Dance Magers

These are the alligator (or is it a crocodile?) and great white shark watermelon carvings created by watermelon carving pro Clive Cooper. They look real, don't they? "No." Well they look pretty real for being carved out of pumpkins. "Those are watermelons." F*** it all, I'm going back to bed. Keep going for two shots of the great white shark, more work at Clive's website HERE. Thanks to OT, who challenged me to a watermelon seed-spitting contest which I politely declined because I once won the spitting contest on Booty Island in the Monkey Island franchise and it wouldn't be a fair competition.

No, that's not the Eye of Sauron — it's a planetary system being born. It's one of the first images captured by SPHERE, a new planet-finder installed in Chile last month. The image shows the protoplanetary disc surrounding star HR4796A — just one of many astounding discoveries SPHERE is sure to make.

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Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

J.J. Abrams addresses the Millennuim Falcon rumors in the best way possible — by outright denying them in a note placed a top a certain holochess set. Wait a minute ,you!!!!

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A Malaysian man recently ordered a penis enlarging kit and receiving nothing but a cheap magnifying glass in the mail. Admittedly, a magnifying glass will make your pecker look bigger. Want the biggest looking penis in the world? Buy a microscope.

MCA Public Service and Complaint Bureau chairman Datuk Seri Michael Chong said Tuesday that the disgruntled customer, known only as Ong from Seri Kembangan, had paid RM450 [~$140] for the penis enlarger. "When he received the package, he was shocked to find a magnifying glass inside. "The instructions that came with the package merely read 'Do not use in sunlight'," he said. Chong told reporters that Ong was one of many who have fallen prey to online scams of this sort. "Men and women are equally vulnerable to these scams. Three people lost a total of more than RM80,000 to these scams this year alone," he said.

Ahahahhahah @ 'Do not use in sunlight.' That's solid advice for anybody who wants to look at their penis through a magnifying glass. Nobody wants to pee out of the hole they melted in the top of their johnson. You see what happened was, I was out burning ants when I felt one crawl up my shorts... Thanks to xer, who's never ordered a penis enlarging kit because it's already big enough to put earth in danger of spinning off its axis into the sun.

Apparently it's totally amazing Star Wars news day, it's just been officially announced that Star Wars: Episode VII has cast the brilliant actress Lupita Nyong'o from 12 Years a Slave, and our beloved Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones, Gwendoline Christie. Hooray!

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Fossil and genetic evidence tell us that animals have been going extinct since long before the existence of modern humans – but how might extinction rates differ if humans suddenly ceased to exist? A recently updated calculation suggests the rate of die-offs would be lower. Much, much lower.

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Disguising a Corpse as a Sex Doll Is a (Nearly) Perfect Crime in Japan

The Environmental Protection Agency will present a draft rule Monday that seeks to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants 30% over 2005 levels by the year 2030, according to anonymous sources briefed on the plan.

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Photo courtesy of USA George

This could be the last summer. Bees are dying, ice caps are melting, there’s a Dunkin Donuts in Williamsburg. Oh, and the US and Russia might start the second Cold War. Time for the global village to band together and pump the brakes? Not likely, considering we’re busy pumping our private parts at home.

In the face of inscrutable military-industrial agendas, porn offers some kind of logic. I’ll never understand troop movements in Crimea, but I definitely know what to do with my boner once I get online. According to a series of charts compiled by the eggheads (dickheads?) at Pornhub Insights, the smut peddlers’ data analysis department, Russians are (mostly) just like us. Cultural geography produces intriguing local fetishes, but at the end of the day, we’re all repressed perverts beating our meat like dogs in heat.

These charts will either prove we're better at busting nuts than Putin's cronies or help us set aside our differences and agree that Russia is too jam-packed with boobs, butts, and cock-hungry MILFs to reduce it to rubble. Let's find out! 

Graphs courtesy of Pornhub

Putin spent the last decade ramping up jingoism and openly icing opposition leaders while framing himself as a whale-hunting neo-Czar, a sculpted alternative to the West’s flabby Merkels and Cheneys—and it worked. His Crimean war games united the country against the finger-wagging West. As always, the political is personal, and Soviet pride extends below the belt. Who needs American resources when you have Russian mom anal? It’s masturbation as empire-building. Mother Russia, indeed.

America is less monolithic—the melting pot is full of cum. Our search terms read like an ethnography of a Disney show, with multiple races, four jobs, and wacky family dynamics. God bless the free market. In America you have the right—no, the responsibility—to imagine yourself landing a massive creampie in your 18-year-old step-sister’s anus while a hentai yoga teacher massages her squirting babysitter. In public. 

Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, start your engines—Americans last longer than Russians. Yup, it takes us over a minute more than the commies to crank off. Does this mean we’re better at sex? Yes. Or maybe we’re numb to sensation, eros dulled by an endless trough of media content. Our minds wander as we sweat and hunch over our iPads like monks with scripture. The likeliest scenario: Americans are so fat that we waste over a minute searching for our genitals. Whatever. A win’s a win.

“Ahhhhh!!! The Mondays!!! After another hedonistic weekend watchin’ ball and poundin’ local craft ale, do I really have to go back to the freakin’ office? Darrel’s gonna chew me out over the Simmons account. Might as well slip into the janitor's closet, fire up my Samsung Nexus, and bust one to Yoga Cum Sluts 4.”

“I am a Russian male. I work seven days of week. No day is the wrong day to watch Russian mom anal.”

Erm, awkward. Americans are nearly three times as likely to baste our turkeys to Russian porn as they are to bust a nut over our smut. It’s pervy espionage. The Spy Who Cums in from the Cold, if you will. Then again, what exactly is American porn? We’re everything and nothing. Searching “American porn” is like searching “dope Yeezy Red Octobers.” It's redundant.

This graph is a bit tricky—it lists the terms searched with the highest relative density in each country, a metric of our most unique kinks. The uncanny appeal of celebrity sex tapes is lost on Russians who are too busy offering their seeds to the motherland. We’re on some equally weird shit: Oedipal repression, colonial fetishism, and the arcane mysteries of yoga inflame our loins with the heat of a thousand suns. Oh. And college. We LOVE college.

You crazy for this one, Pornhub! Seriously, your stats team makes Nate Silver look like Hodor. This graph illustrates porn consumption during the US vs. Russia Olympic hockey match, a game fraught with socio-political significance—for the Russians, at least. About 10 percent of the country’s Pornhub watchers dropped their cocks long enough to grab foam fingers and vuvuzelas to cheer on their boys. Then they lost, and within 20 minutes traffic rose to about 10 percent higher than it is on an average day. Millions of Russians consoled themselves after a hockey loss with a collective wank. Sports are the world’s most obvious metaphor for war. Imagine that bell curve after we flatten Moscow. Go team!!!

Follow Ezra Marcus on Twitter.

Illustrations by Nick Nold

When I was 17, I lived for a couple of weeks in the Dallas Greyhound bus station. Since I had only a few dollars with me, I rationed a dollar a day for two $0.49 McDonald’s hamburgers. I waited until lunchtime to eat them and hoped that they would stick. But by the evenings, I was hungry, so I snuck Saltines from a lunch counter in the bus station, along with ketchup packets and cups of coffee that were barely more than cream and sugar.

At night, the security guards threw me out and I would wander around in the cold, thinking of food, imagining Thanksgiving tables, buffets with plates of bacon, enormous turkey sandwiches too big to finish.

Now I drink whole milk from the jug. Eat spoonfuls of peanut butter when I get home from work. And when I’m at lunch, I drink the prepackaged half-and-half cups left in saucers for people who order coffee. I also finish leftover sodas and beers, half slices of pizza on tables, mashed-potato remnants, french fries, or chicken strips.

My nine-year-old daughter drinks half-and-half cups now, whenever she sees them. She says, “Oh, look, Dad. There’s free cream here, too,” and we take our shots.

Just now, I ate a chocolate chip cookie, a chorizo breakfast burrito, some fried rice, and a yogurt cup. One more cookie should do it for lunch. I’ll probably eat more in a little while.

We're supposed to believe that Davy Crockett was a national hero—a brave frontiersman who was capable of hiking 30 miles without a trail, chopping a cord of wood in under an hour, and fighting Indians with bare fists. I read once that he was famous for killing 105 bears in a single year.

One hundred and five bears.

I’ve thought about that a lot. To eat all those bears, he’d have to go through an entire bear every three or four days, which means 100 or more pounds of bear meat every day. And bear meat is really, really fatty—I’ve eaten it. It’s tough to eat in large quantities. Every fourth or fifth bite has a large chunk of fat in it, and it’s sort of stringy meat, at least for a red meat. A hundred pounds of bear meat a day is an ungodly amount to put in a human’s belly.

Maybe I missed the point of the story.

I’m soy-plus. That’s my stance. I’m not allergic to grass-seed pollen. I run barefoot in clover fields and get stung by bees. I consume tree nuts like a pregnant squirrel. When there’s a baby around, I feed it strawberries dipped in honey.

I’m also gluten-plus. Very gluten-plus.

Three things I can’t eat right now because they’re labeled as gluten-free: Adams peanut butter, Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and Ayr-brand saline nasal-rinse packets.

The other day, I asked a doctor how many people are truly gluten-intolerant. He said, “Real numbers are hard to pin down.”

I said, “Just give it to me straight, Doc. What have you heard in the medical community? What have you read?”

He said, “Well, I read in a medical journal once that one in 157 people are gluten-intolerant.”

“One in 157?”

“Yeah.”

Everyone I know in Portland is gluten-intolerant.

I was invited to an organic frozen-yogurt shop the other day, only to find out that the store sold both frozen yogurt and paleo pizza. The sign said that the crust of the pizza was “swathed in bone marrow.”

I didn’t know what paleo pizza was, so I asked.

The guy said, “You don’t know what paleo is?”

“Like paleolithic?” I said.

“Right, like cavemen.”

“Is that some kind of diet that people are doing right now?”

“No,” he said, “the word diet is misleading, like I want to lose weight. But I don’t.” He pointed to himself. “So it’s not a diet. Paleo is more a way of life, or as I like to think of it, a template.”

“A template?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m understanding more appropriately what my body needs, and that template includes no grains, no legumes, no dairy, no alcohol, no sugar.”

“Fun,” I said.

I watched other customers come in and out of the store and got a strong feeling that the paleo template is something that white people spend a lot of time thinking about between sessions of CrossFit.

My daughter told me that a boy in her third-grade class said, “Pizza is bad for you.”

She said, “Why?”

“Because it has cheese.”

“What’s bad about cheese?”

“Well,” he said, “cheese has milk in it.”

“Wait, what’s bad about milk?”

He said, “It’s bad for your bones.”

“No,” my daughter said. “I’m pretty sure milk is good for your bones.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Prove it,” she said.

“No one drinks milk in my family, and none of us has ever broken a bone.”

She said, “I think that means your family is too careful.”

Me, I drink coffee every day, usually twice a day, often three times. Sometimes four. I’ve had five cups in a single sitting, writing and drinking coffee like it's Gatorade.

When it’s 7:21 in the evening and I’m making a fresh pot of coffee, and my hands are shaking like a junkie as he puts the lighter under the spoon, I should be thinking, How did I get here? Or, What’s wrong with me?

Instead, I’m thinking, I just need one more cup. You know? One more.

For a month, the top Google search for Kate Upton was: “Kate Upton Is Fat.”

Peter Brown Hoffmeister’s memoir is titled The End of Boys. In his first novel, Graphic the Valley, dirtbags and wanderers eat out of dumpsters, finish tourist leftovers in Yosemite Valley, and scrounge food abandoned in bear boxes.

Follow Hoffmeister on Twitter or on Facebook.

It looks like Stargate is about to lose its status as one of the major movie franchises that have never been rebooted . Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin are officially returning to the world of Stargate with a "re-imagined" trilogy of films.

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Super7 teamed up with Acme Archives to create this limited edition silkscreen diagram of the cuts of meat on everyone's favorite omnivorous reptomammal.

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Modern-day Klansmen doing their thing. Photo via Flickr user arete13

These days the Ku Klux Klan is mostly an unfunny joke, a smattering of ignorant racists who play dress-up and hold poorly planned, sparsely attended rallies to protest the renaming of parks. But half a century ago the Klan's power stretched from coast to coast, and members of the hooded hate group carried out firebombing attacks and murdered civil rights workers in the South. In the 1970s, internal conflicts and infiltration by the FBI weakened the Klan, but it was still dangerous enough that in 1979 KKK members killed five protesters in North Carolina.

It was during this era that Ron Stallworth, the first black cop in Colorado Springs, infiltrated the local Klan organization. He first made headlines in 2006 when he went public with his story and explained how he had stumbled upon the Klan and managed to become a leader in the local chapter by faking racist sentiments over the phone and sending a white colleague to meetings in his stead. He just released a book, Black Klansman, about his experience, so I figured now was as good a time as any to talk about how he pulled off a trick straight out of Blazing Saddles (and one that made for the first great skit on Dave Chappelle's short-lived TV show).

VICE: How did you first get into the police force, and how quickly after that did you realize undercover work was your thing?
Ron Stallworth: My family moved from El Paso, Texas, to Colorado Springs in the summer of 1972. I had an uncle who was a sergeant in the army stationed at Fort Carson in the state, and my mother's sister was married to him. I had toyed with the idea of joining the El Paso police department, who had lowered their age to enter the police academy from 21 to 20 as long as you turn 21 by the time you graduate. I was approaching 20 years of age, so that's when I started paying serious attention to a law enforcement career.

When I became a cadet, I immediately decided I wanted to be an undercover cop because I don't like uniforms. You put the uniform on the same way, you march in lockstep with one another. That's not my personality. When I first saw the narcotics officers walking around—these guys with long beards and long hair looking like San Francisco hippies—I liked the fact that these guys were actually cops wearing guns, carrying badges. I thought that was the neatest thing, to look like that and be a police officer. So I started a campaign to try to become a narc. Every time I saw the sergeant in charge of narcotics, I started questioning him about the job they did, how they went about doing it, basically asking him how to become an undercover cop. So I campaigned to become a narcotics officer. Every time I saw him, I said, "Hey, Art, make me a narc!" That became my standard routine. It became a kind of running joke between us. I'd see him in the department, he'd always laugh and say, "When you turn 21 and wear a uniform for two years, come see me."

How would you describe race relations in Colorado Springs at the time?
The cadet program was designed to boost minority hiring in the department, especially black employment. In that sense, the program was a failure—they hired only two blacks, myself and a female who came on about a year after I did.

I was specifically told that I would not be welcomed by the rank and file within the department because it had been white for so long. I was told on more than one occasion by my interview panel, "Essentially, you're going to be in the same position as Jackie Robinson. You will be the only black face in that department. You will be challenged at every opportunity, and you will be in a hostile environment. The challenge for you is to exist in that hostile environment without fighting back." They mentioned Jackie Robinson two or three times. They gave me some scenarios: "How would you feel if an officer came up to you and referred you to as a nigger? How about a citizen?" They threw out two or three "nigger" scenarios, using the word nigger. This was 1972. This was the environment I existed in to pave a path for future generations. Did it change anything, by the way? I can tell you right now that the manager in that department is black, and a friend of mine. There's also a female lieutenant among 43 total officers who are black.

You got your shot as an undercover because Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther leader, was coming to town. What can you tell me about that episode?
They were concerned about his fiery and bombastic rhetoric and his ability to raise the masses through his use of words, so I was asked if I wanted to go undercover in the black night club that was hosting him. They knew that I wanted to do undercover work. That was my opportunity. I was given that special assignment, which I eagerly took.

I went undercover in the night club, with lots of apprehensions about whether I would be recognized, given the time I'd been in uniform. Naturally I had butterflies in my stomach. That's something everybody goes through when they're working a new assignment, especially when they're trying to keep their identity from being recognized. It all came very naturally to me. I found myself at various times caught up in Stokely's rhetoric—what he was saying, as a black man, made a lot of sense to me. I found myself caught up in the hype of what he was saying. At various times when everybody was responding, yelling, "Right on brother! Black power!" I found myself caught up in it too and would jump up and yell, "Black Power!" But then I'd think, You're supposed to be working this fool! You're supposed to be undercover.

But you were able to get in and out without being detected?
After Stokely finished his speech, he got a round of rousing applause, and there was a reception line there to greet him. I got in the line. It was barely seven years or so earlier that I had been watching him on TV when in high school. This was a piece of living contemporary black history, American history for me, and I wanted to meet him. So I got in the reception line and shook his hand.

I asked him, "Brother Stokely, do you honestly believe there is going to be a war between blacks and whites and they're going to kill people?" He leaned in and said, "Brother, the war is coming, and we're going to have to kill white people." Then he said, "Thank you, brother." I walked out, and that was my brief moment with a living piece of black history.

So how did you first get assigned to keeping tabs on the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado?
I was assigned to the intelligence section of my department, and in intelligence you handle a variety of issues: criminal intelligence, organized crime, VIP protection. One of the things we routinely did was read the newspapers to see what, if anything, in there might warrant our attention. I saw this classified ad that said Ku Klux Klan, and there was a PO box address, so I wrote a little letter basically under the guise of being a white racist: I said I hated all niggers, Jews, spics, chinks, wops. I used all the derogatory terms for the various races they like to use. And I said I wanted to do something about it, that I wanted—to use a popular term of the day—to take back our country from these people, But I made a crucial mistake: I signed my real name to the letter. To be quite honest with you, I had a brain cramp. So I signed my real name to this letter instead of one of my undercover names, but then I put the undercover phone number and PO box we used. I honestly thought that the PO box on the classified ad was not legitimate, but responded to it just in case. I was expecting to get a leaflet or phamphlet. That's as far as I expected it go.

What happened next—how did they bring you into the fold?
Maybe a week later, I got a phone call at the undercover phone line in my office. I answered it, and the guy on the other end of the line said, "Am I speaking to Ron Stallworth?" I sat there thinking, Who the heck is calling me on this line? And then he explained he was the local organizer of the Ku Klux Klan. That's how he referred to himself. He said he had gotten my letter. And that's when I realized: Uh oh, I gotta come up with a plan real quick.

He wanted to know why I decided to join my Klan. I told him again I hated niggers, Jews, spics, chinks, wops, Mexicans, and they were taking over the country, and I wanted to take our country back. Again, the rhetoric you're hearing today, I was using back then. And then I added something else to flavor it up a bit: I said my sister is dating a nigger, and every time he puts his filthy black hands on her white body, it pisses me off, and I want to do something to stop that from happening in the future. He responded by saying, "You're just the kind of guy we're looking for!" and "How can we meet?"

That's how this investigation started. Obviously I couldn't meet him because of my skin color, so I postponed our meeting for a week to give me time to set something up. We talked further. I tried to get him to tell me how big they were. He wouldn't, but said they were relatively small. Most of 'em were from Fort Carson, Colorado. He told me he was a soldier at Fort Carson. I asked him activities they were planning to do as a group. This started in October of '78, this conversation. One of the things they were planning to do was have a Poor White Folks Christmas during the holiday season in which they would give care packages to poor white families. He said all niggers ever did was take advantage of white people by gaming the system—welfare and things like that. He said Jews control the system, and they use niggers to do their evil deeds. Nobody ever thought about poor whites.

Did he let you know about any illegal Klan activity?
We had two gay bars in town at the time, and he said he wanted to "bomb the two fag bars." That really got my radar up. He asked for my description, so I identified a fellow officer of mine, a detective in the narcotics division who was my height and weight. I even described how he'd be dressed because I knew how this officer came dressed to work. I spoke to the officer—in my book, I refer to him as Chuck, or as the white Ron Stallworth.

That was the challenge we faced throughout our conversation. Anything I said on the phone, Chuck had to pretend like he was the one who'd been talking to them on th phone and carry it to the next level. I on the other hand had to pretend like I'd been at that face-to-face meeting. We had to maintain that conversational flow at all times so that they believed they were talking to one person and one person only. That was the tricky part because Chuck's voice is totally different than mine.

Didn't they get suspicious?
Only once in the entire seven months of the investigation was I ever challenged as to why my voice sounded different than Chuck's. Chuck had gone to a meeting I set up, and later that day, as I thought about something that had been said at that meeting, I got on the phone and called Ken, the local organizer. I started talking to him as if I'd been at the meeting, but he said, "You sound different, what's the matter?" I coughed a couple times and said I had a sinus infection. And he said, "Oh, I get those all the time. Here's what you need to do to take care of that."

Did you ever fear for your own safety?
The only time I was apprehensive about this falling apart was on January 10, 1979, when David Duke—the grand wizard—came into town. I describe it in my book as the "camera showdown." I had been talking to Duke on the phone periodically, and I had been talking to a gentleman by the name of Fred Wilkens—he was the Colorado grand dragon, the state leader. Duke came into town for a recruiting trip, and was going to be addressing print and television media. During the course of the morning of his arrival, my chief of police contacted me and told me he wanted me to be David Duke's bodyguard during his stay in town. We had been getting death threats.

Was your commander trying to get under Duke's skin, so to speak, by assigning you to guard him, or what?
No, I was the only one available in the intelligence division. I argued with the chief over the fact that I had this investigation going on and putting me in close contact with David Duke and these people could jeopardize the entire thing because they might recognize my voice. He said he was willing to take that chance and didn't want anything happening to Duke while he was in his city.

So I saluted and went to the steakhouse where Duke was having a luncheon. Fred Wilkins and David Duke were there, and then there was a gentleman by the name of Charles or Chuck Howarth—he was head of the ultra-right-wing group Posse Comitatus. They were big pains in our collective police butts in Colorado. It was the forerunner of what later became the militia movement in America. I introduced myself to David Duke, told him I was a detective assigned to be his bodyguard because of threats made against him. I said that I did not believe in his political philosophy or ideology but I was a professional and would do anything within my means to make sure he got out safe from my city. He thanked me very cordially, very graciously—he shook my hand, even gave me the Klan handshake. He didn't know that I knew it but he gave me the Klan handshake. He was pleased, as was the local organizer. And then I asked him for a picture. I said, "Mr. Duke, nobody will ever believe me if I told them I was your bodyguard, would you mind taking a picture with me?" He said, "No, not at all." I gave the camera to Chuck, the white Ron Stallworth, and stood between David Duke and the grand dragon. I put my arm on both their shoulders, and the grand dragon thought it was funny, but David Duke was offended—he pushed my arm away. He said, "I'm sorry, I can't be seen in a photo with you like that." I said to Chuck, "When you hear me say three, snap the photo."

I said one, two, and on the count of three put my hand back on David Duke's shoulder and Chuck snapped the photo. And at that moment David Duke ran away from me and tried to grab the camera from Chuck's hand. I was half a step quicker than Duke, and when he reached over to grab the camera from my hand, I looked at him and said, "If you touch me, I'll arrest you for assault on a police officer. Don't do it." Duke stopped dead in his tracks and we had a staredown. All of his entourage stopped smiling and they stared at me. It seemed like forever but was probably only three to five seconds that were staring at each other, but at that precise moment the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan knew the meaning of a black man having control over him because I owned him—I was his nightmare: I was a nigger with a badge, and I controlled his destiny and he knew it.

What's your sense of where the Klan stands these days?
The Ku Klux Klan has never died in America. It has ebbs and flows, but it never really dies, and it's never been as strong as it once was in the 20s, and in the 50s and 60s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. I don't think it ever will be [that strong] again—society has changed too much—but the very fact that it exists is what America should be concerned about. We should always be vigilant of that fact and be mindful of it and ready to combat it in whatever form it exists in.

Did you ever find yourself sympathizing with any of the Klansmen you came into contact with?
No, they were all assholes. There was no sympathy whatsoever. My only regret was that I couldn't reveal who I was and what I was doing to thoroughly embarrass them and show them what idiots they were. I had to maintain the secrecy of it. The pleasure I got is that I was making fools out of them and they didn't know they being made fools out of at the time it was happening. I got satisfaction out of that duality. They were a bunch of racist idiots.

Has the reaction to the book surprised you at all?
It has surprised me a little bit. I know the story fascinates a lot of people when they hear me, a black man conning a grand wizard of the KKK and his followers the way I did. When I hear that it's spreading around the world... I was interviewed this morning by a radio station in Dublin, Ireland, I have a great niece who's a teacher in Japan and she says it's in magazines and newspapers over there in foreign languages she can't understand. That's where it's kind of overwhelming.

You can buy Stallworth's book online here.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

As rising sea levels begin to engulf naval bases and extreme weather exacerbates conflicts worldwide, the military has sounded the alarm that climate change poses a long-term threat to U.S. security. The GOP response? It passed legislation that blocks funding for any Pentagon program that tackles climate change.

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Do you like the Transformers? Do you like robbing convenience stores? Then you'll love these insane Transformers trucker hats, which for some reason feature masks allowing you to... uh... rob convenience stores. Seriously, this is the only conceivable reason someone would willingly wear these.

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This is the $59 Monkey Brain Bowl available from Firebox that was inspired by the feast scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (previously: this cake). Wait -- $59?! That's a little expensive for something that isn't microwave or dishwasher safe, doesn't look particularly realistic, and is covered in fur. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my cereal with as little hair nearby as possible. Fact: one time I opened a can of peaches and there was a hair inside. My brother will vouch for me on that too. Back me up, Frank. Frank? Remember that time we played Edward Forty-Hands and both pissed our pants? Good times, bro. "Those were only 22-ouncers." Jesus, Frank, I have a reputation to uphold here! Keep going for one more shot plus a video of the feast scene from the money. Mmmm, snake surprise! Thanks to lilco, who agrees if you're going to eat out of a skull, you should make it the skull of a sworn enemy.

How many of us indulge in self-love, and how often? Here's some hard data.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warned that more intense droughts and heat waves will cause famine and water shortages. But, don't worry! Yesterday, the GOP held a hearing to tell us the IPCC is, in fact, a global conspiracy to control our lives and "redistribute wealth among nations."

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It's only May, and already America has seen 288 cases of measles. That's the highest number of reported cases since the disease was officially eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, and the highest number reported in the first five months of a year since 1994. Why the resurgence? Unvaccinated U.S. residents.

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This is the most cynical, horrifying thing I've heard in ages. PETA has restarted a campaign to try and pretend there's some link between "autism and dairy products," in an attempt to scare people into going Vegan.

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This month the Australian Church of Scientology opened their renovated headquarters. It’s located in downtown Sydney in a heritage building dating back to 1908. The $14 million project has birthed an array of new and exorbitant facilities, with its sole purpose being to lure new acolytes.

Historically, Scientology spread failry quickly in the land down under. After officially starting in America in 1952, there was enough of a following to hold a Scientology Congress in Melbourne by 1954. The Australian branch of the Church even became the regional headquarters of the entire Asia-Pacific region. But like in America, reports of the macabre have long overshadowed the church, and it now seems these are starting to catch up.

The group has always been optimistic when expressing their numbers. They claim to have 150,000 members in Australia, despite census numbers putting the figure at fewer than 3,000. To put that in perspective, its less than the number of Aussie Satanists and witches. What’s more, it was shown in 2011 that these numbers are dwindling. Jim Lippard believes we can credit this to the internet, which has robbed the church's power to sweep things under the rug.

The former chief spokesperson for Scientology in Australia Mike Rinder was candid in his explanation of why the Australian brand of Scientology is potentially at risk: “Australians tend to be pretty down-to-earth, and bullshit don't fly." Case in point: the church's recently rejected rehab center.

The optimistic membership figures are consistent with the decision to pimp out the headquarters. But as Mark Rinder goes on to explain, the money spent on construction could be doing more harm than good. "Too much money goes to international management, and they're buying buildings, so they can't use that money for staff.” Hence why they might be forced to spend truckloads of money on employee back payments.

In order to make my own mind up, I decided to see the headquarters for myself. I called the church's head office, and after several days of deliberation, they agreed to give me a tour. I suspect it wasn’t a coincidence that this was arranged for a peak period of business, the 5 PM rush hour.

The outside of the building melds surprisingly well with its surroundings. However, this all changes when you walk inside. As soon as you step through the entrance, the vibrant lighting and futuristic decor make you feel like you’re on the set of the latest terrible sci-fi dystopian flick. It’s prompt validation that this is not your average church.

I was soon acquainted with my guides, Carolyn and Colin. Both were dressed in Navy-esque uniforms, which are intended to honor Hubbard’s time spent in the Navy. The first stop of the tour was in a similarly honorary vein: the L Ron Hubbard memorial office, fitted with a library of his very own books. I was told this was “a mark of thanks to Hubbard.” I suppose the $600 million he acquired through the church wasn't enough.

After this, the led me upstairs to see the new chapel and café. I should note at this stage how bizarrely flaccid the tour was—if these were their peak hours, it's safe to say that business ain't booming.

Inside the chapel, there were tiled murals and a bronze bust of the big homie Hubbard (the dude is never farther than arm's reach in any part of the church). 

I was informed that the time had come for me to discharge my emotional baggage, so we got in an elevator and made our way up to the auditing section. Auditing is the central process of Scientology, where subjects are purportedly cleared of negative influences in order to reach a state of Zen. It involves a practitioner and a divisive machine known as an e-meter. Author Paulette Cooper believes that in the eyes of church members, auditing puts the science in scientology.

We passed a reception desk manned by some brain-dead employees and made our way down a long corridor of identically vacant offices.

“These are all new rooms. In here, this one has the best view.” 

I stepped inside with great reluctance. In the center of the room was a desk and chairs, both adorned with scientology symbols. It was my first encounter with an e-meter (electro-psychometer for those who prefer redundancies).

The machine, which scientologist’s claim will diagnose emotional ills, looks like a prop from the original season of Star Trek. It “works” by sending a small electrical current through wires that are attached to dual cans held by the user. The cans measure resistance, i.e., to what degree a body opposes the passage of the electric current.

According to the church, when subjects using an e-meter recall traumatic memories, their mind produces a charge that triggers the dial on the machine to move around. And in 1971, it was ruled in a US District Court that e-meters had to present the following warning label:

“The e-meter is not medically or scientifically useful for the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of any disease. It is not medically or scientifically capable of improving the health or bodily functions of anyone.”

It’s been argued that the belief in an e-meter’s ability to read one’s soul, despite the lack of any serious science to vouch for this at all, is the greatest testament to scientology being a religion.

“Go ahead; hold on to these.”

My guides watched with flashing eyes as I grasped the cans. It was a profoundly unnerving scenario.

“Think of a time that was very stressful for you,” said Carolyn. “The e-meter helps to identify trauma.”

Having prepared for this all beforehand, I decided to do the reverse and focus on a deeply relaxing memory instead—namely, getting high on a beach in Barcelona. I had also read that the movements in the dial can also be attributed to hand moisture, which was thick in my palms.

“There it goes! There it goes again!” exclaimed my guides.

Sure enough, the dial was faintly stirring up and down, the alleged response to a distressing memory. Meanwhile, I was just reflecting on Catalonian chronic.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell this to my wide-eyed tour guides, though, who were staring at me, apparently free from any instinctual need to blink.

Having supposedly been cured of my supposed trauma, I was escorted to what appeared to be a classroom. Colin told me this was where members learned to become auditors. According to AlternativeReligions.com, this costs approximately $50,000. It was therefore no surprise that these rooms were also empty.

My guides explained that the church is primarily kept afloat from the study fees, which go for up to $1,400 per subject. Anyone is free to take up the studies, which involve working through the prolific content of Hubbard under a supervisor’s guidance. They range from introductory courses to advanced ones. The broader study sections were stocked with a myriad of material.

One student was slumbering on a desk. When we drew near, he spotted our trio, shot upright, and apologized frantically. I don’t blame him—I’ve never been a fan of science fiction books myself.

When I left, around 7 PM, the multimillion-dollar compound was still open for business—with no actual members present save for the staff and the lone student desperately trying to stay awake.

This is a short video of General Grievous at the recent MCM Comic Con in London. The cosplayer does a great job of hiding his real arms and legs. Unless that actually IS General Grievous just PRETENDING to be a cosplayer dressed as General Grievous. Stranger things have happened (my roommate brought a girl home last night). I know this isn't the first time this style of costume has been made, it's just the first one I'm posting. What would you do if you had to battle General Grievous? "Find his off switch." Good answer, I'd tell Mace Windu that Grievous killed his family. How many lightsaber fetishes do you think have ended with accidental penis dismemberment? "All of them." I bet you're right. Could you imagine going to the doctor with a lightsaber wedged up your keister? Whatever you do, doc, please -- DON'T TURN IT ON. Keep going for a portrait mode video of Grevious in action. Thanks to King of all Geeks, who had to defeat hundreds of other Jedi in mock lightsaber battle to claim the title.

Wow. The Book of Life trailer is beautiful. It's absolutely stunning. We knew this movie was going to be good-looking, but—wow oh wow—does this trailer give us chills. Cannot wait.

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This is a series of photographs from University of Pennsylvania biology professor Daniel Janzen of a species of caterpillar in Costa Rica (and other Central American countries) that has a realistic looking snake's head on its underside. Plus it will actually try to strike like a snake if you get too close. I don't know about you, but that would trick me if I were a predator. I'm going to eat you! Oh shit, no I'm not! Sorry Mr. Snake, I was just, uh, I was just reaching for these berries. Yeah, I was just going to eat these berries. "Those are poisonous." *swallowing handful* Finally. Keep going for a couple more shots of the please do not back that ass up. Thanks to Dio, who once bit the head off a viper because it was either him or the snake.

I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that things were better back in my day. Hell, even though I have kids and couldn’t name three EDM superstars, I still kind of consider today to be ‘my day.’ More to the point, back when I existed in a coveted and tastemaking demographic, I liked ridiculously stupid shit. For example, I spent hours listening to Murphy’s Law, who are essentially a funk band dressed as punks singing songs about pouring beer on tits. For the record, I still think Murphy’s Law is great, but I’m under no illusions that the reason I love them is anything more than because they came along when I was dumb enough to like just about anything and they happened to be there and imprinted their party-theism on my soul. It’s the same reason we all love our parents. By the time we figure out that they’re gross, dying versions of us with tons of mental problems, we’ve already invested so much time into looking up to them that it’s too late to stop.  Anyway, the thing is, as we navigate the world, it becomes easier and easier to see things as fads or dumb ancillary ideas, rather than parts of a huge tidal wave of culture that we, as reckless youth, are genetically bound to. This separation from the zeitgeist inevitably makes us distant and jaded, regarding new cultural advances. “I climbed on board for KISS, so I GET IT, but the Insane Clown Posse is just total bullshit,” is something that a dumb, old mongoloid who totally doesn’t get it at all anymore may say.  Calling something “total bullshit” implies that it has no redeeming qualities (unless your feelings on the feces of male bovines differ wildly from mine), and the fact is, if something is really, really popular with a different generation, chances are the X factor that is keeping you from enjoying it isn’t the thing you hate, it’s you. SO, without any further ado, here’s a little primer for my peers. I’m gonna explain to you exactly what’s so good about a lot of the shit that your nephews love, that you claim is garbage. Ready? Good. First up:

Twerking: This is women shaking their asses and simulating intercourse in a dynamic and robust way. IF you can ignore the visceral thrill of butts bobbling around like that (and how can you?!?!?) you should still probably appreciate it from a perspective of pure athleticism. Here’s a little test: Get some of your friends in their 30s together. Get kinda drunk. Next, put an instructional ‘how to twerk’ video on youtube. Marvel at how not easy it is to do once everyone starts trying. Now watch the girls in the video. Feel that? That’s your dick being terrified by the dick equivalent of the worlds fastest, most awesome roller coaster. Twerking wastes no time in physically implying that dicks stand no chance. Asses have all the power in the twerkiverse and dicks lucky enough to get invited aboard should just hold on for dear life, and expect no mercy. That’s as subversively anti-penis as a hip hop dance about butts gets. It’s also super hot, and that’s enough to make it great art in my book. Yes, it’s sleazy. When did you get too good for sleaze, you fucking nun?

Dubstep: This shit sounds like noise, sure. It’s not Foghat. Here’s the thing though: Foghat stinks. Classic rock sounded like screeching cacophony in relation to the totally boring music that came before it, and dubstep is just taking that to the next level. I’m not suggesting you need to put Skrillex on and love it or anything, but if you can’t at least understand why music that bums out everyone over thirty and sounds like a rhythmic, danceable version of a bunch of robots killing themselves is appealing to weirdos then your imagination is dead.

Mumford and Sons (etc): I guess this one is out of place because plenty of dipshits my age like this garbage. Here’s what I can say about old Mumford and his brood of incredibly dull progeny: They’re like a dinner theater version of A Mighty Wind without the sense of humor, and watered down, overly emotive versions of things that were good fifty years ago are essentially new again. Look, I guess these guys shouldn’t even be on this list. My aunt likes Mumford and Sons. I see why she does. The lady that grooms our dogs likes Mumford and Sons. They’re older women with adult children. You like mom music. Is it worse than Skrillex? Nah. Is it better? No. It is not.

Those Assholes With Beards and Mustaches and Monocles and Shit: Aaaaaah, the hipster. Everyone hates the hipster, whether it’s the beardo, the twirly stached, the barista, the bike shop dude, or the mixologist. They’re all the same: they wear those annoying sleeve bands and have tattoos that are half oldschool army tattoos and half nonsense (an eagle clutching a steak in its talons with a banner that says ‘Spring Break’ is a tattoo idea that I just came up with that I think one of you should get) and generally they look like 1920’s hobos riding around on pennyfarthings and they think you suck. Well, here’s the thing: they kind of look cool. The 20’s were awesome and the only decades in recorded western culture where facial hair on dudes wasn’t coiffed and maximized for radness were the 50’s (super lame), the 80’s (awesome, and we’ll get back to this), and the fucking 90’s (nu metal, modern hippies, alt rock, fred durst). Hipster face culture has just returned to the sanity of every other decade minus the two turd decades (50’s and 90’s) and spruced in TONS of 80’s for good measure. The 80’s had incredible music, movies and subversive culture. Imagine if they’d been smart enough to keep their uncles’ 70’s mustaches around for all that? Well, these hipster kids are showing you what that mashup may have looked like. I know. They’re dicks. Are you trying to tell me you weren’t a dick when you were 23? Pfft.

Insane Clown Posse: I don’t really like the smell that my nose invents when I think about what it would be like to stand next to a juggalo or two. I’m not a huge fan of junk food or disgusting, drippy sloth or wiry, beef jerky looking dudes asking to see my old lady’s tits, but man, oh man, how cool is it that they all found each other and exist in an easily quarantinable subsect of humanity where they can get super high and listen to mind numbingly dumb music together in the middle of the woods? I had my face juggalo-ized recently for a music video, and putting that paint on was fun. It didn’t look or feel ‘cool’ to me, but I can see why it may to someone else. I also back the notion of inclusion and family that ICP espouses. It’s way better than any other message I’ve ever gotten out of pop culture. ICP is okay with me. Whoop…ahem…Woop, indeed.

New Scary Drugs: Krokodil isn’t real enough to be scared of and it’s not new. People have been melting down pills and trying to shoot them and fucking themselves up with under-the-sink home pharmacies forever. Krokodil ain’t nothing but a good old fashioned media scare. So is Bath Salts. Bath Salts are just clean meth with a slightly different compound that makes em a little harder to ban. That guy who ate that bum: he was high on weed and homebrewed craziness. There were no bath salts. That was a media narrative that was conveniently dropped when his toxicology reports came back. No kids are doing anything any scarier than they’ve always done. They’re still driving drunk and shooting heroin and cooking meth. Those things are all bad. They’re also not new, and not in danger of being replaced by things made with pee, or things that make you eat strange faces. People like you and me (marketing dipshits in our 30’s) make up stories like those to terrify our parents into watching the news. That’s all it is. Relax. Remember jenkem (google if you dare)? Krokodil and bath salts are one click more real than jenkem. No more being scared of bullshit, kay? Good.

Those dumb super high waisted pants everyone is wearing: Nah…can’t back these. Sorry. That shit just doesn’t look good. Eh, prove me wrong, I guess.

Listen, I gotta go, but this was a good start. The Lawrence Arms is leaving tomorrow for our Midwestern tour. You should come out and hang. Personally, I think it’s gonna be a real gas. Okay, love you guys! xoxoxoxo

Sometimes a relatively dense academic book breaks out of the Ivory Tower and takes the world by storm. Such is the case with French economics professor Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Here's one reason why the book is capturing people's imaginations — and fueling speculation about our global future.

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After this post on antibiotic resistance, many of you may have seen an exchange on Twitter calling me out for being “knee-jerk” about my call to action to do something about the overuse of antibiotics. In that post, I focused on antibiotic use in agriculture, giving only brief mention to human clinical use. There are a number of reasons for this, and while I didn’t discuss them extensively on Twitter, I did want to provide an overview here in order to better explain my position and concern about antibiotic use in agriculture.

How are antibiotics used in animal production?

To start, some background on the issues. Antibiotics are used in agriculture in a number of different ways. Like humans, they’re used to treat disease when animals get sick. This type of use isn’t disputed for the most part–no one wants animals to die from treatable disease, nor do they want sick animals to enter the food chain. Antibiotics can also be used to prevent disease, such as when animals are stressed (as when they’re moved from farm to farm) and disease has a tendency to break out, or if a few animals in the herd are sick and owners want to prevent the rest of the herd from falling ill. This type of use is somewhat controversial, and many have argued that this type of use is only necessary because hygienic conditions on farms aren’t up to snuff–and that if better husbandry was practiced, this prophylactic use could also be significantly decreased or eliminated. Others argue that it’s necessary even with good husbandry.

The practice which is most widely disputed is the use of antibiotics for growth promotion. We’ve known for roughly 60 years that animals, when fed antibiotics at low doses (below the level required for disease treatment),  grow to their slaughter weight faster (and therefore, with less food input). This is the “low-hanging fruit;” the practice that even some in industry agree could end with pretty much no (or minimal) side effects to industry; and the practice that the European Union has already ended. It’s also the target of FDA guidance 213, which asks the phamaceutical industry to voluntarily phase out the use of growth promotant antibiotics in feed and water given to livestock. Twenty-five of 26 companies have agreed to this already, so again, there’s really not much dispute that this is a process that will be ending, after over 60 years of use and 45 years after a government report suggested that rising rates of antibiotic resistance in humans was tied to agricultural antibiotic use in the Swann report. (Maryn McKenna has a great timeline of other developments here).

Why am I (and many others) concerned about the use of antibiotics in agriculture?

First, and most compelling to me, is the fact that between 70-80% of all antibiotics used in the United States are used in agriculture. I’m linking to a PolitiFact report because they drill down into the caveats with that number in more detail than I want to go into for this post, but I will note that it’s tough to get good numbers because the industry won’t release them, and that the numbers we do have include drugs that are not used in human medicine–but that doesn’t mean they may not be important. More on that later.

Second, this is my area of expertise. I study antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the agricultural environment, so naturally this is my interest and where I know the literature the best. Third, antibiotic use in agriculture just isn’t as intensively studied when it comes to methods to reduce antibiotic-resistant microbes that may emerge from this setting. In the hospital and clinics, patients need a prescription to get antibiotics. The amount of antibiotics that are prescribed are tracked and those data are available. Hospitals often have stringent infection-control policies put in place to reduce the generation and spread of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.” Hell, there’s enough research on these policies that my colleagues have a blog devoted just to that topic. In human medicine, no one is ignoring the generation and spread of resistant pathogens.

None of these control and monitoring policies are present on livestock farms as a matter of routine. Rather, as my colleague Lance Price has noted more than once, if he was going to try to create a superbug, farm use of antibiotics–subclinical dosing of thousands of animals at a time–would be an ideal way to create one.

What if we remove “growth promotant” antibiotics?

What remains an issue is what will happen after growth-promotant antibiotic use is stopped. There is already a “natural  experiment” going on in the EU, where such antibiotics were banned back in 2006. As I noted here, the results have been mixed when antibiotics have been removed from agricultural practices. Sometimes resistance persists, sometimes it goes down. A modeling paper examined the use of antibiotics for agricultural use, and suggested that their biggest impact happens before we even realize it via surveillance, and by the time we notice it, it may be too late to make much of a difference, which is depressing.  So even if antibiotics are banned for growth promotion purposes, there is a chance that we won’t see much of a dent in antibiotic resistance overall–or if we do, it may take years to see it decrease. This is an argument against removal of these sub-therapeutic uses–if we can’t 100% guarantee it will help, why change the status quo?–but at this point, even the current status quo is better than an ever-increasing arc of resistant bacteria.

Another concern that persists and muddies the waters is that no meaningful reduction in antibiotic use in animals will occur, but that rather antibiotics used for growth promotion will just be repackaged as “prophylactic” use, which will still be allowed under the new guidance. The industry says this won’t happen, but without meaningful and transparent surveillance, how can we know if it is or not?

Additionally, other sources of low-level antibiotics may still be present on farms and in feed, such as the use of distiller’s grains in animal feed which may still contain some antibiotics. And even if antibiotics that are important for human medicine are removed altogether, resistance still may linger or even climb if we allow for other classes of antimicrobials (such as ionophores, which are part of that group I mentioned above that are used in agriculture but not in human medicine) to still be used on the farms. Why could this be an issue? Right now, we really don’t know if any of these drugs co-select for resistance to important human medicines. For example, in some cases, antibiotic resistance genes are together as cassettes that can move around between bugs, such as on a plasmid or other mobile genetic element. That’s why using tetracycline on a pig farm can select for methicillin resistance–not because the drugs are the same (they’re totally different classes), but because the resistance genes come as a package deal. Is this happening with ionophores? Don’t know. It’s a messy area and makes any clear-cut cause-and-effect research very difficult to carry out.

To make matters even messier, because there’s so much transport of animals across state, national, and international lines, even if antibiotics are reduced in one place, new resistant bugs could be imported from elsewhere where no reduction in antibiotic use has taken place, mucking up the data and making it appear that antibiotic withdrawal has had no effect.

Furthermore, there is no directive for companies to actually track and report antibiotic usage differences after growth-promotant antibiotics are removed. We can’t even get good data on the industry as a whole, much less finer-level data describing how much goes to pigs, how much to cattle, how much on Iowa pig farms versus North Carolina, or for Smithfield versus Hormel farms, etc. It’s a surveillance nightmare. Even if we did have this data, surveillance of resistant pathogens is quite limited, especially on the farms themselves. Most of the data we have comes from NARMS–the national antimicrobial resistance monitoring system, which examines gram negative pathogens in people, meat samples, and live animals (taken at slaughterhouses). It’s a start, but what if we don’t see an effects in these organisms–but might in other commensal pathogens, or in the microbiome as a whole? Or in gram positives like my pet bug, Staphylococcus aureus? NARMS right now would miss those, and so might lead to false impressions of how reduction in antibiotics is really affecting resistance in the bacteria originating on farms.

Soooo….as you can see, this is a messy area. However, as I noted on Twitter, one should look at the totality of the research rather than searching for any particular “smoking gun” publication (a fallacy, I might add, that is employed by many types of science “skeptics”). There have been many, many papers that have shown, usually in ecological studies, that use of antibiotics on the farm is linked to generation of resistant bacteria, and that these bacteria (and associated resistance genes) can spread to humans via food, water, environmental runoff/contamination, air, and other mechanisms. Pew Health has an extensive bibliography of many of these studies here, and it’s barely even scratching the surface when it comes to publications in this field. In the end, though it’s messy, it breaks down to a simple truth: antibiotic use leads to antibiotic resistance, and reduced use is a goal to strive for–be it use in humans or in animals.

We've always known that the second season of HBO series True Detective would be a complete reboot (of sorts). The new season will have new characters and a new locations. And now we know where the new season will take place!

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The Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission just saw something bright in the Andromeda Galaxy. It was either a Gamma-Ray Burst or an Ultraluminous X-Ray Object, but either way it will be the closest event we've ever observed. ...unless it's just a known X-ray object.

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