Each week on The Dinner Party Download an artist picks three or four songs they'd play at their ideal dinner party and explains why they picked the track. They then (usually) close it out with one of their own standout songs. This time it’s Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker.
Yesterday, 32-year-old Philadelphia police officer Matthew Zagursky was caught on a video extorting a driver and his passenger whom he had stopped for a traffic violation.
“Either you buy these or I take your car,”
Zagursky said.
Officer Zagursky informed the drivers they could either buy two $10 tickets for a police department fundraiser or have their car towed for outdated registration. After the driver agreed, Officer Zagursky gestured to the passenger, upping the extortion amount to $30.
“Let him buy one too, or I’ll take your shit,”
Zagursky said in the video.
Yeah. Extortion. Does it again prove that cops are the real gang? - I think it does. They kill us, they steal our money (i don’t mean our taxes, they really DO steal money from people and business) they extorting… Well i guess it’s not that “protecting n serving” we need.
#Cops #Police #Extortion #Philly #Abuse
#StayWoke
I’m so interested in what bullshit the people who ride so hard for cops are gonna say to excuse this shit.
Heavily disputed upon its release, often criticized as an occasionally senseless portrayal of a future with a shallow storyline and abundance of plot holes semi-efficiently covered up by admittedly wonderful visuals, this science-fiction masterpiece is still regarded as a strong polarizing factor in discussions among filmlovers.
I want to conclude the Pakistan series by spotlighting a very special change agent who is working to eradicate one of the nation’s most pressing social ills. Over 20,000 brick kilns operate in Pakistan, supported by millions of workers, and the system is largely underpinned by an extremely close cousin of slavery—bonded labor. Throughout rural Pakistan, illiterate and desperate laborers are tricked into accepting small loans in exchange for agreeing to work at brick kilns for a small period of time. But due to predatory terms, their debt balloons, growing larger as time goes on, with no possibility of repayment, until these laborers are condemned to work for the rest of their lives for no compensation. If the laborer dies, the debt is passed on to his or her children. The practice is illegal. But due to the extreme power and wealth of brick kiln owners, the law is often unenforced in rural areas. It is estimated that well over one million men, women, and children are trapped in this modern feudalist system.
Meet Syeda Ghulam Fatima. Described as a modern day Harriet Tubman, Fatima has devoted her life to ending bonded labor. She has been shot, electrocuted, and beaten numerous times for her activism. Quite literally, she places herself between the workers and their owners. The organization she leads, the Bonded Labour Liberation Front, is small but determined. It is working to set up Freedom Centers throughout rural Pakistan so that every bonded laborer has access to advocacy and legal aid. Fatima operates on a very small budget. So as we learn her story over the next few days, anyone wishing to help empower Fatima can donate to Bonded Labour Liberation Front here:
The truth is hard to deduce when a couple’s relationship breaks down, violently, with both sides telling their stories behind the glow of a computer screen.
On Facebook, presidential candidate Deez Nuts (a.k.a. 15-year-old Brady Olson) endorsed Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican John Kasich for their parties’ respective nominations. “This is not for the general election,” he clarified. “I endorse myself for the GE.”
Reddit’s ultimate subreddit has a fascinating thread right now about users’ controversial opinions about ultimate.
Here is a representative list of top-level comments (some have been lightly edited) — there’s a lot more in the way of discussion at the link. What’s your take on the below? What’s your controversial opinion about ultimate?
1. The occasional out-of-bounds pull isn’t a big deal; it’s better to put the offense in a bad position 80% of the time and brick the other 20% than it is to give off a free first throw.
2. Swearing shouldn’t be a Team Misconduct Foul (TMF) unless directed negatively at anyone.
3. There’s too little of a penalty for fouling on the mark. I also think TMFs and PMFs should be used WAY more. I want people who take advantage of the rules thrown out.
4. I remember studying the rules of a few sports in junior high school and having no problems scoring 100% on every written exam for them, despite having no interest in any of those sports at the time. I’ve played ultimate on and off ever since then, and regularly for at least six years now and I still find the official rules utterly incomprehensible. The verbosity, the jargon, the omission of summary or baseline scenarios to give you a mental framework for the game or the goals of a set of rules before diving into edge cases and specifics, it all drives me insane. If I ever have to consult the official rules, I anticipate no less than 10 minutes of pure frustration.
5. Four team tournaments that take one day and three games are played should be the norm. All weekend events should be special occasions.
6. Passing a rigorous rules knowledge test should be required to participate in the college or club series.
7. There should be a two point line.
8. The game would be much better if we just had refs already. You can have spirit of the game with refs.
9. The Innova Pulsar is a pretty good disc
10. Ultimate will be better off it never becomes a NCAA sport.
11. I like boring play. I like handlers who can throw a disc well enough that there’s no need to layout or sky three defenders to make the catch. I like 50 throw zone offense points that run a cup ragged and score with a three yard pass. I like defenders who are such a presence that their man never gets the disc. My ultimate would never make it on Sports Center.
12. This sport will not be taken seriously by those outside the community within our lifetimes.
13. I would like to experiment with a penalty box. For a lot of fouls it seems like the penalty isn’t that bad, I think some sort of penalty box where the team plays down a man for 30 seconds or a minute would make players less likely to foul. You’d probably need refs or observers for this to work.
I’m not saying this would necessarily be a good rule change, but I think it would be interesting if one of the pro leagues ran with a penalty box for a season, to see how it affects the game.
14. I hate spirit circles or whatever they’re called. Why do I have to stand in a circle with the players of both teams after the match? We all know how the game went and it makes us looks like a bunch of tools in my opinion.
15. I don’t care about the “culture” of ultimate. I play because it’s fun, not because it’s “underground” or has some unique take on sportsmanship.
16. There should be no “spirit of the game” mantra. There should be good sportsmanship, as there should be in any game, and if you don’t have that, you’re a shitty person, but you’re as much an ultimate player as anyone else.
17. Competitive (read club/semi-pro/pro) should be single gender only. Mixed gender should be reserved for pickup and city league.
18. Gloves should not be allowed under any circumstances. I think it’s just ridiculous.
19. Flip the rugby script: No backwards passes allowed.
19. Ultimate should never become an Olympic sport.
20. The sideline in-out rules should be similar to basketball or cricket. None of this ‘you can toe it in, then run out the field as far as you like stuff’. If you’re touching the disc, you should have to stay fully in bounds. If your momentum is taking you out of bounds, you should be forced to offload the disc quickly or risk a turnover.
21. Ultimate consists primarily of over-privileged white people who merely went to mid-tier private liberal arts colleges.
22. [Mixed] should be played 8v8 with 4 men and 4 women to promote equality.
23. Semi-pro ultimate should be mixed-gender only.
24. The sport would be better if played 6v6 on normal sized fields, rather than 7v7 or 7v7 with pro league fields.
25. Play shouldn’t stop for an injured defensive player until there is a turnover unless the injury was caused directly by the offense or it is extremely serious.
Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post, Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company's current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit...
Recently, SuperSkyScrapers held an interesting architectural competition in Mumbai, India: how do you tackle housing shortages in densely populated regions around the world? The competition was focused on one type of repurposed resource: shipping containers.
“Cocktails are not worth intellectualizing, they are just something to be experienced,” he once said in an interview. “The fact that people talk about cocktails like one might talk about like wine, which you have to grow, is laughable. A cocktail is a simple thing—what matters is if you make it right.”
Sasha Petraske, the visionary founder of influential cocktail bar Milk & Honey, passed away on Aug. 21 at the age of 42. Petraske and his bar—based in the Lower East Side in New York and Soho in London—are widely credited with the revival of cocktail and bartender culture.
Petraske’s friends, peers, and fans grieved his passing and paid homage to his legacy on Twitter.
RIP Sasha Petraske, creator of Milk & Honey and the speakeasy movement in the bar industry. pic.twitter.com/z8BMULf9Mm
From a focus on classic, pre-Prohibition drinks to the “bartender’s choice” option on many menus, you can’t walk into a bar today without seeing Petraske’s influence. And although he popularized craft cocktails and formal wear for bartenders, his opinions were simple and unpretentious.
“Cocktails are not worth intellectualizing, they are just something to be experienced,” he once said in an interview. “The fact that people talk about cocktails like one might talk about like wine, which you have to grow, is laughable. A cocktail is a simple thing—what matters is if you make it right.”
The Observer has suggested drinking one of Petraske’s O’Clássicos (avuá cachaça prata, lime, simple syrup, sugar, and ice) as a tribute to the man.
A jury awarded retired basketball player Michael Jordan $8.9 million in his lawsuit against a grocery store chain that used his name in a one-page magazine advertisement without his permission, the Chicago Tribune and other local media reported.
Jordan, 52, led the Chicago Bulls to six National Basketball Association championships in the 1990s. He retired from professional basketball 12 years ago.
The jury deliberated six hours after a two-week trial in federal court in Chicago, and decided on the award amount on Friday evening.
Jordan took the stand earlier in the week to claim he should be paid $10 million, which his business managers said was the fair market value for the advertisement, which appeared in a 2009 commemorative edition of Sports Illustrated to celebrate his career.
Attorneys for the defendants, now-defunct Dominick's Finer Foods, a division of Safeway [MRWAY.UL], had claimed the advertisement was worth far less, around $127,000.
Jordan told reporters he was pleased with the jury's decision and said he would donate the money to charity, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
His lawyer was not immediately available for comment.
Last year he made $100 million from marketing his image through long-term deals with companies such as Nike, Hanes and Gatorade.
A man with an AK-47 on a high-speed train between Amsterdam and Paris was subdued on Friday (Aug. 21) by three Americans on holiday. A 26-year-old man of Moroccan origin, reportedly known to French security services, was arrested at the station in the town of Arras, near the border between France and Belgium.
The aftermath.(Reuters/Pascal Rossignol -)
The Americans are Anthony Sadler, a student at Sacramento State University, and his friends, Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos, who are members of Air Force and the National Guard, respectively. Here’s what we know about what happened:
The incident started around 5:45 p.m. local time in the last carriage of the TGV train (link in French). The man walked out of the toilets with a Kalashnikov, an automatic pistol, and razor blades, and started walking through the carriages, shooting. “I heard gunshots, probably two, and a guy collapsed,” Cathleen Christina Coons, a New Yorker on holiday in Europe, told Le Monde. “There was blood everywhere, apparently he was hit in the neck.”
“We heard a gunshot and we heard glass breaking behind us and saw a train employee sprint past us down the aisle,” Sadler said, according to The Guardian. “As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells, ‘Spencer, go!’ and Spencer runs down the aisle. Spencer makes first contact, he tackles the guy, Alek wrestles the gun away from him.”
Chris Norman, a 62-year-old British consultant who lives in France, said: “I came in at the end and I guess just helped get the guy under control at the end of it all. We ended up by tying him up, then during the process the guy actually pulled out a cutter and starting cutting Spencer. He cut Spencer behind the neck, he nearly cut his thumb off, too.”
After that, Sadler said the “three of us beat him until he was unconscious.” This is the aftermath of the event, according to video from another passenger (warning: there’s some blood):
Sadler said the attacker didn’t say anything while the fight was going on, but was chatty afterwards. “He was just telling us to give back his gun. ‘Give me back my gun! Give me back my gun!’ But we just carried on beating him up and immobilized him and that was it.”
Apparently, the man’s AK-47 jammed. “If that guy’s weapon had been functioning properly, I don’t even want to think about how it would have went,” Skarlatos told Sky News. “We just did what we had to do. You either run away or fight. We chose to fight and got lucky and didn’t die.”
Two men are being treated in hospital in Lille. The Americans and the Brit have been given medals for bravery from the mayor of Arras. US president Barack Obama and French president Francois Hollande have also praised their bravery. “I’m just a college student,” Sadler said. “I came to see my friends for my first trip to Europe and we stop a terrorist. It’s kind of crazy.”
of course a robot like Malcolm Gladwell would measure this economically
One of the tragedies of Katrina was that so many of New Orleans’ residents were forced to move. But the severity of that tragedy is a function of where they were forced to move to. Was it somewhere on the Salt Lake City end of the continuum? Or was it a place like Fayetteville? The best answer we have is from the work of the sociologist Corina Graif, who tracked down the new addresses of seven hundred women displaced by Katrina—most of them lower-income and black. By virtually every measure, their new neighborhoods were better than the ones they had left behind in New Orleans. Median family income was forty-four hundred dollars higher. Ethnic diversity was greater. More people had jobs. Their exposure to “concentrated disadvantage”—an index that factors in several measures of poverty—fell by half a standard deviation.
The next presidential election will feature some of the most controversial topics in decades. Find out which Republican candidate has the intelligence, agili...
In a big survey conducted with Gallup and released today, Google found a range of dysfunctional reasons more K-12 students aren’t learning computer science skills. Perhaps the most surprising: schools don’t think the demand from parents and students is there.
Super Opinionated.
Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post, Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company's current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit...
