Chron.com

Family of boy shot dead by Cleveland officer sues Chron.com Pastor Henry Currie of Mary B. Wise Baptist Church collects himself during services for Tamir Rice, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2014, in Willoughby, Ohio. Rice, 12, was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer late last month. Police told The Plain Dealer the ... and more »

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submitted by gak_pdx [link] [168 comments]

For gun manufacturers, no customer rivals the Pentagon for prestige and revenue potential. That’s why, after years of anticipation, firearm makers are mobilizing for the U.S. Army’s imminent competition to replace the Beretta M9 pistol, the American soldier’s standard sidearm since 1985.

Those of us who don’t check Pottermore regularly, take heed!

In a message to site’s members, J.K Rowling has announced that she will begin publishing new content every day this month leading up to Christmas, beginning on December 12th.

According to The Telegraph, Rowling will be sharing “her thoughts on Draco Malfoy” as well as “brand new writing [...] and even a new potion or two”.

Rowling’s decision to shed light on Malfoy follows the precedent she’s already set of focusing on antagonists for her Pottermore original content–previous stories have featured Rita Skeeter and Dolores Umbridge.

Enjoy, Tumblr.

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This year, California weathered its biggest pertussis – aka "whooping cough" – epidemic in seventy years (for a whopping dose of perspective, see the graph up top). A new report from the CDC says the outbreak could be a sign of things to come.

Read more...

My superhero loving 7yo daughter not impressed when she spotted this sign in @Tesco today @LetToysBeToys pic.twitter.com/8F3bsRv6PK

— Karen Cole (@karlou) November 22, 2014

As a fan of The Flash, Batman Superman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman, 7-year-old Maggie was not impressed when she discovered this sign for superhero toys in her local UK Tesco. Luckily, neither was Tesco!

After Maggie’s mom Karen Cole shared her daughter’s disapproval via Twitter, Tesco wisely admitted the signs were a mistake. A store representative told Buzzfeed News, “This alarm clock would make a great gift for both girls and boys [...] The sign has been removed and we’re sorry if it caused any confusion.”

Cole said of her daughter,

She spotted the sign before I did and pointed it out to me by indignantly saying something like, “Well that’s wrong! Anybody can like superheroes, they’re being stupid aren’t they?”

“[A]s well as superheroes she loves Doctor Who, Minecraft, dragons, skeletons and zombies (she had a cemetery cake for her birthday!) but also likes Frozen, princesses, kittens etc. [...] She just thinks shops labelliing [sic] toys for boys or girls is silly: ‘I can like what I want.’

Keep up the good work, Maggie!

(Via The Daily Dot)

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Perhaps recognizing that he’s never really directed anything, let alone part of a huge franchise that’s known for setting off cranky Internet people who hate things that are new, Roberto Orci has reportedly stepped down from directing Star Trek 3—which he was attached to back in May. Maybe he got cold feet after he realized that he couldn’t possibly live up to the pointless secrecy and terrible title of J.J. Abrams’ last Star Trek movie, or maybe he couldn’t face working on a big project like that without the help of his Best Buddy, Alex Kurtzman—who has since moved on to manage some of Sony’s Spider-Man movies by himself. Whatever the reason, Deadline says he has jumped off of the spinning director’s chair on the bridge of the USS Star Trek 3 and will be settling for a producer’s chair ...

I've generally avoided any coverage of the Gamergate issue. It's well covered elsewhere, and tends to verge into the no-politics limits set here at EN World, and is mainly about videogaming, which I rarely cover. However, this intersects directly with tabletop gaming, and RPG gaming's primary vendor (other than Paizo.com) of electronic products and its role as gatekeeper, and as such is worth discussing. Everything after this sentence is written by the original poster, Alzrius, and is his own opinion. - Morrus.


(Note to the mods: My hope is that this does not run afoul of the "no politics" rule, and that we can discuss this here without consequence. If you feel

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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	Courtney shared this story from Boing Boing:
	Fuck Chris Rock's "I hope it isn't true" re his old friend Bill Cosby - a thing I notice nobody is mentioning when they enthuse about this article. He hopes over a dozen women are lying? Really? Fuck him.

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Racism in America, defined succinctly by Chris Rock in this interview: “White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy.” Read the rest

Courtney shared this story from the dirty normal.

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So late to the party on this one because I’ve been busy with my actual job preventing sexual violence, but:

You have probably heard about the Carry That Weight campaign protesting college sexual assault.

New York Magazine‘s big story about the original case included this interesting paragraph:

Is there a rampant hook-up culture on campus today? Of course there is. Does the promiscuity that third-wave feminists heralded as empowerment look a little less attractive when practiced by teenagers with little experience and less maturity? You bet. And frustration with hook-up culture is undeniably a part of the anti-rape movement. 

And I just want to take a moment to toss a little confounding science into the claim that “of course there is a rampant hookup culture.”

Here are some data from the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment (NCHA), which is THE college health behavior instrument:

Spring 2014 (PDF):  85% of women and 81% of men reported having zero, one, or two sex partners in the last year.

Spring 2009(PDF): 87% of women and 81% of men report having zero, one, or two sex partners in the last year

Spring 2000(PDF) (the first spring semester for which ACHA data exist): 90% of women and 82% of men report having zero, one or two sex partners in the last year.

So if what you mean by “rampant hookup culture” is “more students having more sex partners than 15 years ago,” then no. There is not a rampant hookup culture.

If what you mean by “rampant hookup culture” is “around 15-20% of college students having three or more sex partners in a year, pretty steadily for the last fifteen years,” then yes. Rampant hookup culture.

“Promiscuity.”

Sure.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Blackstonian.

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Editor’s note: Marky Mark Wahlberg’s racist past should not be pardoned. To pardon Wahlberg would be another affirmation that the rich and the famous are treated differently from “regular” people.  Wahlberg has never publicly acknowledged the particular racist element of his crimes and while he may be philanthropic, the majority of his efforts are certainly not focused on the groups whom he attacked or to my knowledge racial equality and justice in general. Perhaps at some point in the future Wahlberg can show himself worthy of a pardon after working towards restoring his image within the communities of color he offended and so viciously attacked. In the meantime a pardon for Wahlberg is not necessary. His criminal record, unlike so many others, doesn’t seem to be preventing him from getting good jobs and making a living.

To Pardon Marky Mark Wahlberg Is To Pardon Racism

Right now many are sympathizing with Mark Wahlberg’s recent plea for a pardon. I am not one of them. One of the benefits of being a Blackstonian through and through is that I been here and paying attention for a long time.

Back in the days in Codman Sq. when I was 15 yrs old and getting into trouble of my own Boston was still smoldering with racial tensions from the 60′s & 70′s.  I was already rapping and had on my name belt buckle and carried a .007 (really big knife). Codman Sq. was a typical “Around the way” location complete with the store that sold weed in little manila envelopes.  There were problems in Codman Sq. but it was a community. In those times nothing brought community together like a racist incident.

You can imagine our shock when we heard that there was this crazy white boy terrorizing people from the hood. We heard he even threw rocks at a school bus full of kids while yelling “nigger.”  By the 80′s Black people had had enough of the rocks and buses. The nerve of this white boy. We were going to find him and teach him a hard lesson.  We never did catch him, which was good I guess, because with the climate back then he most certainly would have gotten severely beaten and using the terminology of the day “stomped” and “doinked.”

By now you know that  the crazy white boy was Mark Wahlberg. Many of you are hearing about his racist past for the first time and may be skeptical. The Attorney General filed a civil action against Wahlberg for a series of racial assaults against a group of black children and their teacher.
Wahlberg had already attacked the same children days before and seeing them at a school trip to Savin Hill  Beach took the opportunity to chase them from the area throwing rocks and yelling racial epithets.  Later in a separate incident he violated his court order when he attacked 2 VietNamese men trying to rob one for liquour and leaving him blind in one eye.

Some of Marky Mark Wahlberg’s statements during the several incidents include:
“We don’t like black niggers in the area so get the f**k away from the area”
“Kill the nigger, kill the nigger”
“Vietnam f**king sh*t”
“Gooks”
“Slant-eyed gooks”

As always let me provide you proof. From The Smoking Gun.
Full court documents here:  http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/back-day-marky-marks-rap-sheet-0

submitted by dodoloko [link] [62 comments]

Black students at UC Berkeley staged a four and a half hour sit-in on campus Thursday to protest the extrajudicial killings of black men. The duration of the protest was a symbolic nod to the amount of time Mike Brown's lifeless body lay in a Ferguson street in August.

According to Eater:

Around noon [on Thursday], the group blockaded The Golden Bear, one of Cal's more popular spots for breakfast and lunch, tweeting that "No one eats until we get justice!" Surrounded by a 300-person crowd of sympathetic fellow students and community members, the students spoke out against the verdicts and a larger culture of systematic discrimination and violence by the police against the black community.

The students have continued their protest throughout the afternoon, demanding demilitarization of law enforcement, a national "End Racial Profiling" act, and investigation of the criminalization of communities of color.

Uplifting the National Demands!!! #BlackLivesMatter #Ferguson2Cal #ItEndsToday pic.twitter.com/CjWTEWGpBJ

-- BlackOUT Collective (@blackoutcollect) December 4, 2014

The Golden Bear Cafe will be shut down for 4.5 hours #Ferguson2cal pic.twitter.com/DzdQecbp0L

-- BLAKE (@B_A_Simons) December 4, 2014

(h/t Eater)

i’d rather not get messages like this and then be expected to keep it quiet for your comfort. do you realize how condescending that is? i don’t know who you are (at least not from your username), so it’s not like we’ve established some rapport and you’re genuinely trying to work through or unpack some shit with me. which i do quite frequently, by the way. i respond to a lot of messages i get privately. but when you ask me to respond to some white nonsense like this not because you’re dealing with something difficult, but because you don’t want to deal with the repercussions of your potentially offensive words, i’m not inclined to care about that. 

i don’t care about bladderfrack calamityboat at all, i’m tired of seeing his flesh-canvas-stretched-over-an-endoskeleton face, and i don’t even understand why i need to justify my disappointment in Marvel YET AGAIN being as safe as humanly possible. and please, don’t come to a person of color (one who regularly and consistently writes about representation, so it’s not like you could possibly be surprised I care about the issue) with that kind of nonsense. i don’t care if you haven’t seen “proof” because newsflash: something being a missed opportunity or whitewashing doesn’t rely on your sole judgment for it to be true.

Today I pulled up an old New York Times article reporting the news that Paris’ subway system had eliminated its First and Second class carriage system. But the newspaper article wasn’t from 1950-something, it was from 1991. 

Image (c) Flickr, Alexandre C

Forgive me, but for someone living in a country whose national motto is “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”, and having traveled the metro for several years, blissfully unaware that until just over a decade ago, its class system was what most distinguished it from all other subways of the world– this was just a little surprising to me.

As trains swept into stations, the single yellow car that carried the No. 1 was always emptier than the others, offering a safe haven from crowds and wandering minstrels to anyone willing to pay 50 percent more than the price of the ordinary ticket. But this week, the cry of egalite finally went underground … first-class subway cars have been eliminated, and one of the cheapest ways of displaying social or at least economic superiority in Paris abruptly vanished…

Image (c) Flickr, DPrezat

A distressed retired school mistress told the NYT reporter, “I have been going first class all my life. My parents would never let me go second class. Now I think I’ll go by bus.” A homeless man was quoted as he stepped into a former first-class car for the first time, already marked with graffiti, “This is the end of the class struggle”.

Image (c) Yann Caderec

In reality, at the time of the elimination of the segregated metro, the allure of traveling first class had lost its sheen by the 1970s. Boarding a first-class car while holding a second-class ticket was not uncommon amongst passengers and easy to get away with. Since 1982, the colour-coded first class carriage had been allocated a schedule of 9am-5pm, during which time its segregational function would be in effect; outside of those hours, the car was open to all passengers.

Image (c) Yann Caderec

But of course there was a time when the distinction between first and second class in the Parisian underworld was very clear. Some senior citizens could even recall avoiding first-class cars during World War II to avoid the occupying Nazi soldiers that were travelling in them.

Image (c) Jean-Christophe Robin

Image (c) Jean Christophe Robin

The two classes were clearly painted in different colours, red for first and and green for second, and the carriage class number was repeatedly indicated on the seat and window decals throughout the car. Seats in first were comfortable and upholstered with leather, while second-class passengers bounced around on hard wooden benches. “Class” was worth paying for, particularly during rush hour.

At the time of the transition, the NYT reported that some passengers were having trouble adjusting to the elimination of the metro’s class carriages:

The yellow car with the conspicuous No. 1 is still stopping in the middle of subway stations.”The class distinction stays in my head,” said an African immigrant who gave his name as Mr. Inombe. “I’m used to going to either end of the platform.” …

Food for thought next time you’re looking for the least crowded carriage on the Parisian metro!

Images taken on the Metro ‘open day’ Journée Patrimoine, sourced from Flickr 1, 2, 3. 

 

Glenn Beck's readers are ever so pissed. In case you don't know, the Satanic Temple is actually an atheist pranking group.

socialjusticekoolaid:

Cops who shot 12-year-old boy in the stomach watched him lie in agony and gave NO first aid before he died hours later

• Tamir Rice was shot by rookie officer Timothy Loehmann, 26, after a 911 caller said he saw the boy with a gun that was ‘probably fake’ on Saturday
• But the dispatcher did not tell the officers that the gun might be fake
• Cops ‘told him to raise his hands’ but instead he reached for his waistband(Disproven by video)
• Officials said that it took four minutes for Rice to receive medical attention
  
• A spokesman for the mayors office said Loehmann and his colleague Frank Gramback, who was with him, are under investigation 
• Rice’s family said he would be alive had Loehmann not acted so quickly

(Read more here)

Are you following the story of young Tamir Rice? They’re already trying to tell us this 12-year old unarmed boy deserved to die— that he would have grown up to be a thug. Please spread the word of this child’s life. It mattered, and we won’t let them fool us into believing otherwise. #staywoke #farfromover

“Cosplay is an industry largely dominated by women; it opens up the world of comics—a world which has overwhelmingly felt exclusionary to girls and women—in a whole new way. It allows not only a small subset of women to make money off of their love of comics (something self-proclaimed comic fan Broderick has been doing for decades), but it also allows a large number of female comic book fans who might otherwise feel shut out of the industry to proudly proclaim their love for certain characters or comics. Strange that so many people have taken issue with something that often involves women taking control of their own image, bodies, and sexuality, and commodifying it without male permission or control. So strange.”

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- Another Comic Book Artist Can’t Stand Change, Competition; Writes Whiny Post About Cosplayers | The Mary Sue (via themarysue)

Sam Maggs slaying YET AGAIN

(via kateordie)

Mark Zuckerberg has rejected Apple CEO Tim Cook’s claim that "when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product." In a feature for Time on Facebook’s Internet.org project, the social network’s founder was reportedly irritated by the notion that ad-supported services are bad for users, describing it as a "ridiculous concept".

"You think because you're paying Apple that you're somehow in alignment with them?"

"A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising businessmodel with somehow being out of alignment with your customers," said Zuckerberg. "What, you think because you’re paying Apple that you’re somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they’d make their products a lot cheaper!"

Zuckerberg was referring to comments made by Cook in September when the Apple chief defended the company's approach to security after hundreds of nude and private images of celebrities were stolen from iCloud. Cook said at the time that he didn’t want the company to become a "treasure trove" of user data for the National Security Agency (NSA) and warned consumers to stay clear of companies offering ‘free’ services.

"I think everyone has to ask, how do companies make their money?" said Cook. "Follow the money. And if they're making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried."

Although no companies were directly named, it was assumed that Cook was referring to both Google and Facebook. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt offered a similar rebuttal to Cook in October, saying his company had the best encryption standards in the industry and that the Apple chief hadn't been briefed "correctly" on his rivals.

Nevertheless, this ideological stance has been growing in influence in recent years and even inspired the creation of alternative social network Ello, which asks users to agree that they’re "not a product" during the sign-up process and has become a public-benefit corporation to legally prohibit it from selling ads. Zuckerberg however is sceptical of this approach, telling Time that Ello won’t ever grow with such a business model. "Our mission is to connect every person in the world," he said. "You don’t do that by having a service people pay for."