Sophianotloren

Lately, I’ve been getting a fair amount of email from people who’ve been browsing the stolen Ashley Madison subscriber list, telling me what famous or semi-famous person had an account there. I haven’t been impressed. A lot of it seems to be men who were looking for dates, and the thing is…I really doubt that any of them found anything approximating love or sex there. It’s peculiar to accuse people of cheating on their spouses through Ashley Madison, when it’s highly unlikely that any man was making contact with any women there.

A detailed look at the Ashley Madison database reveals…

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.

31 million men begging 12,000 women for dates. That’s just pathetic. And it gets worse.

The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.

The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.

The hackers of the Impact Team who broke into the database were right about one thing, for sure: Ashley Madison was a colossal scam that took advantage of men. But then releasing all that membership data was simply another strike against the victims of the scam. Some of them may have been salacious hypocrites (see Josh Duggar), but that’s not a crime…and many of those victims might have just been lonely single people, fumbling futilely on the internet.

“Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years - decades, if you count talk radio - training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time. Indeed, one reason that Trump was able to get so much attention for his presidential run in the first place is that Fox has spent years building him up, knowing that their audience enjoys vicariously needling imagined liberals and feminists with his loud-mouthed insult comic act.
 
As Jill Filipovic as Cosmopolitan recently explained in a feature piece about the conservative website Twitchy, there are entire sectors of the conservative media dedicated to getting the audiences to spend all day and night trying to piss off liberals, believing themselves to be courageous freedom fighters against the P.C. police. Women, in particular, are favorite targets. There’s apparently no getting tired of the pleasure of feeling naughty because you say mean things about women and racial minorities for conservative audiences.
 
Well, conservative media built Twitchy Nation, and now it looks like they have to live in it. You can’t tell people, day in and day out, that nothing is more fun than putting some mouthy broad in her place and then get upset when they continue to think it’s fun, even when the mouthy broad is one of yours.”

- Why Fox News’ Defense Of Megyn Kelly Is Going To Backfire

In a plan to boost literacy rates, Scotland is testing a program to give all children automatic library memberships. The pilot program gives library cards out upon birth, reports BBC.

Related Posts:

• Shelters for Families, and Books
• Bicycle Libraries Serve Book Deserts
• A Library of Seeds
• Solve This Mystery
• El-P and Ninja Collaboration “Coming Soon”

Here's what happens when the safety features on a pressure cooker fail. It also shows why pressure cookers are used by bad people to make bombs.

[via]

In 1960 a Liverpool band called the Silver Beatles asked Pete Best to join them as drummer. Best was already in a band called the Blackjacks, but he took the gig and for the next two years he played with the band (which eventually dropped "Silver" from its name). When the band auditioned with Decca, Best played drums on the first recording of "Love Me Do." Things went downhill quickly from there, writes Maggie Malach of Mental Floss: Read the rest

Plastic has become a material of unique conceptual and physical importance to our society, and the arts are finally catching up. The material’s unimaginably long lifespan, coupled with how casually we as a society treat it, becomes a perfect metaphor for our blind overconsumption. While the oil that makes our plastic formed and rested for over three million years, we extract it and mold it and use it up within months. We use plastic cups for an evening, only for them to outlast our entire civilization.

As Heather Davis, co-editor and contributing writer for Art in the Anthropocene, notes:

Plastic can be considered the substrata of advanced capitalism. It reveals our utter dependency upon petrochemicals. But its role in our life, unlike the more abstract relationship that we have with other oil products, such as gasoline or electricity, is intimate. We use plastics to eat, clothe ourselves, as sex toys, as soothers for babies.

Confronting and unraveling the intimate relationship that contemporary society has with plastic is at the heart of artist Pam Longobardi’s mission for the Drifters Project. Founded in 2006, the Drifters Project works with local communities around the world to educate people about the potential dangers of plastic, reduce plastic use, clean beaches, and build socially engaged sculptures from the collected refuse. After watching this movie about her work in Greece, I knew I had to talk with her.

*   *   *

Ben Valentine: Why plastic?

Pam Longobardi: Plastic, to me, is the physical marker of the Anthropocene, the new geologic era of the planet Earth that we are now embarking on. I was born into and grew up in the age of plastic; it was part of modernity, and it will become the new geologic layers, so every piece of plastic is a ‘future fossil.’ Some of the pieces I find already look pre-fossilized, and indeed often are melted around other rocks and lava. I also have a lifelong connection to the ocean, as my father was a lifeguard on the New Jersey coast and my mother, the Delaware state diving and swimming champion. So, I pay close attention to the ocean.

In 2006, when I discovered mountains of colored plastic the ocean had vomited on the most southern tip of Hawaii, I immediately made it the center of my artistic practice and founded the Drifters Project. I also think plastic is the near-perfect physical manifestation of the id, the wanton and willful child of our personality who can make anything, and does, without a thought to the consequences of its actions. And finally, I am most fascinated by ocean plastic. This is material that has drifted around the world in the most unknown reaches of this planet, first on shipping lanes of commerce and then as a drifter, as vagrant, haunted objects that have been changed by this interaction: marked, bitten, colonized, and otherwise transformed into a new material, an artifact, the ultimate example of commodity fetishism. Ocean plastic is a new type of commodity, one that has illuminated nature’s role in the creation of capital.

BV: I find the conversation around climate change really frustrating, because the evidence is there yet we still have all of these ridiculous debates about it — society is dramatically behind the science. What strikes me about your work is the many layers of teaching about pollution and the environment that it embodies. There’s the strictly educational aspect — what pollution is and does and why it matters; the communal aspect — building a group that cares and acts on the knowledge; and the art portion, which becomes a vessel to relay the first two aspects to another public, hopefully bringing them into the fold. Why is this type of process so important to you?  

PL: I’ve never completely settled for the concept of art as rarified objects that sit untouchable in a divine space and are worshipped. I like art that does work — all kinds of work, from intellectual work to emotional work to work in society. I think art has a job to do, as opposed to being expensive and passive luxury objects. While I think art can be both an expensive commodity and do work, too often the glamor aspect eclipses the other, more rudimentary work function. I like thinking about Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of value vs. exchange value in all aspects of my work with ocean plastic, because of the shifting dynamism of these roles in the physical plastic object itself: an utterly cheap object, to the point of almost immediately having zero value, neither use nor exchange, while at the same time being the physical embodiment of the ancient life of the planet, the fossil sunlight, and representing the peak of industrial revolution technology. Then it goes silent briefly while it is discarded, lost and drifting, only to reemerge when I encounter it, as a prophetic object, a messenger and cypher.

BV: I’m interested in art that offers alternative perspectives on very complex phenomena, like global warming or Deep Time. I believe humans need to develop these perspectives in order to alter our current disastrous course. How does the Drifters Project seek to foster such perspectives?

PL: I believe plastic is at the center of every one of the environmental, social, and health crises the world now faces. As climate change brings extreme weather events now almost daily in some parts of the globe, and in our desperation to extract the last drops of oil from the earth, we are going to riskier and more remote places deep under the sea and further towards the poles — yet plastic has made it here before us. The melting Arctic is only accelerating a frantic resource grab and a heightened mobilization of global commerce as new shipping lanes open. Trillions of pieces of plastic are already in the ocean, and billions of new plastic goods are made everyday. It is not going anywhere. I think plastic is dark matter; it is not of this earth in the same way some other materials are.

I think my work as Drifters Project is a discussion, at its heart, of value — what do we value, what we do not, how these values are skewed and off-kilter in an elementally dangerous way. I think it gives us a chance to reexamine values from personal, societal, and planetary perspectives. My work is consciously an address and invitation to think about the entire non-human portion of our planet, how we interact with it, what we are doing to it, and how we might change the disastrous path we appear to be on.

BV: What are you working on now?

PL: I am working on a commission from a family who survived the sinking of a fishing charter boat in Hawaii. It’s a story too fantastic to even make up. The boat’s propeller got fouled in a piece of floating driftnet, and the incompetent captain didn’t realize that he had destroyed the motor, taking the boat far offshore without addressing the plastic net which had melted and fused around the propeller. At some point, the charter captain realizes the boat is going to sink and actually abandons ship, taking the first mate and the life boat and leaving the entire family of four on the sinking ship. The parents described the realization it was going down with just enough time to get life vests on the kids and tell them to hold onto the boat as long as possible and then push away hard to avoid being sucked into the vortex as the boat went under. It actually went down just as the Titanic in the movie did — they were all climbing to the top as it reared up, saying their goodbyes, and then it disappeared. For moments the only one up was the dad, then his wife and the two kids popped to the surface.

They were there alone in the ocean — no boat, no captain, miles offshore. The irony is the man is a direct descendant of Captain Cook, so stop here and ponder the crazy karmic moment of this. Except this family is the embodiment of goodness: creativity, adventure, and love for the ocean, instilling the best values in their children. After a few minutes, a self-inflating domed survival raft popped to the surface, and at some point half a day later, a local Hawaiian fisherman in a small boat spotted them and was able to radio for a rescue. The captain went to jail, and the father got a commendation from the Coast Guard for rescuing his family. It’s the most moving true story, and I was in tears hearing it, so it’s a true honor to make work to memorialize this for them. The weird thing is, I actually found one of these artifacts at South Point, Hawaii: a driftnet propeller fouling. It’s a chunk of turquoise driftnet fused into a solid core, with a saw cut through it where a diver removed it from the propeller and prevented a boat from sinking. It is going to be the center of the installation.

Trump crushes the rest of the GOP field in new nationwide poll

Donald Trump's lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination just reached an all-time high in a new national poll conducted by Gravis Marketing. The survey, released Tuesday by One American News Network, shows Trump leading the Republican field with a whopping 40 percent, up from 31 percent in Gravis' July poll.

Ben Carson, who placed second in the new poll, had just 13 percent — 27 points behind Trump. Jeb Bush came in third at 10 percent, followed by Ted Cruz at 7 percent, and John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, and Marco Rubio at 5 percent each...

...

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

...

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — There are 324 bottles of water currently on view at the Museum of Bottled Water (MBW) in the Crossroads Arts District, some flat, some sparkling, and featuring labels from across the globe with an emphasis on US branding. The bottles are beautiful to observe and emblematic of the diversity of forms such packaging can take. Artist Neal Wilson started collecting the bottles in 2005 and is MBW’s public face, director, and docent. The collection includes a bottle of New York City water (directly from the tap, apparently), a blister pack, and a can of Emergency Drinking Water with a 30-year shelf life, though it could do with some more international examples.

“The collection is looking to expand into two distinct but perhaps related areas,” Wilson told Hyperallergic. “One is the canned water of emergency response. Budweiser made headlines earlier this year when they shut down a brewery to can water for disaster victims. They do this from time to time, and it would be nice for the museum to acknowledge this aspect of the bottled water phenomena. That packaged water is used to meet the day to day requirements for survival is under-acknowledged in the museum. Similarly, the condition of public drinking supplies in the States and in other countries is profoundly different. With this in mind, bringing more international waters to the museum is a priority. We have serious water issues in the States, no doubt, but the frontier of the bottled water industry in its legal, political, and social articulations is elsewhere. It’d be nice if the museum could use its collection to talk about this frontier more explicitly and more foreign examples might help with that.”

Though Wilson is its most visible participant, MBW is a collaborative project consisting of more than a dozen participants, including an architect (Elvis Achelpohl), a graphic designer (Seth Johnson), an artist-in-residence (Walker Tufts), and even a “fashion consultant” — Hadley, the clothing store hosting the pop-up museum for the month of August.

The MBW’s installation offers an opportunity to appreciate the incredible array of packaging and marketing used to sell water. The collection’s display is rudimentary and visitors are allowed to handle the bottles. It includes more exotic examples like the Hawaiian volcanic water brand Waiakea and a brand named Boxed Water Is Better that comes in a milk carton-like container, alongside familiar labels like Evian, Fuji, Poland Spring, and loathsome newcomer Blk Water. It is interesting to see instances of cross-branding, like a Southwest Airlines/DejaBlue aluminum can of water and a much smaller, more eco-friendly package of plastic and foil from Japan Airlines. The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri, even puts its own custom label on the bottled water it sells. Complimenting the displays are beautiful illustrations of the various packaging by artist Charlie Mylie.

In his role as docent, Wilson offers public discussions of the collection on display and provides historical insight into the development of bottled water. He notesthat archeologists have discovered 2,000-year-old vessels for transporting water, and that holy water, which dates as far back as the first century, could be considered the earliest instance of branding water for sacramental uses.

A more modern chapter in bottled water’s history that Wilson recounts is the rise and fall of Perrier. Its 1977 ad campaign is probably the first instance of bottled water being recognized as a consumer good, according to Wilson. The company’s advertisers deployed “street teams,” paying attractive young people to be seen in public drinking the stuff. As rapidly as Perrier’s market share rose, it declined just as fast after the discovery in 1990 of Benzene in the bottles. But the invention of the yuppie as a socio-economic category has made other bottled water brands, like Evian, more prominent.

At MBW, visitors can serve themselves ice water from a glass jug. I am unsure if anyone noticed the irony in receiving free water while looking at a display of packages used to sell the exact same substance. Water is a political and environmental issue, driving populations to and from its sources. As we continue to evolve and adapt to the realities of climate change, the widespread use of PET plastics may be phased out in favor of more environmentally friendly concepts like the Ooho. The water bottle, in and of itself, is a brilliant concept: compact, mass-producible, and disposable. But in light of rapidly changing dynamics in civilization it is also on the brink of extinction.

As climate change increasingly dictates global displacement, our future selves may look back at where and how we sourced water and shake their heads that so much of it was turned into a private commodity. It is my personal belief that every bottle of water purchased and consumed is a vote for its privatization. Access to this source of life must remain a basic human right. The Museum of Bottled Water is sparking a forthright discussion of potable water’s importance for survival.

The Museum of Bottled Water is open at Hadley (122 West 18th Street, Kansas City, Missouri) through August 31.

elshalarossa:

ewebie:

rosalyndablack:

charlesoberonn:

perfect-but-flawed:

charlesoberonn:

The X-Files theme is so serene and calm in major key.

It could be a video game soundtrack

It sounds like the starting village music.

△ ▽ follow for more chill conspiracy ▽ △

elshalarossa - More music that I wasn’t sure I needed until it ended up in my ear holes.

Ack! This makes me uncomfortable. “The truth is… right here. You can trust… everyone. Want a hug?”

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

Designed to span over 80 feet and connect a pair of apartment structures in London, this remarkable see-through glass pool will give swimmers the ultimate view of the city on all sides. This record-setting, first-of-its-kind creation reflects recent advances in material science and structurally engineering.

In addition to this dazzling connector, a secondary bridge will allow people to walk between roofs, accessing other amenities including a bar and spa. Unlike many deceptive architectural renderings, this audacious structural design has already received planning approval – the real-life version coming in 2017 will indeed be as shown.

Developed by Arup Associates in collaboration with project architects of HAL, this water bridge will be 15 feet wide and 9 feet, framed in thick but transparent glass on three sides. Aquarium specialists and engineers were consulted throughout to ensure the safety of the endeavor.

This residential project is part of a larger overhaul being orchestrated by Frank Gehry and Foster + Partners, a master plan which includes eight other major architectural features and renovations surrounding the historic Battersea Power Station.

“My vision for the sky pool stemmed from a desire to push the boundaries in the capability of construction and engineering, I wanted to do something that had never been done before,” said Ballymore’s chairman and CEO, Sean Mulryan. “The experience of the pool will be truly unique, it will feel like floating through the air in central London.”

Meanwhile, in India, a similar undertaking is underway. The pool designed for the Twilight Star development in Surat, Gujarat, has a shorter span but a bonus feature: it is cantilevered out beyond the edges of the buildings it connects, providing an additional thrill for those willing to take the plunge.

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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]

The sprawling 19th-century cemeteries whose monuments and mausoleums dot the United States are often short on hands to preserve their heritage. This summer, a two-year pilot program launched at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to help care for its monuments and facilitate the training of young preservationists. The partnership between the World Monuments Fund (WMF) and Woodlawn Conservancy, in collaboration with the International Masonry Institute and Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, takes the form of an internship program with stone conservation training in the cemetery and jobs at its conclusion.

“We had been looking for a number of years for a way to set up a training program for young people to get them interested in going into the preservation arts,” Frank Sanchis, WMF’s US program director, told Hyperallergic. Sanchis arranged the program, which recruited underserved students from high schools that concentrate on preservation trades, including Bronx International High School and the Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design. Sanchis has initiated similar programs in the past, such as a restoration program at Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, where ten young members of the Taos tribe were trained to rebuild a collapsed adobe structure.

A cemetery is a different environment from previous WMF programs, being a place of memorials with a major diversity of materials in its structures. This is especially true of Woodlawn Cemetery. As Susan Olsen, the cemetery’s director of historical services, told Hyperallergic: “Because of the volume, many cemeteries will restore only one or two monuments a year. For us, it’s the reality of the volume. We’ve got the largest collection of private mausoleums in America.” She adds that it’s “a great place to address historic building conservation on a small-scale,” with monuments in marble, granite, slate, and other stones, and a range of architectural eras that span mortar joints to modern caulking.

This summer, the focus is on the Gracie plot. Archibald Gracie IV was notably a survivor of the Titanic, and his family constructed Grace Mansion, the home of the New York City mayor. Over the years the plot suffered neglect, with toppled and damaged headstones in need of stabilization and attention. This is the case with many historic plots, where families often move on or die out, leaving a short-staffed cemetery to raise funds to keep things from falling apart. Hands-on work by the interns at the plot, supervised by Woodlawn’s Resident Craftsman Robert Cappiello, is combined with classroom sessions, visits to stone quarries, and work on other monuments in the cemetery.

“The cemetery is a great place to train, with the variety of stone and the accessibility of the monuments,” Sanchis said. “It’s a better place to train than a building, because each monument is like a little building, so you just have a lot more opportunities to learn different things, and it’s a great working environment, because it’s peaceful.”

Especially valuable is that, unlike many internship programs, this one leads directly to jobs, with those who complete it eligible to be apprentices with the International Masonry Institute. Two interns will also be offered apprenticeship positions at Woodlawn. Now, WMF is considering expanding the program to other cemeteries. As Sanchis explained: “I think that we have a good model for other cities that fit this profile of having: a) a great cemetery; b) having a large quantity of underserved youth that can be the apprentices; and c) having an IMI center.”

For Woodlawn, which also involves students from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania in preservation programs, it also is vital to maintaining their incredible collection of architectural and artistic history, which includes work by McKim, Mead & White, Daniel Chester French, and John Russell Pope.

“We have made it where the cemetery benefits the community, where it’s not us that’s constantly asking for money and asking for help, we’re helping people to obtain skills,” Olsen said.

Woodlawn Cemetery is at 517 East 233rd Street in the Bronx.

Robo Painter

Prototype tech from custom painting service Instapainting can capture brushstrokes from an artist using a tablet which can then be reproduced mechanically:

Over the past three weeks I’ve been working on a robotic painter to research the area of mechanical artwork reproduction and automated picture to painting creation for Instapainting.com and the print store e-commerce platform A Manufactory.

The goal is to have it accomplish both problem domains in full color, and to rival the quality of Chinese-produced hand-painted replicas …

Demo showing the AI painter in command and control mode, and replay mode. The first half shows the artist painting live, and the second half shows the robot replicating the exact brush strokes.

More Here

Originally posted 2015-08-26 20:55:37. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Throated Daisy Haze source: droolingfemme.

There's a sentence from a Los Angeles Times column titled, "Why Clinton's email problem won't go away" that's so ironic and so galling that it ought to be put on a poster in every media outlet. Here it is: "It's difficult to avoid the suspicion that Clinton, after the scandals that rocked her husband's presidency during the 1990s, simply did not want to leave behind a paper trail (or e-trail)."

Context is everything, dear children, and the writer, John Schindler (a dick pic-sending right wing assmunch), is leaving out a huge part of the story. See, all those "scandals," Travelgate and Filegate and Whitewater, were utter bullshit. They were worthless wastes of time and money by Republicans (and cowardly Democrats), and their only purpose was to isolate, degrade, and destroy the presidency of Bill Clinton, that hick punk who thought he could just saunter in and lead the nation. If they also took down his bitch wife who thought she was smart enough to solve the health care crisis, all the better. If not them, then any collateral damage of their friends and associates was just dandy.

The only thing that approached an actual, real "scandal" was Clinton lying under oath about getting blowjobs and cigar-banging an intern in the Oval Office. That came out of the Whitewater investigation and it had jackshit to do with the presumably shady land deal in Arkansas. The entire impeachment saga was because of a tangential question and, ultimately, it was the same giant trash pile that every other fake "scandal" was.

While most of the public didn't give a single fuck about the Clinton scandals, the Republican base and the party's donors loved it. They gobbled it down like it was jizz from Jesus's own dick. And conservatives across the country pretended that the United States was being victimized by the immoral bimbo fucker and his castrating spouse. God, how they made bank on it all, how evangelicals lied openly about the sinful, adulterous, murdering, raping, drug-using Clintons. It was a goddamned carnival of molesting clowns and shiv-wielding carnies. And press outlets just jumped on the rickety scandal roller coaster because the GOP had bitch-slapped them into believing the "liberal media" canard. "We'll show you how we're not liberals," they announced. "Please, tell us more about missing Rose Law Firm documents and we'll act as if the fate of the entire motherfucking republic depends on it."

We have been a pathetic fucking country for a very long time.

Which gets us to the scandal du jour, the inevitable digging up of something, anything, to sew onto Hillary Clinton's clothes. The scarlet "B" for Benghazi wasn't holding. But, oh, happy fortune, the bullshit investigation yielded the info on the private email server, and the Clinton Industrial Complex went back into high gear. Let's get the "E" out there.

When the Rude Pundit first heard of the private email server issue, his initial thought was "Oh, c'mon" because he knew what was coming. But the one part that's been left out of the story of why Clinton used the home server (which was not fucking against the law) for her State Department emails when she was Secretary of State is the complicity of the Republican Party and the media in making Clinton so paranoid that she felt she had to do so.

Of course, she was going to do anything to keep her communications out of the public eye. Of course, she was going to make life complicated for any congressional investigations. Why the fuck wouldn't she? What the hell did she get the first time around? A discussion about her husband's dick on the floor of the House of Representatives. An accusation that she had a friend murdered. Why wouldn't she just say, "Go fuck yourselves"? In fact, she should have said that at the beginning of this. She should have said, "Well, no shit I used my own server."

Frankly, Hillary Clinton's pretty goddamn fearless to be putting herself through what was going to be an inevitable slog through the GOP fake scandal swamp.

Note: None of this excuses Clinton if she committed any real crimes (and not just violating the "spirit" of the law, which everyone does every day in many, many ways without being dragged through piles of dog shit for it). But, so far, sorry, she hasn't. Offering unsatisfactory explanations for one's actions is not illegal.

Check out these images from London-based photographer Michelle Marshall, her on-going documentation of Redheads Of Color - or as the The Huffington Post states, "documenting the stunningly diverse manifestations of the MC1R gene" (in most cases, red hair is the result of a mutation in the melanocortin 1 receptor, aka MC1R gene). In regards to her latest work, the French-born photographer tells The Huffington Post: "I am currently interested in documenting the incidents of the MC1R gene variant responsible for red hair and freckles, particularly amongst black and mixed raced individuals of all ages [...] I want to stir the perception that most of us have of a ‘ginger' as a white caucasian individual, potentially of Celtic descent ... As we struggle with issues of immigration, discrimination and racial prejudice, Mother Nature, meanwhile, follows its own course, embracing society’s plurality and, in the process, shaking up our perceptions about origins, ethnicity and identity." Explore below.

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

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innerbohemienne:

 Unusual set of three scrimshaw gambling dice ~ Carved from a sperm whale tooth (approx. 1” square), with designs inlaid with pitch & red wax; early 19th century. “The time for recreation on a 19th century whaling ship was the second dogwatch, from 6 to 8 o’clock in the evening. Boxing was discouraged by the captains, but scrimshandering, dominoes, dice, backgammon, card games, cribbage, & chess were not. The stakes for seamen playing such games & using the dice were usually tobacco.”

(via Finch & Co.)

oneterabyteofkilobyteage:

original url http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ranch/1849/

last modified 1999-11-28 20:22:53

Will You?

tehnakki:

spiderine:

professorfangirl:

wburartery:

Career illusionist Teller (of Penn & Teller) is cooking up a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” using freaking MAGIC!

Read the heck out of this story.

NO SERIOUSLY YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND:

“The creators say the music and monsters do that too. Musician Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan gave Teller access to their catalog of gritty songs. The island’s creatures are brought to life by Pilobolus, a dance company known for piling performers on top of each other.”

SHAKESPEARE

TELLER

PILOBOLUS

TOM MUTHAFUCKIN WAITS

aksdjfa;lkdjfa;l

I SAW THIS IT WAS FUCKIN’ AMAZING!  Caliban especially was incredible. but the whole production was unique and unforgettable.   

I saw this twice because I will see anything that Teller does and OH MY GOD. THIS is exactly how Midsumemrs was MEANT to be scene. IT WAS INCREDIBLE. Abslutely overwhelmingly immersive, one of the best nights at theater I’ve ever had. Just SO GOOD.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

dreamoftalma:

When things went wrong during the second round of the Dublin Nations Cup [07/08/15]

1. Charlie Jayne & Valeska (USA) at the liverpool
2. Steve Guerdat & Corbinian (SWI) at the liverpool
3. Johnny Pals & Vignet (NED) before the n°6
4. Steve Guerdat & Corbinian (SWI) before the n°6

© Equidia

liveworkwander:

Never imagined we would see the Northern Lights from as far south as Oregon. Interestingly when @vanagonlife showed me this picture initially, I didn’t think these greens and purples were the Northern Lights partially because I had just smoked some endo and was a little unfocused, and partially because I’ve always heard that the Northern Lights showed up as milky white in the sky. Apparently, this is how they look in camera. Pretty dope.

Photo Credit: @vanagonlife

#northernlights #astrophotography #vanagon #vanagonlife #vanlife #westylife #wanderlust #wanderfolk #oregon #exploremore #roadlife #roadtrip #rei1440project #campmaster #camptrends #campvibes #campmobile #upperleftcoast #upperleftusa #provenoverland #pnw #adventureanywhere #getoutstayout #goexplore #letswander #liveauthentic #liveworkwander #liveauthentic #northwestisbest #oregon (at Cape Kiwanda Pacific City Oregon)

I think I need a vanagon…

life

[by]

optimysticals:

lierdumoa:

xaevierthorne:

huffylemon:

Greek Mythology/Roman Empire on tumblr

zombiedriver

Oh man, I remember as a little kid reading this sanitized illustrated version of the Greek myths, and not finding out until years later the “sea foam” Aphrodite emerged from was in fact jizz from Uranus’ lopped off gonads.

Me: giggling like a doofus.

Most people go through life completely unaware of a small blind spot in their field of vision.  Here is a web site that helps you ‘see’ it.   The blind spot corresponds to the part of the retina where the optical nerve passes.  (Move closer to the screen if you don’t see it.)

Similarly, the human mind is equipped with a moral blind spot.  We are sometimes completely unaware of the real reasons we behave and feel the way we do.  Perhaps there’s a good reason for that, even if it gets us into trouble sometimes.  It’s pretty funny when you think about it.

culturenlifestyle:

Mirrored Ziggurat by Shirin Abedinirad 

Iranian visual artist Shirin Abedinirad (previously featured here) has installed her latest piece titled, Mirrored Ziggurat near a body of water in Sydney, Australia. As part of Underbelly Arts Festival, the pyramid is composed of mirrors, which reflect the fascination between time, space, while exploring the means and function of optical illusions. Every angle is reflected, which creates an alternate dimension on a small space, which seems to disappear and reappear continually. 

1913 kid leather cap-toe ..shoes? ..boots? I have no idea, but they should be on my feet.