Sophianotloren

Well, such as it is.  I am apparently not allowed to do a dance of seven veils and demand decapitation of those who arouse my ire.  So, again, with achy fingers, I give you images…remember, we got here by having not enough people vote.  Do something about that next month, ok?

Oh, and btw?  Fuck Scott Walker. With flaming pineapples. Now THERE is a job I would do for $7.25 per hour.

Well, then, let’s let those exalted bastards get down in the cheap seats with the rest of the country, ok?

Filed under: Life, Politics Tagged: asshattery, economy, gop lies, labor rights, minimum wage, vote!, wages

This week, an art project asks people to give away their data for a cookie, the first web browser turns 20, a child befriends Siri, slowing down in museums, the smell of old books, tea propaganda, and more.

 This past week was the 20th anniversary of the release of Netscape Navigator, which was the first commercial web browser. Its original press release included these bullet points:

Mosaic Communications’ network navigator achieves its dramatic performance improvements through new capabilities such as:

• Continuous document streaming, enabling users to interact with documents while they are still being downloaded rather than waiting for the entire document to load.
• Multiple, simultaneous network accesses, allowing several documents or images to be downloaded simultaneously.
• Native support for the JPEG image format.

 One art project asks people if they would give away personal data for a real-life cookie:

Participants couldn’t be certain that Puno wasn’t a flagrant identity thief planning to leak selfies. But they made a bet that she was what she seemed to be: a bright young Brooklyn artist making a well-intentioned point. Her project would have been more daring, and perhaps more artistically complete, if she’d put everything online, posing the question of who would be at fault if someone made nefarious use of the information.

 A bizarre story of how a boy with autism befriended Apple’s Siri:

Siri can be oddly comforting, as well as chummy. One friend reports: “I was having a bad day and jokingly turned to Siri and said, ‘I love you,’ just to see what would happen, and she answered, ‘You are the wind beneath my wings.’ And you know, it kind of cheered me up.”

 Maurice Berger explores LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Notion of Family“:

Ms. Frazier, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was inspired by Gordon Parks’s idea of using the camera as a “weapon” of choice against racism, intolerance and poverty. She does not pretend to speak for African-Americans or even Braddock’s black community in this project. Instead, she typically photographs herself and her mother and grandmother, three generation of women whose “lives parallel the rise and fall of the steel mill industry,” and who endured despite “thirty years of disinvestment and abandonment by local, state and federal governments.”

 Reconsidering the “Broken Windows” theory that the NYPD so depends on to justify their policing:

When “Broken Windows” was published, in 1982, tax revenues in New York were shrinking at an alarming rate and the city’s ability to maintain itself was in doubt. In 1980, the population had fallen to 7,071,639, a drop of about 800,000 from ten years earlier and around where the city’s population had been in 1930. Crime by blacks—not the collapse of local manufacturing or the flight of middle-class families to the suburbs—was popularly perceived to be the primary cause.

This racial perception is no less prevalent today. The most comprehensive study to date on the roots of crime found that the central factor in how people perceive the safety of a neighborhood is not disorder or even the presence of boarded-up stores and abandoned buildings, but the number of African-Americans (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) who live there. This perception was true for blacks and whites alike.4 The link is ingrained in the American psyche. When we criticize the police for racial prejudice, we are decrying a condition that is bigger than the police, a prejudice that we may share ourselves.

 The age-old question of slowing down in a museum:

Most people want to enjoy a museum, not conquer it. Yet the average visitor spends 15 to 30 seconds in front of a work of art, according to museum researchers.

… Indeed, a number of museums now offer “slow art” tours or days that encourage visitors to take their time … sometimes you get more for the price of admission by opting to see less.

… Previous research, including a study led by Stephen Kaplan at the University of Michigan, has already suggested that museums can serve as restorative environments. And Daniel Fujiwara at the London School of Economics and Political Science has found that visiting museums can have a positive impact on happiness and self-reported health.

 Every wonder why old books have a particular aroma? Galley Cat has your answer:

 A PDF catalogue accompanying the Art Post-Internet exhibition, curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing during spring 2014, is finally available online. I’ll probably have more to say about this at a latter time.

 We often associate tea with India, but did you know that it took a British propaganda campaign to get Indians to drink chai?

Tea might seem to be India’s best-loved beverage, but its popularity is actually the result of a careful propaganda effort. Like Christmas and diamonds, tea consumption is among the world’s more successful advertising campaigns.

… Tea plantations in India were initially meant to produce tea for foreign consumers. When tea consumption in Britain and the US began to stagnate around the turn of the 20th century, the British, ever the opportunists, decided to look to India to expand their markets.

The only problem was that Indians were extremely reluctant consumers of the combination of sugar, boiled leaves, water and milk.

In 1903, the British government established a propaganda unit, at first called the Tea Cess Committee, that was meant to propagate tea consumption. This board was funded by the proceeds of a tax on the export of tea. The government neatly renamed this as the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in 1937.

 A short history of Fire Island architectural modernism and its distinct style (emphasis theirs):

It was, essentially, the antithesis of the suburban ideal: no cars, no carefully maintained lawns, no fences—just meandering paths that took you from the boardwalk to the front door. Gifford, who often talked his wealthy clients into building houses with a smaller footprint, is quoted by his biographer, Christopher Rawlins, as saying, “Someday we will learn to live with nature, instead of living on nature.”

 The YouTube channel of the New York City Department of Records is a treasure trove of strange video, including:

• The Guggenheim Museum in 1986 (posted below)
• Random footage from Harlem
• AIA video tour of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood
• The Bronx in 1986
• Footage of Shirley Chisholm declaring her presidential bid on January 25, 1972; she was the first African-American woman to ever do so.

 Why do so many gay men hate camp men?

There is a growing resistance to the straight-acting gay man. “Masc” is just another mask and the straight-acting gay man is just that – an actor. The bromosexual chooses his clothes as carefully as any drag queen; his mannerisms are as studied, his voice as carefully modulated. He is trying to pass. But so is the straight man. It’s just that over centuries all his careful nurturing has been naturalised. He is the norm but he is not natural.

 A man and his hummingbird “pet” (via Colossal):

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

ostolero:

samurott:

why do gamers need a gate anyway

So I was idly perusing Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield’s Twitter yesterday, and I came across an alarming tweet. It seemed as though Bloomfield had somehow penetrated the 47 levels of security protecting the Feminist HIgh Council to discover incontrovertible evidence of Operation Wicked Succubus. You know, the feminist plan to eliminate all men (except for me).

Her followers were aghast:

And naturally one of them brought up #GamerGate.

There were a few others, but you get the idea.

It never occurred to any of them to, you know, try to find out just who the bald man advocating killing all men was. Or who exactly he was talking to.

So I decided to do some serious investigative journalism to see what I could uncover. I typed out “‘eliminate men as a gender’ security” into a little known internet “search engine” called Google, and boldly clicked on the first result.

This led me to a Tweet with a URL in it. Bravely, I clicked on that URL and found myself looking at a video of a presentation at something called Monitorama PDX 2014 — clearly the code name for one of the Feminist Conspiracy’s conventions.

I looked it up in Google and discovered a web page for the event, which had been held in May. It was described as an “An Open Source Monitoring Conference & Hackathon.”

Ah, clearly a clever Feminist code name.

And then I decided to look up the name of the speaker: James Mickens. Turns out the guy works at Microsoft, one of the companies at the center of the Misandrist Conspiracy. Mickens is also the author of a number of papers, with titles like “Pivot: Fast, Synchronous Mashup Isolation Using Generator Chains” and “Mugshot: Deterministic Capture and Replay for JavaScript Applications.”

Obviously, some high level feminist theorizing.

Then I decided to watch the video. And I was shocked!

Because it wasn’t a speech about killing all men after all. It wasn’t even a feminist speech. No, it seemed instead to be a highly technical talk about internet security issues, illustrated with a lot of silly slides. Like this:

 

And this:

I must confess that I didn’t get the overwhelming majority of his jokes. But he audience seemed to find these slides, and much of what he said, hilarious. So if you ever need to hire a comedian who can joke about Synchronous Mashup Isolation Using Generator Chains, Mickens is your guy.

So where does the whole “kill all men” thing come from?

Well, I skipped ahead a bit in the video until I found a section in which Mickens talked about the dumb things people do that can undermine even the most sophisticated security setup.

His example: gullible, horny men who are tricked into “friending” hackers on Facebook posing as hot babes — even when there are pretty obvious indications that the hot babes aren’t really hot babes at all.

Things like: saying they graduated from Central University, even though there is no school by that name in the US, or spelling the name of their profession wrong.

 

These are all good clues, he said, that the hot babe you just friended on facebook was really this guy:

 

Given that men are regularly duped with simple tricks that play on their horniness and gullibility, Mickens joked, maybe the real goal for people trying to design secure systems should be the elimination of all men.

So that’s where the slide comes from.

And by the way, that whole bit of his killed — not as in “killed all men” but as in “got giant laughs from the mostly male audience.” Expecially the part about killing all men.

If you want to see the whole bit, starting with Mary and ending with “eliminate men as a gender,” it starts at around 20:40 in the video.

Men’s Rights Activists: more gullible than guys who friend Mary from Central University on Facebook.

NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL-MINDED MRAS: That bit about the feminist plot to kill all men (except me) at the start of this post was a joke. Feminists don’t really intend to kill all men (except me).

Or do they?

While I cannot be sure this would work on Mr. Capital Letter-Speak, it is amusing.  I have been accused of thinking a suitable supply of candy bars heals all ills! (And yes, ferret-like, I swiped this from a blogger in my morning ramble and can’t even recall from whom.)

Rep Dennis Ross (R-Round the Bend) is a man of action.  And he has the toolbox to make things happen.  So, the minute this here election is over, he’s returning to Congress with an emergency bill in his briefcase to save Americans from Ebola.

Rep Ross agrees with his colleagues that a travel ban is the way to go (because a big plastic bubble over the country would take too much time to roll out).  Doctors, epidemiologists and international experts have traveled to Congress to give their advice—that travel bans won’t help and could make things worse—but, Republicans, being Republicans aren’t buying it because . . . . well, aren’t doctors and experts usually elites trained in liberal universities? and doesn’t Obama hope that we’re all too sick to stop his world conquest?

For whatever reason, Republicans have decided that they know best and should therefore take charge.  So, they wrote a letter to the President to apprise him of the fact that they are taking the lead on Ebola—as soon as the election is over.  So far, 53 Republicans and six Democrats, who might as well be, have joined up.

Rep Ross (R-FL) got himself on MSNBC this morning to let Americans know that Republicans are going to save them . . . as soon as the election is over.

I believe we can nip this in the bud, if you will, at least by banning those flights temporarily until such time as the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] believes the epidemic is under control and also make sure we don’t issue visas to travelers from over there. We have a good border patrol, believe it or not, and they can catch these people with fake passports and fake visas as they come across the border. It just seems to me we ought to have the debate on this and flush this out and that’s why I filed the bill to allow for the banning of these flights.

Despite what the experts say, that could work, except for one thing: there are no direct flights that come to the United States from West Africa, as New York Times reporter Jeremy W. Peters pointed out to the congressman.

Rep Ross apparently didn’t enjoy being caught flat-footed and immediately pivoted to snark:

Then we don’t have any problem. Everybody’s contained, correct?  They are not. They are traveling. They are traveling.

“It will not solve the problem,” he added of his bill. “It is a step in the right direction.”

I guess . . . especially if it buys us some time to get that big plastic bubble set up.

Watch Rep Ross go off around the 2:15 mark.  And get a load of his face after his rant when they show the whole panel.  Bet that’s the last time Dennis Ross goes to MSNBC.

“Woman is at once apple and serpent.” ~ Heinrich Heine Related Posts: Fertile Fields Sweet Spring, Cummings Lingering Give me shelter Forget The World

How Savile’s niece’s demand for compensation led to police fraud probe: Her own daughter says story is false…how many more of the 211 claims for vast payments will police investigate?

• Caroline Robinson claimed great-uncle Savile abused her in front of family
• In 2011 gave TV and newspaper interviews following paedophile’s exposure
• But family members say ‘there is not a chance in this world’ her story is true
• Now police are investigating other Savile compensation scheme claimants 
• Many of the 211 claims are vague with history not always checking out 

By DAVID ROSE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 21:20 GMT, 18 October 2014 | UPDATED: 23:23 GMT, 18 October 2014

Detectives have launched a criminal inquiry into suspected fraud over claims of sex abuse by Jimmy Savile, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The extraordinary development centres on allegations by Savile’s own great-niece, Caroline Robinson, who claims she was sexually abused by him as a child – and is seeking thousands of pounds in compensation.

But following inquiries by this newspaper, police in West Yorkshire have confirmed they have now launched a probe. And both West Yorkshire and detectives from Scotland Yard’s Operation Yewtree have said they would investigate other claims if fraud were suspected.

Some 211 people came forward claiming compensation after alleged abuse by the DJ, who died in 2011. The following year, a TV documentary exposed his predatory behaviour, opening a floodgate of claims.

An engagement party at a luxury venue in Leeds in 1978. The bride-to-be – who, unusually enough, is both pregnant and only 15 – is asked by her mother to take some food to the disc jockey, her famous ‘Uncle Jimmy’ Savile, who’s playing the hits in his booth next to the heaving dancefloor.

The girl shudders at the request because three years earlier, when she was just 12, Savile sexually abused her in front of numerous relatives at a family gathering. But she’s keen to please her mother, and so she obeys – only to be assaulted all over again, this time much more seriously.

It’s dark and noisy. No one sees his attack and no one hears her protests. ‘He cornered me; I was trapped,’ she would tell a reporter years later. ‘I can still summon up the smell of him; his cigars and a sweet, sickly girls’ perfume. When it was over, I ran outside. I remember being sick. Then I went into the hotel toilets and scrubbed myself.’

In the long, posthumous charge sheet against Jimmy Savile, this depraved case stands out: an account of his abuse of his own great-niece, Caroline Robinson.

Now 51, she gave TV and newspaper interviews in 2012, after the documentary that first exposed Savile as a paedophile.

But an investigation by The Mail on Sunday has revealed that her story conflicts with other evidence – and in this is not alone: so far as it is possible to check other claims being made by Savile’s alleged victims, some may also be questionable.

At least five members of Mrs Robinson’s close family say she is lying, including her daughter, Samantha Smith. Samantha has even accused her mother of making a fraudulent claim for compensation, and submitted a formal complaint to police.

Mrs Robinson’s brother, Martin Perry, adds ‘there is not a chance in this world’ that her story of being abused by Savile while sitting on his knee in front of many witnesses aged 12 was true. As for the engagement party, ‘it never happened’.

Mrs Smith, 26, a school science cover supervisor, said: ‘She’s made out like she was trying to protect me from him. It was the exact opposite.’ When she was 13, she said, her mother made her take a day off school to go to Savile’s brother Vincent’s funeral – purely so that she would meet Jimmy.

‘She was saying, “There he is, go and talk to him, he’s got loads of money”. His money and fame were the only reasons she made me go the funeral of a man I’d never met.’

Her police statement concludes: ‘I reject all of Caroline’s claims as nothing more than a calculated lie in order to obtain money fraudulently.’

Last night, Geoff Dodd, West Yorkshire’s Assistant Chief Constable, revealed police were beginning an inquiry into whether Mrs Robinson’s claim is bogus.

She has previously denied her family’s allegations, but last night did not return requests for comment.

Mrs Robinson has waived her anonymity by giving interviews, so it is possible to check what she says. Legal restrictions make investigating claims by others who say Savile abused them extremely difficult.

However, inquiries by this newspaper have revealed:

• Mrs Robinson’s compensation claim is one of 211 filed under a scheme set up by the executors of Savile’s will, National Westminster Bank, and the law firm it has engaged to run it, Osborne Clarke.

• All aspects of these further claims are supposed to be totally secret, but many refer to events and times – for example, screenings of Top Of The Pops – which would appear to be impossible. The way the scheme works means they are subject to only the most cursory scrutiny.

• The lawyers who represent claimants will be paid between £11,000 and £16,000 for every claim they process. Under the scheme’s fixed ‘tariff’ of damages and legal fees, this means the lawyers will be paid up to ten times as much as victims. Next month, the scheme will be challenged in the Court of Appeal.

• The fees going to Osborne Clarke will take precedence over all other calls on Savile’s fast-shrinking estate. They have already taken £500,000 and submitted bills for a further £200,000 – still only a fraction of the sum they will eventually be due.

• What is left of the Savile estate is currently valued at about £3 million, and the payment of these fees will empty the pot. The only genuine victims likely to receive compensation are those abused at NHS hospitals or the BBC: in those cases, the burden will be transferred from the estate to tax and licence-fee payers. But this applies to less than half the claimants. The others will probably get nothing.

A SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL?

THE 2012 documentary that destroyed Savile’s reputation focused on allegations that he assaulted girls during visits he made to Duncroft, a secure Approved School in Surrey for teenage girls.

In the programme’s wake, more former Duncroft girls came forward, and at least 14 are now claiming compensation under the scheme. Some say Savile abused them when they were taken from Duncroft to recordings of his BBC TV shows.

Anonymity rules mean that most cannot be identified.

But, like Mrs Robinson, former Duncroft inmate Bebe Roberts went public.

She said in a 2012 interview that Savile assaulted her when she was 15 in 1965: ‘If you were walking down the corridor he would come up close and touch you inappropriately… He always came when we were getting ready for bed. There were girls in there who were quite terrified of him.’

Ms Roberts’s claims surprised her former room-mate, Susanne Cameron-Blackie. Now a lawyer and mental health expert, Ms Cameron-Blackie writes a blog about the Savile case under the name Anna Raccoon. She said: ‘I was staggered by her interviews, for the simple reason that in 1965, Jimmy Savile did not come near Duncroft. We never saw him.’

Yesterday, Ms Roberts said: ‘I’m sticking by my story. I will never say anything more about it.’ She said she had not claimed compensation.

This newspaper has uncovered evidence that Jimmy Savile did not visit Duncroft until early in 1974, when his name first appears in its visitors’ book – so casting doubt not only on Ms Roberts, but on the allegations of four women who have made compensation claims, because they say he abused them before this date.

The Mail on Sunday interviewed the woman responsible for Savile’s first visit to Duncroft. Susan – she has asked us not to publish her surname – revealed: ‘I met him on a weekend leave in late 1973.

‘My mother was managing a country club. There was a reception for police officers, and she needed a waitress, so asked me to fill in.’

The result was that Susan, who looked older than her years, was serving a group of detectives and their friend Savile.

He asked her to visit him at the flat he used at Broadmoor Hospital the next day.

They kissed, but she says that when he discovered she was only 15, he ceased intimate contact.

Later she begged her mother, Sheila, to ask Duncroft’s head, Margaret Jones, if Savile could visit. Sheila later confirmed she did so. Ms Jones – 93 but still mentally sharp – told the same story: ‘I never knew Savile until Susan’s mother asked if he could come and brought him there in 1974. I said Yes because I thought it would be good for the girls.’

The Savile compensation scheme was first advertised in national newspapers. Claims are checked by a small group of ‘scrutineers,’ made up of members of Savile’s family, a few friends and former colleagues.

They are prevented from discussing claims so it’s impossible to establish their veracity.

The task is still harder because the police, who seized Savile’s diaries that recorded his movements for more than 20 years, say they have ‘lost’ them.

But it is clear that many of the allegations being processed are vague. An analysis prepared for the Court of Appeal reveals that out of 211 claimants, eight say an incident of abuse took place at some time in a period lasting ten years or more. Eighty say an incident occurred in a period of between two and ten years. Sixty-one specify a year, and 62 both a year and a season.

There are claims by people who say they were assaulted at recordings of Top Of The Pops before it started in 1964, and others by those who describe assaults at the BBC TV Centre in London at recordings of programmes which were, in fact, filmed elsewhere.

One claimant described an assault by Savile in 1945, stating that he was a manager at a Mecca Ballroom. In 1945, Savile was 19 and a ‘Bevin boy’ miner.

Most of the claimants – 174 – are represented by a team from law firm Slater & Gordon, led by solicitor Liz Dux. She said she ‘cannot be sure there are no fraudulent claims’, though she said she has rejected claims which seemed improbable.

She also admitted that many claimants might never receive a meaningful payment: ‘They are going through an awful lot of pain in reliving their ordeals for a tiny monetary gain.’

The scheme’s tariff sets eight separate compensation bands: victims who were touched over their clothing should get £1,500, rising to £7,500 for those assaulted under their clothing, and a maximum £40,000 who were raped.

Ms Dux said most of her clients’ alleged abuse was at the lower end of the scale, so that they would be due less than £10,000 – or in other words, less than the £11,000 to £16,000 due to claimants’ lawyers like her under the scheme’s fixed legal fees, and in some cases, much less.

But she insisted: ‘The scheme was drawn up to keep legal costs to a minimum.’

However, the sums due to NatWest’s lawyers Osborne Clarke – who have appointed a team of barristers to assess all the claims, adding still more to their costs – would likely soon render the estate insolvent.

When that happened, Ms Dux said, ‘we will not be paid, and nor can the victims. If there’s not enough money left, the court will decide how to divide what’s left. Osborne Clarke will take precedence.’

The scheme is being challenged in the Court of Appeal by the trustees of Jimmy Savile’s charitable trust, to which he left almost all his estate.

Jo Summers, the trust’s solicitor, who is working on the case pro bono, said: ‘The money should go to the bona fide claimants. A scheme where the lawyers get more than the claimants cannot be right.

‘The level of scrutiny NatWest/Osborne Clarke are applying to the claims is ludicrously low – it will be almost impossible to tell which claims are genuine and which are not.’

Osborne Clarke and NatWest refused to comment.

A BBC spokesman said it would deal with claims where appropriate, but could not discuss any details.

Although she would not respond to this newspaper, Caroline Robinson has earlier insisted on her Facebook page: ‘My so-called family are trying to stop me telling the truth… I have told the truth, it’s a pity certain people can’t handle the truth.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2798457/how-savile-s-niece-s-demand-compensation-led-police-fraud-probe-daughter-says-story-false-211-claims-vast-payments-police-investigate.html#ixzz3GXhgymvb
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Edited by Ms Raccoon to add: As a result of the hard work that went into the making of this article – Detectives in West Yorkshire and London have launched a criminal inquiry into suspected fraud over claims of sex abuse by Jimmy Savile.

Ms Raccoon is currently just south of Paris en route to hospital for her 3 month scan – so if there is more than one link in your comment it is likely to be stuck in moderation for some time; I doubt that I will be back before Tuesday.

A tip of the Raccoon tail to David Rose for all his hard work – he has done a superb job validating this story and I salute his courage in standing tall in ‘Fleet Street’ (as was!) where others have hidden behind corporate security blankets….never let it be said that there are no proper investigative journalists left…

My original post from July 2013 on the Caroline Robinson story is HERE.

What makes a great actor?  One important skill is the ability to believe the part.  Actors sometimes practice roles for months to make their performance more authentic.  However, what happens when an actor plays a drug addict?  What happens when they go  around trying to convince themselves they have a disease of the brain that can kill them?

Philip Seymour Hoffman: In Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, he plays a drug addict embezzler.  He died of a heroin overdose soon after attending AA.

Robin Williams: In the TV series Crazy Ones, he plays an alcoholic advertising exec. “I’ve been to rehab in wine country.”  Killed himself a day after attending AA.

Corey Monteith: In McCanick he plays a drug addicted street hustler – anything for a $50 fix.  He had recently gotten out of rehab at Betty Ford and killed himself after attending an AA meeting.

River Phoenix: Drug addicted hustler in My Own Private Idaho.  Died of “acute multiple drug intoxication” including heroin and cocaine in 1993.

Heath Ledger: Played a heroin addict in Candy.  Died from a mix of drugs while playing the Joker in Batman.

Actors more than anyone have the ability to magnify a small craving into a monumental obsession.  They are especially vulnerable during rough patches in their life, if they feel angry or upset about something.  And then they start taking drugs and feel the need to overdo it.  It’s like watching yourself in a movie.  You are powerless to intervene.

Most of us experience setbacks, frustrations, and humiliations.  But we don’t think we’re powerless so we survive.

Odds are that a great actor playing a drug addict doesn’t have much time left.  Especially if they’ve been to AA/12 Steps ‘treatment’, as many of these actors had just before they self-destructed.

Read more:

• Alcoholism: The Lie Becomes the Truth
• SAMHSA’s New Blood Drive
• The Origin of Sin – We once lived in the Garden
• AA’s Satanic Roots – Have a drink and do what thou wilt
• Lie Like the Wind – How to know if AA is right for you
• How to Drink Like a Normal Man – Just keep it simple
• Powerlessness as Religion – Only the good die young
• You Are So Brainwashed It’s Funny – Who will pay for their sins?
• The Problem of the Jews: a Lesson in Brainwashing Propaganda – How AA bamboozled a country
• The Drinking Club – Watch what they do, not what they say
• Does Addiction Take Away Free Will? – We lived in the Garden
• Cory Monteith: The Cult of Powerlessness Claims Another Victim
• I Call Blackout – I did what??
• Rat Addicts and the Science Of Addiction – The best of 60′s Science Fiction
• A Conversation with Dr. Drew Pinsky – 13% and proud
• School for Scoundrels – What you actually learn in the rooms
• AA is a Pagan Cult – Putting the ‘pagan’ in propaganda
• The Little Psychopath Could: How the Addiction Myth creates new Drug Addicts

Did you like this article?  Please Like/Share:

Hope LGM frequenter, Sly doesn’t mind being a front-pager tonight. I just want everyone to see his great summation of GamerGate:

Here’s a basic but somewhat detailed summation:

1. • • Most people who have been on-line long enough get to know about the various self-identifications that form the loose confederation of Organized On-Line Misogyny: Your Red Pillers, your Slymepitters, your MRAs, your Incels, your PUAs, your MGTOWers, etc. Though they differ in the details of their reason for being women-haters, they are unified to the extent that they (a) hate women and (b) use the Internet to talk to and organize with other women-haters. Feminists know them well. Veterans of the Skeptic-Misogyny conflicts got to learn over the past few years how they can’t stand women who have the temerity to bring their lady-brains into what they, the misogynists, assume to be de facto male spaces.

       Anyway, #GamerGate is essentially a repeat of what happened within the Skeptic/New Atheism movement. A subculture that was predominantly male and thus saturated with all the notions of masculinity that men are socialized to accept as natural, whether they are unhealthy or not, is becoming less predominantly male. The men who cling to those notions of masculinity, especially the toxic varieties, see that they are losing cultural capital among their peers. They feel marginalized, and those within the confederation of On-Line Misogynists find a new fora for their overtly toxic anti-feminism. Reactionary movement ensues to “take back” the subculture from the people who are ruining it. Many bystanders who have no idea whats going on get swept up as cannon fodder in a conflict they know nothing about and useful idiots for a ideology that they’d otherwise reject.

       It is in this context that Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend posted his missive in which he alleged that Quinn traded sex for good press. The misogynists seized upon it, pointing out yet another instance of how women ruin everything. Doxxing/Harrassment/Threats ensued. When the allegation turned out to be bunk, the Doxxing/Harrassment/Threats had to be justified somehow, so more doxxing was done to find something to rationalize the initial breech. Quinn doxxed another charity (also false). Quinn slept with her boss for a promotion (also false). Quinn made up the doxxing/harassment/threats (plainly false). The conspiracy theories were rampant, and the campaign took on a new title when actor and wingnut jerkoff Adam Baldwin was the first to tweet one of the original conspiracy videos under the hashtag “GamerGate.”

       Various attempts were made to shield the harassers and conspiracy mongers from allegations of sexism, like organized donations to the charity that Quinn didn’t dox, the manufacturing of a “chillgirl” gamer mascot who, like, totally doesn’t need feminism because it’s not like it was 100 years ago – GAWD WHY DONT YOU JUST LET ME PLAY GAMES, setting up sockpuppet twitter accounts claiming to be women and minorities using the hashtag #NotYourShield, etc. All of this was deliberately organized as a means of public relations.

       Those of us who saw how utterly stupid and noxious this was started voicing our disgust. Leigh Alexander, a writer and Editor-At-Large for Gamasutra, published an article titled “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over” in which she said that the changing face and mentality of the gamer identity is a welcome thing, because people who believe that they have a license to exclude others from the identity by any means necessary – up to and including waging campaigns of harassment – are a bunch of rabid jackals in the midst of a death rattle. Other on-line publications put out similar articles. This is ultimately what blew everything up, because if there’s one thing that reactionaries cannot stand is when you stop criticizing what they love and start criticizing them directly. They forgot about Zoe Quinn (GamerGaters now refer to her as “Literally Who #1,” or “LitWhoW1,” while Sarkeesian is “LitWho2″), and switched their harassment campaign to those critical on-line publications.

       Otherwise neutral parties were swept up into the “movement” as its Useful Idiots, misunderstanding the “‘Gamers’ are Over” message as an assault on anyone who plays videogames. These people likely now constitute a majority of GamerGaters, and is why so many GamerGaters claim they don’t support doxxing and harassment. To be fair they’re being honest, but they exist solely as a shield for the misogynists to voice and act upon their misogyny.

       And so, at the present moment, GamerGate, as a collective identity, is composed of two groups preoccupied with the following causes:

       Group #1: Scouring any tint of cultural leftism from gaming.

       Group #2: Disavowing Group #1.

       Group #1 survives by trading complicated conspiracy theories done up as 30-minute YouTube vidoes or 120000×80000 pixel MS-Paint images, linking articles from anti-feminist writers at Forbes and Breitbart to one another, and totally crushing on anti-feminist women like Christina Hoff Sommers (because, as everyone knows, you can’t be a misogynist if you’re a woman or agree with a woman who spouts anti-feminist gibberish). That, and trading cartoon kiddie porn and creepshots on 8chan.

       Group #2 survives by shouting “NOT ALL GAMERS ARE LIKE THAT!” without realizing that no one is talking to them.

Corey Robin:

And here we come to Ground Zero of conservative commitment. The conservative believes in excellence, as Douthat says, but it is a vision of excellence defined as and dependent on “overcoming.” It’s a vision that abhors the easy path of acceptance, of tolerating human frailty and need, not because that path is wrong but because it is easy.  Or, to put it differently, it’s wrong precisely because it is easy. And though that vision often claims Aristotle as its inspiration, its true sources are Nietzschean.

The conservative believes the excellent person is a kind of mountain climber, a moral athlete who is constantly overcoming or trying to overcome his limits, pushing himself ever higher and higher.  When it comes to sex, he’s not unlike the Foucauldian transgressor, that sexual athlete of novelty and experiment: but where Foucault believes that taboos against sex are all too easily reached (that’s why, if we are to attain the peaks of experience, we have to move beyond those limits), the conservative’s remain out of reach. The value of a rule lies in its difficulty and potential unattainability, the ardor of the struggle it imposes upon us. We might call this ethic the ardor of adversity.*

Very much so, yes. And it gives us another opportunity to revisit Holbo’s classic David Frum essay:

“Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?” But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared. Merely exhorting Americans to show more fortitude is going to have about as much effect on them as a lecture from the student council president on school spirit. Reorganizing the method by which they select and finance their schools won’t do it either, and neither will the line-item veto, or discharge petitions, or entrusting Congress with the power to deny individual NEA grants, or court decisions strinking down any and all acts of politically correct tyranny emanating from the offices of America’s deans of students – worthwhile though each and every one of those things may be. It is socials that form character, as another conservative hero, Alexis de Tocqueville, demonstrated, and if our characters are now less virtuous than formerly, we must identify in what way our social conditions have changed in order to understand why.

Of course there have been hundreds of such changes – never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945 … But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about.

All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe.” (p. 202-3)

Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner party? Where did all these people go? Into each other, to a dismaying extent. A passage from one of those moving, stoical diary entries:

“…Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that [she] thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don’t think she has done so yet, [but] it is distresing. The Donno[r]s told the California folks that they [would] commence to eat the dead people 4 days ago, if they did not succeed in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow & did not know the spot or near it, I suppose they have [cannibalized] …ere this time.”

The stoical endurance of the Donner party in the face of almost unimaginable suffering is indeed moving. The perseverance of the survivors is a lasting testament to the endurance of the human spirit. (On the other hand, the deaths of all who stoically refused to cannibalize their fellows might be deemed an equal, perhaps a greater testament.) But it is by no means obvious – some further demonstration would seem in order – that lawmakers and formulators of public policy should therefore make concerted efforts to emulate the Donner’s dire circumstances. What will the bumper-stickers say? “It’s the economy, stupid! We need to bury it under ten to twelve feet of snow so that we will be forced to cannibalize the dead and generally be objects of moral edification to future generations.”

I think we are beginning to see why Frum feels that his philosophy may be a loser come election time. I think the Donner party – who, be it noted, set out seeking economic prosperity in the West, not snow and starvation – would not vote Republican on the strength of William Bennett’s comfortable edification at the spectacle of their abject misery. (“Let’s start with the fat one over there in the corner, playing the slots. We can eat off him for a week. See how he likes it.”)

To put what is surely rather an obvious point yet another way: if the Donner party is really what you want, the policy riddle (how to reproduce these conditions, since the Donner party was not political, per se?) already has an answer: Stalinism.

…Warren Terra in comments:

I had heard the term “Donner Party Conservatism” before, but it had never occurred to me that it reflected actual sentiments from a famous Conservative Thought Leader in praise of the Donner party – I assumed it was just an insult hurled at the party that professes to represent some sort of Conservative ideals, and that in reality so well recapitulates the experience of the Donner Party.

Think of it: a bunch of god-fearing but frankly ignorant buffoons were sold promises of wealth and opportunity if only they’d pledge themselves to a grand venture. They were then taken advantage of by profiteers who badly outfitted them for the undertaking, and were literally misguided, as in sent along the wrong path, at the wrong time. When they became trapped, the few survivors made it by eating their own; others more principled or more circumspect did not – or were perhaps slain to be food. It’s like the George W Bush administration, plus literal cannibalism. It is, in short, what the Conservatives deliver, but not what they claim to seek. Except, apparently, Bill Bennett.

“Don’t be a know-it-all!”

This was shouted at me just before the shouter pushed me into a brick wall.  Hard. I was twelve years old.

I don’t even remember what I was expounding upon on the barren asphalt “playground” in Pocatello, Idaho; but I sure remember the push for presuming to know something the pusher did not know.

It has been almost fifty years since that chilly October day; and I still occasionally get vocally pushed for knowing something — usually something someone else would prefer NOT to know.  But then, in proof of the premise that “You cannot win,” I often get an angry response to not knowing, too.

Or, to be more correct — for saying that some things are unknowable.  The nature and number of presumed deities, for instance.  Yes, that is an unpopular opinion, let me tell you.  It kind of boggles my mind that people take comfort in assumptions about the nature of divinity — something very much NOT under human control; but they get rattled at the idea that they SHOULD know what their government is doing, or the location of some once-obscure-nation-now-in-American-bombsights.

Perhaps because I didn’t get my personal ethics system from a religious base, per se, I don’t invest the idea of comfortable certainty in divinity?  But because I can posit the idea of Beings beyond our complete knowing, it does seem a wee bit over-the-top hubristic to presume defining such Beings.  I think human matters belong to us humans; divine matters belong to the presumed divinities.  I admit, I am uncertain where the interface is located.

But I often think people would be a whole lot better off admitting that there are things they simply do not and cannot know.  We can explore our phenomenal world; it is next to impossible to absolutely ascertain anything in that noumenal world of presumed divinities and possible afterlife.

And it seems to me that the presumption of having grasped a certainty about the noumenal world and its presumed inhabitants, and bringing BACK that “certainty” to THIS world causes a fuck-load of trouble.  All those religious screamers, telling women to cover up — and beating or otherwise torturing them when they don’t; or controlling other people not EVEN of one’s oh-so-assured “faith”.  I could be here all day enumerating the issues caused by religious know-it-alls. I think admission of UNcertainty and some humility based on an inability to know would do the world a world of good.

Admission of doubt is not weakness, any more than kindness is.  Admission of doubt and of not knowing is HONEST and human.  And being human?  That could lead to a bit more of being humane.  And the world could certainly use more humane behaviors over more religious know-it-alls.

 

 

Tagged: doubt, gnosis, pagan blog project

I remember seeing the photo above on Flickr once, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong.

The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector ‘read out’, i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about, lets have a look.

Many modern digital cameras use as their ‘sensing’ device a CMOS detector, also known as an active-pixel sensor, which works by accumulating electronic charge as light falls upon it. After a given amount of time, the exposure time, the charge is shifted row-by-row back to the camera for further processing. There is then a finite time where the camera scans down the image, saving rows of pixels at a time. If there is any motion over this timescale the image will be distorted.

To illustrate, consider photographing a spinning propeller. In the animations below the red line corresponds to the current readout position, and the propeller continues to spin as the readout proceeds. The portion below the red line is saved as the captured image.

First, a propeller which completes 1/10th of a rotation during the exposure:

Some distortion, but nothing crazy. Now a propeller moving 10 times quicker, which completes a full rotation during the exposure:

This is starting to look like the Flickr image at the beginning. 5 times per exposure:

This is a little too far, things have clearly gone mental. Just for fun, let’s see what some different objects look like at different rotation speeds, from 0 to 1 rotation per exposure.

The same propeller as above:

A fatter propeller:

A car tire:

We can think of the rolling shutter effect being some coordinate transformation from the ‘object space’ of the real-world object, to the ‘image space’ of the warped image. The animation below shows what happens to the Cartesian coordinate grid as the number of rotations is increased. For small rotations the deformation is slight, as the number increases to 1 each side of the grid is moved successively towards the right-hand side of the image. This is a fairly complicated transformation to look at, but simple to understand.

Let the image be denoted by , and the real object (which is rotating) be denoted by where are 2D polar coordinates. Polar coordinates are a natural choice for this problem due to the rotational motion of the objects.

The object is rotating at angular frequency , and the shutter progresses across the image at speed in the vertical direction. At position in the image, the distance the shutter has moved since the start of exposure is , and so the time elapsed is . In this time the object has rotated a number of radians . Putting this together,

which is the required transformation. The factor is proportional to the number of rotations during the exposure, and parameterises the transformation.

To get some insight into the apparent shapes of the propellers, we can consider an object consisting of propellers where is non-zero only for for . The image is then non-zero for

or

In Cartesian coordinates this becomes

which helps to explain why the propellers get that S-shaped look – it’s just an inverse tangent function in the image space. Cool. I’ve plotted this function below for a set of 5 propeller blades at slightly different initial offsets, as might be observed during a video recording. They look pretty much like the shapes in the animations above.

Now we understand a little more about the process, can we do anything about these ruined photos? Taking one of the warped images above, I can take a line through it, rotate backwards the appropriate amount, then stick those pixels onto a new image. In the animation below I scan through the image on the left, marked by the red line, then rotate the pixels along that line onto a new image. This way we can build a picture of what the real object looks like even if a pesky rolling shutter ruined our original image.

Now if only my photoshop skills were better I could extract the propellers from the original Flickr image, un-warp them, and slap them back on the photo. Sounds like a plan for the future.

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To figure out the real number of blades in the photo at the top of the post and the rotation velocity we can look to this excellent post at Daniel Walsh’s Tumblr blog, where he definitely has the edge on mathematical explanation.

He works out that we can calculate the number of blades by subtracting the ‘lower’ blades from the ‘upper’ blades, so in this picture we know there should be 3. We also know the propeller is rotating approximately 2 times during the exposure, so if we try ‘undoing’ the rotation with a few different speeds around that we get something like this:

I’ve had to guess where the centre of the propeller is, and I’ve drawn a circle to guide the eye. Looking at that, the centre shouldn’t be too far off. There is unfortunately a missing blade, but there’s still enough information to make an image.

There is a sweet spot where everything overlaps the most, so picking this rotation speed (2.39 rotations per exposure), the original image and blades look like this:

It’s still a bit of a mess unfortunately, but at least looks something like the real object.

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About the author: Jason Cole is a PhD student from London with a passion for math, physics, and data visualization. Visit his website here. This article originally appeared here.

Prepping for BAHFest. Wish I could tell you about the secret thing.

sekahyyh:

cardsofclow:

decencybedamned:

HELLO FANFIC AUTHORS IT’S TIME FOR A VOCAB LESSON

• wanton: sexually immodest or promiscuous
• wonton: a type of dumpling commonly found in Chinese cuisines

YOUR CHARACTERS SHOULD NOT BE MOANING LIKE A CHINESE DUMPLING OKAY THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT

either way, things are sure gonna get

steamy

GET OUT

First some tweets, and then some commentary.

There’s something both telling and sad about the sort of dude who literally thinks that a) impugning my masculinity is the worst possible thing they can say about me, b) that it’ll somehow lessen me if they do. On the former, meh. Given the ridiculous ideas that they have regarding masculinity, I’m happy not to meet their definition. On the latter, whatever. They’re idiots. I’m not inclined to care, outside of the opportunities it provides for pointing and laughing.

But I do think it’s useful to publicly mock their stupidity on such subjects, for the amusement and edification of others. I also think it’s particularly useful to mock their definition of masculinity and gender, and their baseline assertion that being male is the apotheosis of the human condition. It’s not; it’s merely one way to be. I’m okay with gender being more than binary; I’m okay with people having a gender other than mine; I’m okay with people shifting their idea of what their gender is over time. Because I don’t think one’s essential value is rooted in gender, and someone else’s gender is nearly always not my business anyway. I am for people being who they are, not who anyone else wants them to be, or demands them to be for their own selfish reasons. I’m for letting the world know that I think such a position is the most correct one to have. I’m for calling out people who try to make difficult for those who don’t conform to their own, usually bigoted, expectations.

Want to declare that because I don’t meet your pointless and stupid definition of “masculinity,” I should identify as another gender entirely? Awesome. I get to create a gender that doesn’t have your jackassedness riddling it front to back. The folks in my gender won’t be focused on being a “real man” or a “real woman” but on being “really me.” My gender will have all the best parties because we can do what we want, free of gender expectations! Because there are no gender expectations! My gender gets to love whoever they want! My gender gets to be whoever they want! My gender doesn’t care what you think my gender should be! My gender rocks. And it doesn’t need you, or care what you think of it.

If only it were as easy for people of every gender to be as free in theirs as I am in mine. Because of course that’s the thing: Even when these idiots declare me “not a real man,” it doesn’t change that I am always seen to be a “real man,” and that I get all the benefits that accrue to me for being biologically male, identifying as a man, and conforming to social standards for what both of those mean. The worst these dudes can do is be mean to me on the Internet. It doesn’t change anything about what I get from the world. And while I can mock them for it and proclaim the new Scalzi Gender in all its awesomeness, let’s just say that I know that it’s easy for me to do so, because in the end society has my back. Not everyone else gets to say the same. We need to be working on that.

goose no like drone

Thank you, Ronald Reagan, for promoting the voodoo of trickle-down economics.

Reposted from 2016 because this is my favorite Halloween cartoon ever.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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bearhatalice:

thedoubleclicks:

robothugscomic:

New comic!

Yeah, I might have watched a movie and gotten kind of mad.

This is seriously a trope I’d love to never see again though.

the lego movie

the matrix

pacific rim

now that I’ve learned I can’t unsee it

The more I think about it, I am not so sure I want a Black Widow movie any more.

thenightlymirror:

 

becausejensenackles:

I feel like I should have seen that coming.

[goneintorapture]

Looks like both BAHFest shows will sell out early. Please buy soon to guarantee a seat!

““I wanted to … make [Rorschach] as like, ‘this is what Batman would be in the real world’. But I have forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, ‘smelling’, ‘not having a girlfriend’, these are actually kind of heroic! So Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I made him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street and saying: ‘I AM Rorschach. That is MY story’. And I’d be thinking: ‘Yeah, great. Could you just, like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?’”

-

Alan Moore (via class-snuggle)

Most Alan Moore quotations make me think he’s sort of insane, but this one is gold. Few things weird me out about fictional characters more than when people idolize the ones who were clearly created as terrible human beings.

(via chrisisoninfiniteearths)

Amazing.

(via losertakesall)