledged that the school had engaged in illegal and immoral practices when then-Governor Claude Kirk stated, “Somebody should have blown the whistle a long time ago.” Yet, it wasn’t until the 2011 Department of Justice and 2010 Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigations were completed that the reform school finally closed its doors.
Why is it that what is essentially a mass grave of children in the United States not the most salient story of the day? Is it because the children in question were “criminals?” Are we (or the media) all too ready to forget even the recent past? Is it simply easier to ignore truly harrowing events so that we can continue on blissfully unaware? I don’t know the answers, but I think it is important to explore why many choose to remain silent in the face of such atrocities. After all, it was likely silence by support staff, guards, educators, administrators, state inspectors, and others that allowed the Florida School for Boys to remain open for so long.
Ladies, having trouble keeping your phone charged at festivals and conferences like SXSW or Coachella? What’s the purpose of that fancy purse besides keeping your wallet, lipstick and iPad warm anyway? Well, there’s new clutch-cum-cross body bag that boasts a powerful battery in its pocket called the All-In-One bag by emPOWERED. It’s fashionable, promises to juice up your device to a full charge and is compatible with a range of phones and handheld devices, from iPads to androids. I can’t lie, I kind of want one.
Do viral-style headlines make you want to do this? (Grafvision/Shutterstock)
The Upworthy headlines will find you. In tweets, in emails, in wall posts from well-meaning family: Viral Headline English, with its blithe incredulity, will hunt you down, and you won’t believe the absolutely incredible thing that happens next. OMG.
Well, what you can’t beat, change.
Alison Gianotto a New York-based developer better known as snipe, has given users a way to hide from the madness. Her plug-in for Chrome, called Downworthy, translates certain common words in viral headlines to their more accurate equivalent.
“Literally” becomes “Figuratively.”
“Incredible” becomes “Painfully Ordinary.”
And my favorite: “Will Blow Your Mind” becomes “Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment.”
We’ll get to the absolutely mind-blowing results in a minute. First, it’s worth noting that Snipe’s extension plays on a key feature of the web. While browsers load the pages that servers send to them, they can be told to ignore or change some elements. In other words, users can play defense with HTML. The process is known as “augmented browsing.”
Though coined as a phrase in 1997, augmented browsing became easy in 2005 with the release of the Greasemonkey plug-in for Firefox. Greasemonkey let users run and manage website-specific scripts—they could change how IMDB looked, for example. This kind of user-side modding, once rare, is now widespread. If you’re using ad-blocking software, you’re browsing an augmented web right now.
(A side note: It turns out Upworthy’s headlines themselves aren’t predictable or formulaic enough to produce interesting results with the plug-in.)
In her acknowledgments, Snipe thanked two other developers who wielded plug-ins to make a point or draw a laugh. Danielle Sucher’s swaps all gender pronouns. And Steven Frank’s popular cloud-to-butt converter replaces every mention of “the cloud” with—what else?—“my butt.”
These extensions: They’re little jokes, written in code and executed on the unsuspecting and unaware—like, say, Bloomberg Businessweek:
The Forbes blogger might be my favorite: he asks if this could be connected to a similar scandal involving guns that got attention primarily because a law enforcement officer was killed. He thinks that might make everyone feel better because it could show that the DEA’s strategy was to give arms to drug cartels so they would kill each other and save us the trouble.
You don’t have to prosecute someone who’s dead! You don’t have to prosecute their families, you don’t have to prosecute their crying children or traumatized communities. It makes things much easier, for everyone.
Government support of drug distribution is an old strategy that has never “worked” as in put a significant dent in the drug trade, but has “worked” in that it has perpetuated the economics of the drug trade and law enforcement simultaneously.
Supporting one part of a drug economy doesn’t damage that economy, but it can provide more predictable, safer arrests and other evidence needed to prove “productivity” in law enforcement. It is understandable that the people who work in law enforcement don’t want to die. They want to bring a paycheck home and feed their families like everyone else. I wish we’d stop doing it this way though.
Choosing our income, our safety, and our affluence over others results directly in suffering and death among groups of people we’ve decided operate outside the boundaries of our empathy. If there were a “drug war” in the U.S. there would be police in white and wealthy neighborhoods knocking down doors.
I don’t know how basic these things seem to you, but these things seem worth expressing to me. Here are some ways I’ve seen the “drug war” play out in person:
I did criminal background checking for the Chicago Housing Authority in 2005 and 2006. I saw the confused conflux of circumstances that results in people getting into trouble with the state and with drugs, then getting help from the state, then getting pulled off the state help because the state help wasn’t helping.
I spent a lot of time looking through records at the Rolling Meadows Courthouse with another criminal background checker who spoke openly to me about her cocaine use. She lived with her boyfriend, a cocaine dealer, and told me when the time came for her to stop using coke their relationship was probably not going to survive (probably). She got out of her situation later, but throughout it she told me she felt little danger from the law. She came to the courthouse every weekday and typed up other people’s crimes. She and her boyfriend were white, and they lived in a white neighborhood.
I lived in Mexico in 2007, and eventually found out the city I was living in, Zacatecas, had been negotiated for by local government. The Zetas were given control over other towns in the state in exchange for leaving the capital city alone. Some of the friends I made in Zacatecas told me it could be scary and strange to visit friends and family in these towns because the Zetas had free reign.
Returning to Zacatecas from a road trip to Mexico City, we were searched by the Federal Police, which was not too unusual. This time though they told us half a dozen police officers had been killed execution-style in the main square of one of the neighboring towns. Had someone violated part of some deal? Was it retaliation or aggression? The press covered the killings but no one could say why. I can’t imagine how it must feel to live in the crossfire between police and drug cartels, especially when both groups seem uninterested in your welfare.
I lived on the west side of Chicago in 2008 and 2009. I met several children who were later killed, unarmed, by gang violence and by police. There was a point when two unarmed boys were killed by police over the space of a few months, and I saw the neighborhood organize a march on the police station. I can’t find a link for this, so if there was press coverage, there wasn’t much.
In 2012 I obtained a large quantity of dimethyltryptamine, an illegal psychedelic “drug” that occurs naturally, it seems, in all living things. The people who supplied the plants with high concentrations of DMT, according to my contact, had their home “raided” by the DEA some time later. The majority of their belongings were destroyed and no charges or arrests were made. They moved and set up shop elsewhere.
None of our Drug Enforcement strategies have worked. I don’t think the “law” or any particular “system” is to blame. I think we have a culture that encourages individuals in law enforcement and elsewhere to react to our confusing and contradictory culture with self-preservation instead of empathy.
If you have not been affected by any of this, the first step you can take to end the drug war which does not exist is to close your eyes and imagine. Your friends and family, your stoner cousin, your aunt with the anger problem. They’re in prison. They lived exactly the same life and were exactly the same people, but they were arrested and sent to prison. Maybe in a different neighborhood, in a different economic class, with a different skin tone. But they are exactly the same person, with the same basic desires and needs. You are in prison.
A federal judge in Tulsa, ruling that the majority view of Oklahoma voters that marriage should be open only to a man and a woman “must give way to individual constitutional rights,” on Tuesday struck down the state’s ballot measure banning same-sex marriages. Senior U.S. District Judge Terence C. Kern put his ruling on hold during any appeal that is pursued by the state to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
The judge’s sixty-eight-page ruling is here. If upheld, it would add Oklahoma to the expanding list of states where same-sex marriage has become legal, either by court ruling, state legislation, or ballot measure.
Without counting Oklahoma, and without counting Utah, where a judge issued a similar ruling last month, seventeen states and Washington, D.C., now allow such marriages. The Utah ruling has been blocked by the Supreme Court while an appeal in that case goes ahead in the Tenth Circuit. Judge Kern noted, in delaying the Oklahoma ruling, that he was following the Supreme Court’s lead.
“Equal protection,” Judge Kern wrote, “is at the very heart of our legal system and central to our consent to be governed. It is not a scarce commodity to be meted out begrudgingly or in short portions.”
His ruling came in response to a challenge by two women, both of whom are editors at the local newspaper, the Tulsa World. The couple, Mary Bishop and Sharon Baldwin, lives in Broken Arrow; they have been in a committed relationship for more than fifteen years. In 2009, they were denied a marriage license, based upon the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
They and another lesbian couple had been pursuing their challenge to the ban since 2004, shortly after Oklahoma voters approved “Amendment A.” The case has taken a number of procedural side paths, but ultimately led to Judge Kern’s final ruling Tuesday.
Oklahoma voters had also approved a provision in the state constitution saying that Oklahoma would not recognize any same-sex marriage performed in another state. That provision survived a challenge by the other couple, because Judge Kern found that they technically did not have a claim.
The other couple, Susan Barton and Gay Phillips of Tulsa, has twice been married — in Canada in 2005 and in California in 2008. They have sought to have their California marriage recognized in Oklahoma, but have been refused. The judge ruled Tuesday that they were not in a legal position to challenge the lack of recognition in Oklahoma.
Similarly, the judge found that Barton and Phillips could not go forward with a challenge to a part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act — a part not ruled on by the Supreme Court last year — that seeks to give states permission to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Judge Kern blocked that claim, finding that DOMA’s Section 2 was not the reason for a lack of recognition of their California marriage.
In ruling against the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the judge declared that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of legal equality. He ruled that the Supreme Court’s ruling last Term in United States v. Windsor actually provided some support both for the challenging couple and for state officials defending the state ban.
The Windsor decision, the judge said, supports a plea for marriage equality because much of the reasoning of the Court majority about the purpose behind DOMA could also be applied to state bans on same-sex marriage. It supports the state, the judge added, because of the lengthy commentary in the opinion about states’ primary power to define marriage.
In the end, however, the judge decided that Oklahoma’s ban was based on intentional discrimination, with a “stark” negative impact on gay and lesbian couples. “This is not a case where the law has a small or incidental effect on the defined class; it is a total exclusion of only one group.”
The ban, he added, “was adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of excluding the class from marriage.”
Judge Kern took note of a string of decisions by the Supreme Court favoring gay rights, between 1996 and 2013, and said that, while “there is no precise legal label for what has occurred,” his court “knows a rhetorical shift when it sees one.”
The American Dialect Society has voted "because" the Word of the Year for 2013, because "because is now being used in new ways to introduce a noun, adjective, or other part of speech." No matter how annoying you think it is, because is definitely very hot right now.
I WILL NO LONGER KEEP MY LOVE OF THIS SHOW A SECRET.
¡HOLA! Season 1000 of The Bachelor starring Latin Lover Juan Pablo begins this week in a two-night extravaganza of love, loss, self-tanner and Forever 21 dresses. This year's batch of women are beautiful, special snowflakes who are perfect in their own individual way. No, that's a lie: I crunched the numbers and they're all uncannily similar.
While Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio wooed Manhattan liberals with his Duarte Square “Transition Tent”, the city’s dispossessed know that progress will never appear as an option on a public ballot. As fantastic as the end of Stop-and-Frisk, universal Pre-K, the decriminalization of marijuana, or whatever else the former pro-Sandinista had in mind, these are likely to become ephemeral talking points from yet another forgotten election cycle–promises he likely couldn’t keep even if he wanted to. And no amount of open source discursive new media, the latest technological advance in democratic illusion, will make us forget that tax-free Duarte Square owner Trinity Church approved the arrest and prosecution of over 50 occupiers in December 2011, and sent comrade Mark Adams to Rikers Island for more than a month. Before its flashy Transition Tent, Duarte Square was just another vacant, unused property in this city, fiercely protected from receiving new life by the New York Police Department.
Bloomberg’s extended 12-year mayorship was a brutal baptism for the post-9/11 21st century, and a smashing success for a mode of governance which seems to only get stronger whenever we dream it’s on its last legs. While he has been lampooned in the media for his heavy hand on lifestyle issues, despotism over the city bureaucracy, unapologetic racism, and self-appointed third term, Bloomberg was all-too typical of this century’s liberal-democractic Mussolinis (with Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi being the most famous). With a net worth of around $30 billion, Bloomberg is the second richest person in New York City, the seventh in the United States, and the thirteenth in the world. His wealth, he argued, was proof of the business savvy NYC needed to survive the “great recession” and 9/11. This is the reality of decision-making and authority in 2014, and this is the context in which de Blasio enters.
Like a punctual train, the tragic 20th century delivered us onto the farce of our current era—-where comedians like Jon Stewart or Beppe Grillo best express the time’s ideological centrism. Critical as they may be, a well run military intervention or bipartisan slashing of social programs will always be admired by Americans, as pragmatism and exceptionalism remain the liberal basis of the nation’s self-mythology. And no matter how bleak things turn, how many flaming loops of logic we’re asked to jump through, or irregularly-shaped pills of the present we must swallow, the activism of Occupy and libertarianism of the Tea Party balance between an unmovable constant–the statue of that mythical goddess of American Liberty, to be defended against all threats, both foreign and domestic.
The dual worst-case-scenario poles of Communism and Fascism remain the ultimate taboo, officially stuck in sepia, but present in the nightmares of every citizen. But what about the bleak hues of our present reality? The despot of our time will not be any single elected official, but a web of markets and management we’re unable to escape. Decades of effort have firmly replaced community with economy. After Bloomberg, the tyranny will remain, diffused all around us. The real estate, service industry and general “coolness” bubbles will continue to engorge. Rents, costs, and expenses will continue to rise, forcing us all to work even more for even less, all to avoid being displaced like the occupants of our apartments before us.
How far will we be pushed? When will we stop being pacified with new outlets for cultural life and leisure? It’s all well and good to have our little hobbies, but it’s so much better to fall in love, and to build the capacity to defend that position collectively. For years, decades, we have tried marching, breaking windows, occupations, publishing magazines, starting businesses. At least we’re trying, but then again, so is de Blasio and his thousands-strong transition team of young, socially mobile entrepreneurs. These are people who can articulate goals, make long-term plans, follow-through on basic tasks, and hold each other accountable in the process of working towards a shared vision. These are people whose attention spans and common commitments last longer than a meeting, a month, a season. These are people who are able to think and act strategically.
We need to get organized. Not for transition, progress, or profit, but for life itself. If we’re competent enough to act like we’re proud employees at some restaurant or university, we can also start acting like dogged revolutionaries who can declare and embody a position; who can communicate with those around us, always clinging to an unshakable class resentment and desire for revenge. Neither for nor against the Left, neither believers nor atheists of Community. We cannot exorcise our ideologies, but we can subjugate their identities to the life we want to create. We can’t presume to like every community gardener, identity politician, cyclist, communist, sectarian, post-leftist, hippie, oogle, or 20-year-old anarchist, but we can be less superficial in our critiques and moralistic in our judgements of those trying to find another way. We can drop off pieces of the puzzle for each other. We can give each other knowing nods.
Let’s wake up in 2014 like true New York-multitaskers, wondering what tiny steps we can take to make New York look more like a city on the brink than one on the rise.
