matt.alvarado

Rock on. 

I don't know about the aspartame cancer issue, but I hate that fake sugar is in "everything" and now it is increasingly difficult to easily tell from nutrition labels.

Fox News's Jesse Watters once claimed/bragged about this slick move he had used to get the attention of the much younger woman who is now his wife, and it was to let the air out of her tires so she would need a ride. And it worked! And nobody even filed any charges! What a pickup line! There is a dad pun in that last sentence, go back and find it!

He's just so extremely gross any time he talks about women. Like when he explained, with the demeanor of that strange 45-year-old who for some reason shows up to frat parties, that girls do not like the "scene" of marijuana. "Girls like the alcohol scene," said the guy who bragged about letting the air out of his now-wife's tires.

Fox News's Jesse Watters Let Air Out Of Woman's Tires, Called It Courtship

Jesse Watters Knows What Teenage Girls Like

Anyway, yesterday, Watters was discussing some new reality show, a spin-off of "The Bachelor" that will be all folks 65 and up. You know, Martha Stewart types! And just like how it was on Fox News when they were discussing the Sports Illustrated cover with Stewart on it, there was one creepy piece of shit asshole on the screen. With Stewart, it was Lisa Boothe, who was mostly just an asshole. With the reality show for the Silver Sneakers crowd, it was Jesse, who totally made it creepy.

---

Early in the discussion, Jesse asked his guest, Charly Arnolt, a woman, "You like watching older men?" She mentioned the "fantasy suite," which we guess is a thing on "The Bachelor" that involves sex, we don't fucking know, the only reality shows we watch involve getting chased by bears in Alaska or something. "Is he going to need a little help in the fantasy suite?" asked Jesse, about boners presumably, because they immediately started talking about Viagra ad tie-ins.

But where he really made it very Watters-esque was when he said, "I don't know if I'm going to watch this, I'm sorry. Only if the bachelor was 65 and all the other women were young. That I would watch."

Yeah def, only if the bachelor was extremely old and he was a pervert preying on younger women. That he would watch.

So that's cool. Jesse Watters is a dirty creeper again. Alert a journalist or call the cops or whatever.

Speaking of that, here is famous incel Nick Fuentes, the Nazi Donald Trump dinner date and person who Marjorie Taylor Greene OF COURSE denounces, explaining his plans for marrying a 16-year-old girl. Not right now, mind you. He is 24 now. It would be gross to marry a 16-year-old girl NOW.

\u201cMisogynistic Christian fascist incel Nick Fuentes says that once he turns 30, he'll probably find himself a 16-year-old child bride: "Right when the milk is good, I want to start drinking the milk."\u201d

— Right Wing Watch (@Right Wing Watch) 1684339256

"No, bitch, I want to drink it straight from the tap, I want it raw," said Fuentes, whom at least one of GOP Rep. Paul Gosar's staffers looks up to. “Right when the milk is good, I want to start drinking the milk.”

"The same thing goes with women. I don't want to turn 30 and find some 29-year-old woman that I have something in common with, and it's like hey! Properly aged, like wine!" He said women don't age like wine, they age like milk.

"I gotta find my 16-year-old wife." But not until he's "30 or something."

He started doing math.

"Let's say I get married to an 18-year-old now, six-year age difference. When I turn 40, she's going to be 34. Ew! But if I'm 30 and she's 16, 14-year age difference? When I'm 50 she'll be 36. When I'm 40 she'll be 26. Now we're talkin' here, now we're cookin' with gas."

"I want a 16-year-old that's untouched, untouched, pristine, untouched, uncorrupted, innocent, that's what we all want." (Incels are total experts in "what we all want.")

"And all 16-year-olds want a older guy [sic] who's like capable and strong and everything, to sweep 'em off their feet, that's what everybody wants. That's what everybody wants." His tone was so wistful there at the end, you should watch it.

Nick Fuentes knows what the ladies want, just like Jesse Watters knows ladies don't like the marijuana "scene," they like the liquor "scene" and getting the air let out of their tires by strange older men.

You might think the Nick Fuentes part of this blog post is way creepier than the Jesse Watters part.

We just think the Fuentes part has more words in it.

[Media Matters]

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.

I would like a BlueSky invite.

I'm also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@evanhurst@newsie.social) and at Post!

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Missed that Tesla had a bad day at the dog track yesterday (and this year, generally). $TSLAQ could still be happen!

The truest, purest feast of fools.

I’m Alissa Wilkinson, and this is Jackassathon.

Every Jackass stunt begins this way, an introduction to a deceptively simple task, and here was mine: Having never seen a Jackass movie, I agree to attend a nine-hour extravaganza to right the wrong. Jackass: The Movie (2002) and Jackass Number Two (2006) would screen, in glorious 35mm, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Jackass 3D (2010) would follow, in actual 3D. And then Jackass Forever would premiere, one night before its four-times-delayed theatrical release. The whole thing would be followed by a chat with head Jackasses Johnny Knoxville, who stars in the series as a kind of semi-benevolent rubber-jointed Joker, and Spike Jonze, who’s produced them all while simultaneously winning acclaim and sometimes Oscars for movies like Her, Where the Wild Things Are, and Adaptation. A banner day, a gauntlet, the kind of stunt that made my friends say things like “Oh, buddy” and “Wow.”

So on Thursday at 1 pm, fortified only by a shot of tequila and a quick snack hurriedly located between my subway stop and the museum, clad in an extra-strength mask and some comfy pants, I jacked in. Time to party.

To be alive in the world is to know the basic gist of the Jackass saga, even if it was just so you knew you didn’t want to see it. It’s right there in the name. A bunch of dudes named things like Chris and Bam and, in Jackass Forever, “Poopies” engage in truly loony activities ring-led by Knoxville that threaten life and limb. And we laugh. And so do they. No plot. No thesis. No point to make.

Paramount/Everett Collection

But a lot of people have wanted to see it. The first film, based on the group’s short-lived but wildly popular MTV show, was shot for $5 million, then turned around and made almost $80 million at the global box office. It starts with the cast rolling down a hill in an enormous shopping cart, then getting chunks of what looks like cement shot at them from cannons before they crash into a fruit stand. The second film, with its titular scatological wink, pulled in $85 million. Jackass 3D made $171 million worldwide. As others have noted, the Jackass franchise has extended surprisingly long tendrils into American entertainment, from the internet’s ability to make anyone a star to its harnessing of cinematic innovation toward outrageously and insistently lowbrow ends.

There’s a taxonomy of Jackass-ery, as one might discover while watching them all straight through. There are pranks, like rigging up an enormous hand to thwack your buddy unawares or tricking him into, I don’t know, getting into a limo filled with bees. There are stunts, like Knoxville’s many attempts to drive vehicles of various sorts off of ramps and into places those vehicles should not go. And then there’s just nothing-good-can-come-of-this dares: Will you jam your fist into this bear trap? Will you bungee out of this tree tethered only by your tighty-whities in pursuit of a truly wicked wedgie? Will you drink this cup of horse semen? Meanwhile, someone is seemingly always vomiting off or on camera, and the rest of the crew is laughing. It’s not like slapstick, exactly, because people really do get hurt. It’s just that they get over it and go back for more.

Mostly, it feels like being trapped at a bachelor party weekend with a bunch of good-natured 11-year-olds, which I do not mean in a bad way. The Jackass guys give off a distinct whiff, psychically but probably also literally, of a gaggle of boys in the throes of puberty who have never been so much as looked at by a girl. Left to the bliss of their own, uninhibited company, they are fascinated by the fact that they have penises, but only to figure out what weird things they can do with and to them. They slam into walls for fun; they find farts and tricks involving butts and fire hilarious; their moms are always saying, “But I just don’t understand why you would do that,” and in answer they merely shrug. There’s no reason to poop in a display toilet in a hardware store, except that — as Knoxville says a time or two — it just seemed really funny at the time.

Paramount Pictures

Of course, in Jackass: The Movie, almost all the guys are in their 20s. That was 20 years ago. So the films are documentaries about what happens when that impulse is given free but largely harmless rein, extended far into adulthood and filmed by the subjects. (The crew don’t often participate in the stunts, but they have to get mighty close to them, with occasional vomitous consequences.) Over the years there have been sobering changes — one conspicuously missing cast member in Jackass Forever is Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash in 2011 — but for the most part, watching all four in a row is a feast of genial idiocy that documents whose body changed with fame and who got another tattoo and when they all start to go gray. It’s not unlike binge-watching the Seven Up documentary series.

I knew what I was getting myself into. As one character asks another in Jackass 3D, “What did you think was going to happen?”

What did happen: Yeah, okay, I left with a raging headache and some bright spots in my peripheral vision, and the feeling of being hungover even though that one tequila was it for the day.

But having been stewed in Jackass’s juices all day, watching guys superglue themselves to one another and then scream as they’re ripped apart, I pondered just what, in a cosmic sense, I was watching.

What Jackass isn’t is mean. With a couple of (mostly early) exceptions, it’s not the kind of humor that leans on misogyny or racism to be funny. And it isn’t trying to expose anyone for their foolishness who isn’t already exuberantly engaged in being foolish on purpose. When pranks involve people outside the group — the owner of a rental car agency, a man on the street horrified at the actions of Knoxville costumed as a “bad grandpa,” a sushi chef trying to ignore the guy taking wasabi lines up the nose across the counter from him — it’s they who are the reasonable ones, and the Jackasses who are just being idiots. We presume (and sometimes confirm) that they smoothed it all over after they got the shot. In this way, the movies feel different from the aims and goals of an adjacent property, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, which is working in a different and satirical register (more similar perhaps is the largely improvised Bad Trip, starring Forever addition Eric Andre). There’s no satire to Jackass. It is, proudly and unabashedly, itself.

That said, there’s still a reason for its existence, and that reason is not merely giant box office returns. Somewhere in the middle of Jackass Number Two, probably when cast member Steve-O was getting a fish hook stuck through his cheek so he could swim with sharks and then get reeled in by his buddy, I started thinking about the medieval Feast of Fools.

Paramount Pictures

We don’t know a whole lot about the Feast of Fools, but the general outlines have stuck: Around the turn of the year, participants in the feast, often clergy, would appoint some kind of leader for the day — a fake bishop, a fake pope. They’d flip the clergy hierarchy, and low-ranking clergy would perform a mass that mocked the higher-ranked. It was (understandably) controversial, and the practice had all but died out by the 16th century. But it was a moment of catharsis, a way to let off steam and then let life kind of return to normal.

I found myself thinking about the fools of the feast, not because they’re a perfect analogue, but because the whole reason to watch Jackass is to participate in the mayhem. Everyone is temporarily given their Chaos Muppet hall pass; everyone is in on the joke. And what is the joke? That there are all these things you’re not supposed to do in life — slingshot yourself on a skateboard across a blow-up pool, fart into a funnel connected to your friend’s helmet, pogo-stick your buddy’s crotch, squash your genitalia flat — that most of us, frankly, would never even want to do, and never will. In the Jackass world, the rules get turned from “thou shalt nots” to “thou absolutely musts,” if just for a couple of hours.

So the dream remains, and the Jackasses get up and just do it for us. If you’ve seen a Jackass movie in a theater (and honestly, that is the One True Place for watching it), then you know that at least 50 percent of the sound effects come from the crowd. (By Jackass 3D, my whole room of fellow ’thoners was groaning merely at the appearance of a tube of superglue.) A bunch of the audience are almost certainly, like me, the kind of people who won’t even hover our fingers within a couple inches of an electrical socket, but the kind of cleansing relief of watching the weirdly pure goofballs onscreen tase one another lets us return to our own lives of seat belts and fully cooked, unregurgitated food a little lighter.

Sean Cliver/Paramount Pictures

That they’ve caught it on tape reinforces the fool’s impulse. They are definitely doing this for themselves. But they’re doing it for us — documenting it not to simply observe human behavior but to provoke our own, to remind us that no matter how many degrees we’ve earned or how finely tuned our comedy sense is, there is something basely funny about a blindfolded guy getting kicked in the nuts by a donkey.

A whole generation of kids, probably particularly the masculine variety, learned what funny was from Jackass and went on to replicate it in their mall parking lots and dorm rooms. Jackass Forever is the first of the films to add new cast, because Knoxville and his pals are hovering around 50 these days and a lot more brittle; the new members are delighted to be in the movie we used to watch! And who can blame them? They have taken on a high, low calling: to be the fools who prostrate themselves across a pile of mousetraps or take an enormous belly flop for the camera, for us.

But whether you envy the guys onscreen or want to shake them a little, if you find yourself settled into the Jackass groove, it’s pretty hard to resist. The obvious affection between all of the guys, who beat on each other, yell at each other, and then hug it out and do it all over again. The excitement of watching guys who you know probably walked away from the stunt on their own power but also are taking it on the chin without any typical stuntman precautions. The eye-bugging realization that they are really going to go there this time; the upping of the ante; the matryoshka-style stunts where you think it’s going to be one prank and then it’s a whole bigger, badder prank. The impulse to do it, and to watch, is in its way a proudly, baldly, loopy celebration of these weird, smelly, gross, hilarious bodies we all have and the world we let them roam around in.

I stumbled into the night after Jackass Forever with aching cheeks from laughing, a sore derriere from sitting, and a little bit of gratitude to inhabit a planet with people who don’t mind being fools on purpose. Will I attempt the stunt again? Absolutely not. Did I have a blast? You bet.

Jackass Forever is playing in theaters.

Harvey Weinstein apparently knew from the beginning that he’d need a female lawyer. Or at least, that’s what Donna Rotunno, who is defending Weinstein, said in an interview for The Daily with Megan Twohey. The beginning half of the interview is a lot of Rotunno giving us the reasoning behind her taking on this case in the first place, but it’s easy to see why someone would defend Weinstein if they’re willing to blame victims.

Rotunno points out that women made a “choice” to text Weinstein even after the alleged assaults, and if they made that choice to keep their careers, then … oh well? Twohey continues to, in my opinion, drive the conversation perfectly, asking Rotunno to go on and explain in more detail what she means because, as it stands, it sounds like she’s saying that women then have a choice whether or not they get sexually assaulted. Rotunno quickly cuts her off, saying that she’s not “putting all the responsibility on the woman” (which she is).

And while Rotunno goes on to continue to make muddled points (continually, again, putting the blame on women) that don’t make much sense (no really, she keeps basically saying that women going with Weinstein to hotel rooms to look at scripts was the problem, and not Weinstein), the real meat of this entire exchanged happened when Twohey asked if Rotunno had ever been sexually assaulted.

The interview comes to an end, and Twohey asks if anyone has any other questions, bringing up that she wanted to ask whether or not Rotunno had been assaulted. She says no, and it seems like that is that until Rotunno, basically, whispers, “Because I would never put myself in that position.”

Twohey (like myself) can’t let that stand and follows up for Rotunno to clarify what she means—essentially just repeating what Rotunno said and asking her to explain her terrible statement without Twohey seeming like she’s putting her own opinion on it (a truly brilliant move).

Rotunno responds, “No, I’ve always made choices from college-age on where I never drank too much, I never went home with someone that I didn’t know, I just never put myself in any vulnerable circumstance. Ever.”

What’s damaging and frightening about this is that it shows Rotunno’s point of view clear as day, and that’s that she blames victims for being sexually assaulted. She also makes the “point” that she never went home with someone that she didn’t know, as if someone you know cannot sexually assault you. I’m glad that Rotunno has never experienced that, but the way she’s speaking is extremely dismissive to victims and those who trusted someone they knew.

But Rotunno backtracks on her point when Twohey calls her out, saying that she took precautions to keep herself from getting sexually assaulted, which … great? What does that even mean? That’s still not an excuse for any kind of victim-blaming language. Precautions don’t always work, especially because she said that she would “look around” when she went out at night, as if that’s that.

When Twohey brings it up, Rotunno says that if the precautions don’t work, then it’s a totally different conversation. It isn’t, but that’s apparently what Rotunno believes. What level of “precautions” need to be taken before the conversation changes and it’s no longer the victim’s fault for not being “careful” enough? Why does Rotunno think she, or anyone, should be the judge of that?

She also seems to believe that victims cannot be sexually assaulted by someone they know, just strangers in dark alleys—an outdated and hugely incorrect way of thinking, frankly, and one that shows her true colors more than anything.

Megan Twohey brings up that victims can still be sexually assaulted by someone they know and Rotunno responds with “Sure, anything is possible, Megan,” which basically completely contradicts every point she was making previously.

But it’s the victim-blaming that’s most upsetting. Rotunno is dangerous because she is pushing a narrative that states that if you go into a situation that can be read a certain way but it’s not what you want, then part of that blame is on you. That’s what Rotunno is saying, even if she thinks she isn’t.

That right there is the problem. Why should anyone get to be the judge of when we should expect to be assaulted? That’s telling me I can’t wear shorts because a man might then think it’s an invitation to say something about my legs. That’s telling a woman that because she went to a room for a business meeting and was sexually assaulted, well she shouldn’t want to be successful in the first place. Even saying the blame should be “equal” means that you’re, essentially, just blaming the woman.

Don’t worry, though. When asked about what men can do, Rotunno says to make their intentions clear (okay then) but then to finish the conversation out, Rotunno truly said this:

“If I was a man in today’s world, before I was engaging in sexual behavior with any woman, today, I would ask them to sign a consent form.”

And she was being dead serious, promoting the idea that a significant number of assault accusations just come from women who were consenting at the time and then just lie about it later.

Is it surprising that someone like Rotunno would represent Weinstein after all the things she said in this interview? Not at all. She thinks that sexual assault is circumstantial and that a woman is equally to blame, so I’m not surprised. Harvey Weinstein couldn’t have found a more suited lawyer.

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 —The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Rock on.

Forget the aliens — the movie’s most lasting contribution to Hollywood was a roadmap for big-budget blockbuster marketing.

Independence Day didn’t become the quintessential movie to watch over the July 4 holiday in the US purely because of its title (though that certainly didn’t hurt). It was, on many levels, a groundbreaking film of its own — in the most American of ways.

The term “blockbuster” became an established part of the Hollywood vernacular in 1975, when the exciting, record-setting Jaws destroyed box office records and delighted people so much that they returned to the theater to see the film again and again. The term had popped up in Hollywood before Jaws — but after Jaws, it came to define a new genre: that of the big-budget, action-packed film with wide appeal intended to rake in serious moolah in ticket sales.

The decades that followed ushered in a string of big-budget studio movies that would become iconic summer blockbusters, including the original Star Wars films (which were all released in May) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (which came out in June). Before long, making summer blockbusters had become standard practice Hollywood. And nearly 20 years after Jaws, in 1993, Jurassic Park became the latest iteration, taking its place as the highest-grossing film of all time.

But Jurassic Park’s record wouldn’t go long before meeting a challenger. In January 1996, people watching Superbowl XXX found themselves watching an ad for a movie that wouldn’t arrive in theaters for almost six more months: an alien-invasion film called Independence Day, which would debut on July 3.

In the movie, which takes place over the Fourth of July, unnerving, unexplainable phenomena begin to appear all over the globe. The truth becomes impossible to ignore: Earth is under attack. And it’s up to a motley band of Americans, including a satellite technician (Jeff Goldblum), a Marine pilot (Will Smith), a former combat pilot (Randy Quaid), and the American president (Bill Pullman) to save the world.

Fox

That Super Bowl commercial cost Fox $1.3 million — and it was only the beginning of a massive, months-long ad campaign aimed at maximizing box office revenue for Independence Day.

In the months that followed, Fox cut a promo deal with Apple, and scenes from the film in which Goldblum’s character uses a PowerBook appeared in Apple’s advertising. Tie-in toys were created, and Coors and Coca-Cola cut product placement deals. Teaser trailers and taglines like “Don’t make plans for August” blanketed the public consciousness. The Clinton family enjoyed an early screening at the White House.

Finally, the weekend before Independence Day’s release, a half-hour special about the film aired on Fox, including what you might call a “fake news” report on the film’s alien invasion premise.

And all of these efforts paid off, beyond almost anyone’s wildest dreams. With more than $817.4 million in ticket sales worldwide, Independence Day became the highest-grossing film of the year, beating out movies like Twister and Mission: Impossible to nab the spot. It was briefly the second highest-grossing film of all time until The Lost World: Jurassic Park came out in 1997, and came very close to surpassing Jurassic Park’s opening week record.

In some theaters, Independence Day opened on July 2, both because that’s the date when the film’s events begin and because anticipation from moviegoers was so high. The movie won tenuous praise from critics — more for nailing the blockbuster genre than for cinematic craft — and raves from audiences. It was ultimately nominated for two Oscars, and won for Best Visual Effects; its soundtrack won a Grammy. And Fox sunk another $30 million into a marketing campaign for the movie’s eventual VHS release, which coincided with Thanksgiving.

All of this marketing success put studios on notice. Independence Day began the now time-honored tradition of kicking off the marketing campaigns for big-budget movies with an expensive Super Bowl ad slot. It also kicked off a wave of interest in big-budget science fiction movies, with film studios hoping to capitalize on the surge with titles like Men in Black (1997) and Armageddon (1998).

Independence Day is more product than movie, which isn’t really a strike against it: Like an amusement park thrill ride or a skydiving expedition, the experience of watching it is more about adrenaline and excitement than the artistic qualities of the movie itself. The catharsis of seeing the world destroyed (and then seeing the American president save it) was just right for its moment — when just enough optimism still reigned and computer animation was new enough that the images felt new and invigorating rather than dark and foreboding — and people loved it.

Movies like Independence Day partly succeeded because people could see the movie with their friends or family in the theater and talk about it at work, or over the backyard grill. It was cool and awesome and fun, and that’s all it needed to be.

And, like any good product, the success of Independence Day was a function of its then-pioneering marketing push, which set a template for future big-budget films. Today, selling your film to audiences isn’t just about cutting a good trailer and running it on TV during NFL games, and maybe getting a toy into Happy Meals. It’s about teaser campaigns and cross-promotion and stealth marketing and post-credits scenes that make people want to see the sequel that hasn’t even been shot yet.

All that money, all that marketing, all that big-budget spectacle: It’s quintessentially American, and quintessentially Hollywood. Love it or hate it, that’s the world that Jaws built and Independence Day made inescapable.

The golden age of the blockbuster seems to have ended here in the US; not long ago, the abysmal Independence Day: Resurgence flopped at the domestic box office. But the blockbuster is still alive and well in big markets like China, where movies like Alien: Covenant or The Mummy — both of which crashed and burned in America — do just fine.

So it turns out that in a post-Independence Day world, the next big step in the evolution of the Hollywood blockbuster was to export it for global consumption.

How very American.

Watch the trailer for Independence Day:

By Evan V. Symon  Published: April 20th, 2018 

Most of Trump's battles with the media (in particular CNN, and the hilariously fake spat with Morning Joe during the campaign) are just wrestling stories. Zucker knows the game, and he'd obviously sell his children for a small ratings bump. In a way he already has.

I really can't keep up with changing narratives about the Taliban.

[NOTE: To spice up the discussion started by Tenacity’s guest post, we bring you this throw-back post. One of Patrick Thadeus Jackson’s greatest hits (of which there were many) originally posted on December 25, 2007.]

Ever since the invention of the InterNet, not a December goes by without some version of this making the rounds of listservs and e-mail chains and the like. I must have received it a dozen times from various sources. It’s cute and funny and all, but I must say that I’ve never been entirely happy with its conclusions. So in the spirit of the season, I present the first known social constructionist investigation in the the existence of Santa Claus. I mean, why should the natural sciences get to have all the fun — and why should they get to corner the market on looking into such matters?

The first thing to point out is that a social constructionist would not necessarily consider the existence of Santa Claus to be the same thing as the existence of a man in a red suit who flies around the world in one evening in a sleigh pulled by eight or nine flying reindeer and delivers toys to all of the good children of the world. Perhaps physicists are so literal when it comes to social actors, but we social constructionists tend to have a broader view on the subject. Indeed, for us, an actor exists inasmuch as and insofar as action is legitimately performed in its name. It is the massive set of activities carried out in the name of the state — invoking state authority, done on the state’s behalf — that provides the evidence for the state’s existence, as well as concretely instantiating the actor “the state” from moment to moment. Contra some IR constructivists (like Alex Wendt), it’s not like there’s some essential stateness lying around somewhere from which state acts emanate; rather, there are a series of actions performed in the state’s name, actions that — if successfully legitimated — give rise to the effect of a solid object called “the state”. It’s not center first, action second; it’s action first, appearance of a center second.

So the social constructionist standard for an actor’s existence is related to the variety of actions performed in that actor’s name, and on their reception by the relevant audiences. “Acceptance” here doesn’t necessarily mean “belief”; it merely means that the audience accepts that the actor has performed the action, even if the action itself is questioned. If the state seizes my possessions, I might challenge that in court, but in so doing I am accepting the state’s actor-hood, even if only provisionally (I might be a principled anarchist or an extremely rigorous libertarian, and so would never completely accept the state as an actor). The only way to refuse to accept a claim of actor-hood is to refrain from even speaking of an action as though it were performed by the supposed actor, something that it is extremely difficult to do in a world constituted by sovereign territorial states.

Now, some of my critical realist friends always object, at this point in the account, that all of those actions performed “in the name of the state” are really being performed by individual human beings. [When talking to a critical realist, always watch for the adjective or adverb “really” — this generally shows you the weak point in their arguments, since these are the places where they have to rely on the linguistic equivalent of banging a fist on the table in order to make their point.] My usual response is to smile and ask them what basis they have for that assertion; the basis they give usually boils down to either:

— “individual human beings are constituted to be actors, unlike other beings; other beings are only actors inasmuch as human beings do things with and for them.” To me this looks kind of like species prejudice, and also temporal prejudice, since it wasn’t so long ago that animals were considered to have moral culpability (and in some parts of the animal rights movement, this is not a radical claim at all).

— “when you point to something done in the name of the state, you’re actually pointing to a physical human being doing something.” Hmm . . . empiricism and behaviorism from a critical realist? How deliciously ironic. Sure, if I try to abstract from all of the social content what I “see” is a member of the species homo sapiens whose limbs and extremities and orifices are moving. Well, only if I am looking at a certain macroscopic scale; if I peer in closer, I see mitochondria and various cellular components, closer and I see complex chains of organic and inorganic molecules, and if I go even closer I see atoms. Why stop just on the level that is comfortable to those of us raised in human society — especially since if we’ve been raised in human society, we know the difference between that person who has the authority to stop traffic an that other person who does not: the first person is not acting under her or his own authority, but is instead the instrument of the state and as such is not a single isolated individual but is instead a representative of a broader corporate person with a claim on me. The fact that members of the species homo sapiens are involved in these interactions is as little relevant as the fact that oxygen is involved in these interactions.

— “we can only preserve human agency if we confine the notion of action to individual human beings.” I think this is just silly. Indeed, confining action to individual human beings strikes me as a fine way to degrade human agency, because it runs the risk of changing every social arrangement into a more or less deliberate bargain entered into by pre-social individuals, and converting human agency into a matter akin to selecting products from a supermarket shelf. I’d much rather celebrate human creativity, including the various ways that social actors are produced and reproduced over time — some of those actors are “individuals,” to be sure, but this is just as much of a social product as “the state” or “the clan” or “the nation” or even “the civilization” is.

Critical realists dealt with, we can turn to the facts about Santa Claus and actions performed in his name. Every December, millions of kids write letters to Santa, go to malls and other places to see Santa, and discuss what Santa is going to bring them. Millions of adults use the threat of Santa not bringing anything (or bringing coal) as a way to induce better behavior in their kids. NORAD, the strategic air command for the USA, devotes at least some server-space to tracking Santa as he supposedly travels around the globe. And — this is the most important thing — every year millions of kids get presents from Santa on Christmas morning. A gift with a note attached saying “from Santa” strikes me as prime facie evidence of an action performed in the name of Santa Claus, and by social constructivist standards, that’s pretty much all it takes for Santa Claus to exist as a social actor. Wait, you say: what about legitimacy? Think or a moment of the great lengths that people go through to make sure that their kids can’t poke holes in the Santa Claus story: different wrapping-paper for the Santa gifts, modified handwriting for the Santa cards, and so on. And it’s not just kids: think of “Secret Santa” activities in offices, at shelters, in churches. And why does the Salvation Army dress its collectors up in Santa outfits? Clearly, they’re invoking a selfless giver in an effort to solicit donations for their own charitable work. “Santa” has wide popular cultural currency, and the idea of a “present from Santa Claus” occupies a distinctive place in the cultural resources that we use to make our lives meaningful. QED: Santa Claus exists.

Call this the Miracle on 34th Street version of the case for Santa Claus’ existence: to the extent that there’s a series of social practices identifying Santa Claus as their author, there’s a Santa Claus. Of course, that movie presents a mythologized version of the account; there’s a concrete human (or apparently human — Santa is often envisioned as an elf of some kind) being who claims to be, and is eventually recognized by the US postal service and the State of New York (and the two female protagonists) to be the one and only Santa Claus. But in actuality, we have something closer to the situation that Thomas Hobbes identified centuries ago as pertaining to the concept of sovereignty: the commonwealth only exists insofar as it is “personated,” and that personation is, at bottom, a social convention. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a sustained argument to the effect that the commonwealth ought to keep getting personated lest we collapse into a civil war, and as such is an implicit acknowledgment of their being no higher court of appeal for questions of actor-hood than the diffuse processes that go into making socially sustainable claims. We aren’t living in a movie; we don’t have a single identifiable individual member of the species homo sapiens who is the one and only genuine Santa Claus. Instead, we have a whole panoply of cultural practices revolving around the idea of gifts that show up from mysterious sources. And inasmuch as those practices continue, the actor that they sustain continues, and Santa Claus continues to exist.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Dallas Woodhouse, who heads North Carolina conservative group Carolina Rising, and his brother, Brad, who runs liberal group Americans United for Change, were on Washington Journal Tuesday morning for a friendly partisan debate. And then a caller told them to knock it off.

"Oh God, it's Mom," said Dallas, putting his face in his hands. Brad did the same when he realized what was happening.

What follows is priceless,  mostly because this woman talks to her arguing Beltway pundit sons like they're eight years old and fighting in the back of the family station wagon ("I'm hoping that you'll have some of this out of your system when you come here for Christmas.").

C-SPAN just doesn't get any better than this (not even when Cher calls in). Watch it and be reminded that even when you're a big deal who gets to be on the TV, your Mom is still the boss of you.

[h/t: Washington Post]

OCALA, Fla. (AP) — Police in Florida say two would-be carjackers almost got away with a vehicle in Ocala but didn't know how to drive a stick shift.

The Ocala Star-Banner (http://bit.ly/1yHpghG) reports the owner of a 2014 Toyota Corolla told police he was sitting in his car talking on his cell phone when a man with a gun tapped the window. Another man was by the passenger side window.

Police say the gunman demanded the man get out of the car and demanded his keys. He gave them the keys, they got in the car and he walked away. The man stopped another motorist who called police.

But the carjackers couldn't move the car because it was a stick shift. The duo ran before police arrived, leaving the keys in the ignition.

BRYANT, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas police say an 11-year-old girl paid a cabbie $1,300 to take her to meet a boy in Florida, but that authorities caught up with the runaway in Georgia after her parents reported her missing.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported Friday (http://bit.ly/12VJ4Qv ) that cellphone records show the girl hailedthe cab Dec. 5 in Little Rock after talking to a 16-year-old Jacksonville, Florida, boy she met two years ago. The boy said he didn't know the girl's plans.

The cab company said the girl wore heavy makeup and appeared to be 17 or 18 and that the driver wouldn't face discipline. The girl's father said he has confiscated her cellphone and makeup.

Bryant police say the girl stole $1,300 from her grandmother to pay the fare. The grandmother isn't pressing charges.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

New Comic: Values

It all began with this tweet:

Not sure how this made it through proofreading, peer review, and copyediting. Via http://t.co/sWaswaM2X4 #addedvalue pic.twitter.com/8krLlvthAr

— Dave Harris (@davidjayharris) November 10, 2014

Oh my. Not only is that embarrassing to the authors and to Gabor, but it's embarrassing to the tune of thousands of retweets.

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus's Retraction Watch blog looked into it. The main author told them that the phrase was introduced after peer review, while they were revising the paper. And no, it was not intended to make it into print. And Caitlin Gabor herself says that she would like an apology. And adding insult to injury, she even knows some of the authors.

The journal has since fixed the error.

But it's still fairly concerning that no one caught this before publication. What was going on with proofreading, both by the journal and by the authors?

Will Oremus over at Slate also has a great discussion of the debacle and includes the intriguing thought that maybe this is actually a good sign. After all, it was caught. And it's now being corrected. Some publications have been exploring reviewing papers after they're public, and maybe this is sort of an example of that.

Russian President Vladimir Putin lent his coat to China's first lady during dinner, and it is apparently a scandal, reports Foreign Policy. Chinese state media censors have apparently scrubbed all references to Putin's quasi-flirtatious interaction with Xi Xinping's wife.

Putin was seated next to Chinese first lady Peng Liyuan during a dinner at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing on November 10th, which President Obama also attended. This video captures him speaking to her briefly, then producing a tan coat from under his table and placing it around her shoulders. The first lady wore it for a moment, then handed it off to an attendant. The action starts at 0:35, toward the right end of the table:

Having viewed the video, I agree that it raises a number of important questions. For instance:

1. Why did Putin have a coat hidden under the table?
2. Where exactly was the coat?
3. No but seriously does he have a secret Bond villain compartment under there?
4. Whoa, really? What else does he keep in there?
5. Doesn't the first lady agree that it's a little weird to borrow a coat from someone at dinner and then hand it off to some rando five seconds later?
6. Where did the aforementioned rando take the coat?
7. Didn't she know that it was Putin's coat?
8. Okay but then why didn't she just hand it back to him?
9. Is Putin sad that he did not get his coat back?
10. Was it a special coat that he loved?
11. Was it hard for Putin to continue with dinner knowing that his beloved secret-compartment coat had been cruelly stolen from him?
12. Has that issue been raised through formal diplomatic channels?
13. Has anyone considered that perhaps the real scandal here is that dinner was being held in a room so cold that multiple coats became involved before the first course had even been served?
14. A man was in charge of the thermostat, wasn't he?
15. Is he aware of the scientific research showing that women's extremities get cold more easily than men's, thus making women more likely to become uncomfortable in chilly rooms?
16. Did he not even care?
17. Have there been any attempts to resolve the coat dispute via back-channel communications with Kuzya the tiger?

My emotions!

I’m suddenly even more excited for the return of Reading Rainbow.

(via Kotaku)

Previously in Go the Fuck to Sleep

• Samuel L. Jackson did a reading of it, too
• What would happen to you if you didn’t go the fuck to sleep?
• LeVar Burton never sleeps; he assembled an all-star team for Reading Rainbow‘s return

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It's common to hear that teachers should be paid better — more like doctors and lawyers. In 2009, the Equity Project, a charter school in New York decided to try it: they would pay all their teachers $125,000 per year with the possibility of an additional bonus.

The typical teacher in New York with five years' experience makes between $64,000 and $76,000. The charter school, known as TEP, would pay much more. But in exchange, teachers, who are not unionized, would accept additional responsibilities, and the school would keep a close eye on their work.

Four years later, students at TEP score better on state tests than similar students elsewhere. The differences were particularly pronounced in math, according to a study from Mathematica Policy Research released in October. (The study was funded by the Gates Foundation.) After four years at the school, students had learned as much math as they would have in 5.6 years elsewhere:

(Mathematica Policy Research)

The gains erased 78 percent of the achievement gap between Hispanic students and whites in the eighth grade.

The results are important in part because TEP also appears to have sidestepped some common concerns about charter schools. They didn't expel or suspend students out of school in the first four years. There is no evidence that the school encouraged problem students to leave or transfer on their own. And the students who attended were roughly as likely to be low-income, and to have had similar levels of academic achievement before they arrived. They could still differ in other ways — they could have more involved parents, who get them into the charter school lottery, for example — but TEP doesn't present some of the obvious factors that help explain other charter schools' success.

How TEP hired and trained teachers

The $125,000 number was eye-catching, but it was just the start of the school's approach to teaching. Teachers were also eligible for a bonus of between 7 to 12 percent of their salary. The teachers, who are not unionized, went through a rigorous selection process that included a daylong "audition" based on their teaching skills. The typical teacher already had six years of classroom experience before they were hired.

Teachers at TEP also get more time to collaborate and played a bigger role in school decision-making than teachers in other jobs. Teachers were paired up to observe each others' lessons and provide feedback, collaboration that experts agree is important but happens too infrequently. During a six-week summer training, teachers also helped set school policy.

The workload at TEP, where teachers also take on administrative duties and had an average of 31 students per class, is fairly heavy even with the extra pay. But the school also had more teacher turnover than usual. Nearly half of first-year teachers didn't return for their second year, either because they resigned or because they were not rehired. Teacher turnover has been found to have a slight effect on student achievement.

Overall, though, the results are promising. The researchers caution that this is just one study of a small school. It's not meant to prove that TEP's methods can work in every school nationally. But it appears to suggest that, at least, the approach worked at one school.

In case you were wondering, now you know: Boulder residents never have to stand in line behind their family members to use the bathroom. Miami residents, meanwhile, have a lot longer to wait.

That's the takeaway from a new analysis from real estate brokerage Redfin, which has calculated the number of residential toilets per capita in the largest US metro areas. The below chart shows the top and bottom five, as well as the average from 37 metro areas studied. Boulder has 102 toilets per 100 people — in other words, more toilets than people.

It's amusing (and, as you'll see in Redfin's blog post on the study, it's prime pun material), but it also tells a bit about who lives in which US cities, as well as our housing tastes. For example, as one Redfin agent says in the post, the many condos in Miami were built for older people wanting to downsize. But many of those condos were also built in the 1960s and 70s … today, buyers are increasingly interested in new condos with more bathrooms. Meanwhile, wealthy DC is known for having some of the largest homes in the nation.

Indeed, Americans are increasingly getting more and more luxurious houses, as I wrote in May. The median square footage of a new single-family home grew by 54 percent from 1973 to 2013.

Correction. The first chart in an earlier version of this post said it listed the number of toilets per capita, not per 100 people. Clearly that was wrong — 102 toilets for every 1 Boulder resident would be way too many.

With NYCC over for another year, it’s time for us to comb through everything that went down and bring you the best tidbits of news (we already showed you some stuff, and you can expect interviews with the cast and crews of Sleepy Hollow, Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and more over the coming weeks, plus cosplay galleries and pics from our Geek Girl Headquarters). On that list: Marvel announced that they’re doing a Guardians of the Galaxy animated show, set to air next year on Disney XD.

Below you can find the full first poster for the show and some test footage of Rocket and Star-Lord. Neon. So much neon.

(Entertainment Weekly via /Film, top pic from Disney XD)

Previously in NYCC 2014

• NYCC 2014: Check Out Preview Pages From DC Comics’ New Fables: The Wolf Among Us Digital Comic
• Breaking NYCC 2014 News: DC Comics Announces Wonder Woman ’77 Digital Series
• Witness The Most Important Thing to Come Out of the NYCC Sleepy Hollow Panel

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Brian Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on dark energy, and then he took the prize to Fargo to show off to his grandmother. As recounted to Clara Moskowitz at Scientific American the airport security people were a little put off by the way the giant piece of gold sucks up all the x-rays:

"They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’

I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’

They said, ‘What’s in the box?’

I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.

So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’

I said, ‘gold.’

And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’

‘The King of Sweden.’

‘Why did he give this to you?’

‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’

Traditionally, the one redeeming virtue of America's pointless airport security procedures has been this kind of democratic element. I was once stuck in an incredibly tedious and long customs line at Dulles Airport and who did I see with me in the line but Paul Krugman, on his way back from picking up his Nobel Prize in Stockholm. But with the rise of Global Entry and TSA Precheck it's now possible for people to buy their way out of some of the hassle.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Intra-uterine devices — small, T-shaped devices that doctors implant in a woman's uterus — are one of the most effective forms of birth control. And pediatricians want more teenagers using the long-acting contraceptive, largely because it leaves little room for error.

In new recommendations published Monday, the American Academy of Pediatricians endorsed implantable birth control as "first-line contraceptive choices for adolescents." The group recommends that pediatricians either learn how to implant these devices or identify health care providers in their communities to whom patients can be referred."

These recommendations put the pediatricians in line with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has recommended long-acting, reversible birth control as the first-line choice for teenagers since 2005.

Teen IUD use still small, but rising

Since the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guideline came out, more teenagers have gravitated toward the the long-acting contraceptive. In 2002, an almost-negligible 0.3 percent of teenagers used IUDs. In 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, 4.5 percent of women between 15 and 19 were using the device.

Experts argue that this rise in IUDs is likely partially responsible for the recent steep decline in teen birth rates. Implantable birth control requires no work on the part of the patient after a doctor inserts the device. Birth control pills and patches - which have to be taken or applied at regular intervals - leave significant space for user error.

The copper IUD, for example, has a failure rate of 0.8 percent - meaning that for 1,000 women using IUDs, approximately eight would get pregnant per year. Birth control pills, meanwhile, have a failure rate of 9 percent, more than ten times the rate of most IUDs.

IUD use has proven to be incredibly effective in small experiments to control teen pregnancy. For example, when a Colorado program made the contraceptives available at no cost to low-income teens, it led to a 40 percent drop in birth rates over four years.