discovergreatbritain:

The castle capital of the world

By High50

Not content with being home to the wildly beautiful countryside and rolling valleys, Wales also boasts Britain’s most splendid castles

Read More

spaceexp:

Newly released remote camera footage of the Antares rocket explosion

This isn't new information: one way to support Ferguson is to donate to the city's public library, which has provided all manner of community support, including maintaining normal hours and bringing in teachers and volunteers when the city's public schools closed. But since yesterday's grand jury decision, there's been a huge outpouring of public support for the library on Twitter.

It started with this tweet Buzzfeed's Ashley Ford:

ICYMI: @fergusonlibrary is open tomorrow, but school are not. We all know books save lives. Please donate: http://t.co/OPJTnOD7qg
— Ashley Ford (@iSmashFizzle) November 25, 2014

Then Roxane Gay weighed in:

I have to believe we are going to be better and do better by one another even if I cannot yet see how. If I don’t believe that, I, we, have nothing.

On Twitter last night, Ashley Ford shared that she donated to the Ferguson Public Library, which inspired me and many others to do the same. I hope you can donate, too. We have words and we can make sure the people of Ferguson have them too.

One of Ford's tweets was shared 266 times, and many famous (Neil Gaiman) and less-famous (Anne Helen Peterson) writers tweeted about donating to the library. By the end of the day, Ford reported that donations to Ferguson's public library had reached five figures.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

design-is-fine:

Hermann Zapf, type design, 1950. Germany. Via typografie.info

septagonstudios:

Sara Blake

King of Hearts

septagonstudios:

Tran Nguyen

Nevermore

septagonstudios:

Lou Patrick Mackay a.k.a opawapo

Skullogy

septagonstudios:

inkcorf .

Marceau Truffaut: Ni dieux ni maitres

ishwari-ghale:

Reminder that James Eagan Holmes, a grown man who entered a public movie theatre in full tactical clothing, carrying seven different fire arms and grenades, did not have a single shot fired at him by police when he walked out of the building after he finished killing 12 people, and he was arrested peacefully. But Mike Brown, an unarmed teenage boy in plain clothing, was shot multiple times after he got down on his knees and begged for mercy.

ladyshinga:

You’re right, we should totally ignore peoples’ valid rage and anger and their case for justice if they happen to be destroying property while they protest. Destroying things to make a point is wrong. Next we know they’ll be throwing a lot of tea into the ocean or something.

(Continued) could be the 1 good cop. Even white, male cops are entitled to innocent until proven guilty and the due process of a grand jury. He shouldn’t have to pay for the sins of others. And likewise, although there r many innocent black youth harmed by the police, this might not b one of those cases. Mike Brown just robbed a store, assaulted the clerk, and was high on drugs. The witnesses that testified to him attacking n charging the officer were also black. Plz hold off until more is known

—————————

KNOW YOUR FACTS, KNOW THE TRUTH:

"MYTH: Wilson stopped Brown because he was a suspect in a robbery.

FACT: Wilson did not know Brown was a suspect in a strong-arm robbery that happened moments before the shooting, according to Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson. Wilson stopped Brown and his friend for walking in the middle of the street, Jackson said.

MYTH: Autopsies tell us EXACTLY what happened when Brown was shot.

FACT: Police say Brown struggled with Wilson inside his police car, then reached for Wilson’s weapon. Brown’s family and some witnesses say Wilson killed Brown as he raised his hands in surrender. Multiple pathologists say the autopsy performed by the St. Louis County medical examiner and the pathologist hired by Brown’s family could support either version.

Pathologists say forensic science alone can’t determine whether Wilson justifiably shot the teen.” [x]

Yes, Mike Brown had pot in his system BUT THAT DOESNT JUSTIFY HIS MURDER jesus. i have pot in my system right now, probably. do you have any idea how long pot stays in your system? if you’re a frequent user it can stay in your system for 7-30 days. even if he’d smoked an hour before he was shot, it doesn’t make a difference to me. 

saying he had “drugs in his system” are specific words used to vilify an 18 year old boy. 

^ “Reflective of the county’s racial make-up, which is 70 percent white, but not of Ferguson’s, which is about two-thirds black.” [x]

“For 104 days, the police have lied and said Mike Brown was killed 35 feet away from Darren Wilson’s SUV. It was actually 148 feet.

This distance is essential to the defense and how Darren Wilson must demonstrate that he “reasonably feared for his safety.” At the point in which Mike Brown ran half a football field away, how reasonable is it for an armed officer to fear anyone?” [x]

“Six different witnesses on the scene claimed that Mike Brown was shot at repeatedly from behind before he turned around, faced Darren Wilson, verbally surrendered, and put his hands in the air. Wilson, having already shot at Mike Brown at least six times while he fled, then fired off a barrage of four quick shots at the surrendered Brown he was looking at face to face, killing him on the spot.” [x]

The Prosecutor rigged the system (video)

“The Missouri prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown has deep family roots among police: his father, mother, brother, uncle and cousin all worked for St. Louis’ police department, and his father was killed while responding to a call involving a black suspect.” [x]

Ferguson grand jurors are not barred from following news about Ferguson but are only allowed to use evidence they’ve seen in session to reach a decision 

OTHER RELEVANT READINGS:

Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.

Michael Brown, Police Violence, And Why It’s So Hard For Victims To See Justice

When The Media Treats White Suspects And Killers Better Than Black Victims

Everything You Need to Know About the Ferguson Grand Jury

MY OPINION THAT IT’S INJUSTICE ISN’T UNFAIR. IT’S UNFAIR THAT MIKE BROWN WAS UNARMED AND YET STILL SHOT AND KILLED. 

that’s all.

bobbycaputo:

The rarity of a federal grand jury not indicting, visualized

A data point from FiveThirtyEight’s coverage of Monday night’s events in Ferguson is worth pulling out. “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010,” the site’s Ben Casselman writes, “the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.”

That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. And the grand jury decided against doing so 11 times, finding no true bill or a lack of evidence to do so.

(Continue Reading)

This is INCREDIBLY important.  I’ve noticed a lot of people seem to misunderstand.  The non-indictment was not about a conviction or a guilty/innocent sentence for Darren Wilson.  This was about whether or not there was enough evidence to take him to trial in the first place.  Had he been put on trial, the odds of him being convicted would have been even lower.

Notice how incredibly rare it is to not grant a case the bare minimum of a trial.  Especially in the face of conflicting testimonies and overwhelming evidence that there is more to the story, it’s outrageous (racist) that the Grand Jury would come to such a rare conclusion.

There are a few more routes to justice at this point, although their effectiveness is debatable:

-The Justice Department can press federal charges (they’re being urged by the National Bar Association to do so)
-The Justice Department can bring charges against Ferguson PD
-The Brown family can bring a civil suit against Darren Wilson

(It’s worth noting that many civil rights era cases needed to go to the federal government before anything got done.)

Flock of pigs flies over Mississippi as federal judge strikes down the state's gay marriage ban (Arkansas's too.)

SAN MARCOS, CA—Issuing a flurry of apologies, equivocations, and statements downplaying her intelligence, local 28-year-old Jessica Knoll reportedly launched into a four-minute self-deprecating preamble Tuesday before sharing her thoughts with a gro...

Richard Sherman is firing back at the NFL in creative ways in protest of the fines levied on Marshawn Lynch for refusing to speak with media.

Richard Sherman promised a show for his Tuesday afternoon press conference. After deflecting reporters' locker room questions with "don't care" in protest of the NFL's fine on Marshawn Lynch, the Seattle Seahawks cornerback took the podium with a cardboard cutout of Doug Baldwin and acted out a two minute skit that criticized the league. Sherman name-dropped his sponsors, then called the NFL hypocritical for claiming to care about player safety while occasionally scheduling teams to play twice in a five-day span.

Lynch was fined a total of $100,000 for violating the league's media policy after a Week 11 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs when he left the Seahawks' locker room before speaking with reporters. After the Seahawks' Week 12 win over the Arizona Cardinals, the running back sat down with reporters but only gave one-word answers.

Sherman's interview with reporters mirrored Lynch's. With the help of Baldwin voicing the cardboard version of himself, Sherman's skit took a step further by lampooning the league. He mentioned Campbell's Soup, Neff sunglasses and Beats by Dre headphones. The league has threatened to fine players who plug non-NFL sanctioned sponsors (with Beats earning special scrutiny). Sherman contrasted that against the NFL, which takes a hard stance against players who earn alcohol-related charges but claims beer companies as its biggest sponsors.

Sherman may earn a fine for his comments, which in his case may be exactly what he wanted. Reports indicate that the Seahawks' locker room has turned "icy" since Lynch was fined. Sherman's press conference likely won't make it any warmer.

Adam Savage, known for his work on the popular television show Mythbusters, recently wrote an article for The A.V. Club about the series of animations his father, Whitney Lee Savage, created for Sesame Street during the 1970s. Savage included examples like “Harry Works High in the Sky,” “Guitar Drawing,” and a hand drawing a train and tracks. As a young child, Savage even voiced characters in some of the animations, including the part of “He” in the “He, She, and It” series.

Savage has also discussed his father’s animation work elsewhere. On a recent episode of the Nerdist podcast, Savage discussed working with his father on the animations and the process of writing the A.V. Club article. In a video for Tested.com Savage spoke with animator Marty Cooper about the animation process and his father’s work while Cooper created an animation.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

In this short documentary, The Atlantic interviewed people who build, live in and love treehouses. These are far from the forts of childhood memory, though.

I continue to be freaked-out about how bad is web performance. HTTP Archive says that the average transfer is 1907K, which is down just a little from last month, but still outrageous.

For comparison, my iPhone app Vesper is 5.0MB, which is less than three web pages. And you don’t have to re-download it every time you use it.

One of the strengths of the browser-based web is — or ought to be — that it’s lightweight. Going to any given site should not require an amount of data transfer that’s a significant fraction of downloading a native app.

The situation right now is crazy.

Scott Jehl writes in A List Apart, Planning for Performance:

We’re not doing a good job.

Aaron Hernandez's 2012 double murder trial, originally scheduled to begin in May, has been delayed until after his other murder trial is complete.

A judge agreed Tuesday to delay the 2012 double murder trial of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, according to the Associated Press. His defense lawyers successfully argued they were busy prepping for his trial related a 2013 killing, and would not be able to adequately prepare for both proceedings in such a short window of time.

The double murder trial -- in which Hernandez is accused of killing two Boston men after an encounter at a nightclub -- was scheduled to begin in May. Hernandez's lawyer asked for that trial to be delayed six months, so they can focus on preparations for Hernandez's trial related to the 2013 killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd. Jury selection in that case is expected to begin Jan. 9.

The judge agreed to delay Hernandez's second trial, but did not set a new date, saying he wants to see how long the Lloyd murder trial takes before deciding on a firm date.

Hernandez is accused of shooting Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado after one of them spilled a drink on him at a nightclub in June 2012. Hernandez has pleaded not guilty in that case.

Hernandez is also charged with first-degree murder in the June 2013 killing of Lloyd, who was dating Hernandez's fiancee's sister. Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to that charge.

revitiligo:

standardreview:

magnacarterholygrail:

durgapolashi:

Eartha Kitt speaking truth to power at a 1968 luncheon at the White House hosted by Lady Bird Johnson which resulted in Kitt being blacklisted in the US for nearly a decade.

let it be known that on January 18th, 1968, Eartha Kitt stood in a room full of white women at The Women Doers Luncheon, GOT IN LADYBIRD JOHNSON’S FACE, and told her that the government was sending the best of the youth off to be shot and killed and, in not so many words, that THAT was the reason the youth were rebelling. She ALSO stopped President Johnson after he made a statement claiming that mothers should be responsible for stopping their kids from becoming criminals and asked about “the parents who have to go to work, for instance, who can’t spend time with their children as they should”. It was brushed off by LBJ who only mentioned the funding for day care centers put in place by the recently passed Social Security bill, and then more or less said that the women at that luncheon should figure it out for themselves.

She was blacklisted, but she defended every word she said that day. 

gifs via

Black women continue to be great

echoboots:

I have heard several people express the sentiment that the recent Ferguson decision was the system working exactly as intended.  While I understand the power in such a chilling statement, it belies the utter procedural travesty that just occurred.  Though I am not a Missouri attorney, I am a licensed attorney in my own jurisdiction, and I want to take a few minutes to unpack what just occurred—though understanding the legal implications does not make them less horrifying, it does illustrate exactly why federal prosecution should occur.

The fact that McCulloch was allowed to prosecute this case is staggering.

There are numerous reasons why McCulloch had a conflict of interest around prosecuting this case, which is exactly why Brown’s family and several civil rights groups repeatedly moved for a special prosecutor.  That request was more than reasonable, given the circumstances, and it should have been granted.  McCulloch responded to this call by telling the Governor to “man up” and oust him if he was supposed to be recused, because he wasn’t going to recuse himself.  McCulloch’s prosecution strategy, as I’ll discuss below, illustrates exactly why the governor should have done just that.

The fact that the grand jury contained exactly one black man is staggering.

In Missouri, as in many other states, 12 grand jurors are selected from a larger pool by the presiding judge, and 9 must vote in favor of indictment in order for it to occur.  Not coincidentally, there were 9 white jurors and 3 black jurors on the jury, and only one of the latter was male.  Statistical studies show that white jurors perceive police officers differently than black jurors.  Though the jury is supposed to be Wilson’s peers, rather than Brown’s, the small and selected jury pool is chilling at best.

McCulloch’s prosecution strategy was staggering.

As this article helpfully notes, a grand jury proceeding does not work like a regular trial—there is no opportunity for defense counsel to bring witnesses or cross-examine witnesses the prosecutor brings forward; forms of evidence that would be inadmissible at trial are permitted; and prosecutors are free to select which charges they want the jury to deliberate upon.  A grand jury proceeding is so much the prosecutor’s show that New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler was famously quoted by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities that “a grand jury would ‘indict a ham sandwich’ [if the prosecutor so desired].”  The Washington Post politely calls McCulloch’s approach ‘atypical,’ but I personally have no problem stressing that it was outright bizarre.  

 He didn’t even wait to finish investigation before he launched a grand jury trial, and central to his case was four hours of testimony from Wilson himself.  It is very rare for defendants to testify at grand jury proceedings, because prosecutors cannot compel them to be brought as witnesses for their own charges—but perhaps Wilson was unconcerned because McCulloch did not even give the jurors charges to consider.  In fact, he stated that he would be “presenting absolutely everything to this grand jury … [e]very statement that a witness made, every witness, every photograph, every piece of physical evidence. Absolutely nothing will be left out, so the grand jury is making their decision based upon absolutely everything and we’ll go from there.”  And that appears to be exactly what he did.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of how he could show the jurors everything when he hadn’t even finished investigation yet, a grand jury proceeding is not a trial.  By showing the jurors “absolutely everything,” when the defense isn’t even supposed to be permitted to bring a case, McCulloch essentially turned the jurors into a de facto fact-finding body.  In other words, they were performing the role of a trial jury, but without jury instructions, a presiding judge, a defense attorney, or proper rules of evidence for a trial.  As several articles note, the actual facts of this case were murky at best.  The time and place for fact-finding was at trial—it was not McCulloch’s job to show the jurors “absolutely everything;” it was his job to prosecute the damn case.

In short, there was no way to avoid yesterday’s result, because this was in no way a proper legal proceeding.  If we want to see an actual unbiased legal proceeding take place at this point, we need to see action from the federal system.

This is so good. At his weekly meeting with the press, Seahawks corner Richard Sherman, a cardboard cutout of Doug Baldwin, and the disembodied voice of actual Doug Baldwin teamed up for a skit that took shots at the money-hungry NFL and stood up for teammate Marshawn Lynch, who was fined $100,000 for failing to talk to the press last week.

There are polite and considerate ways to say that in the face of a modern age of Biblical scholarship and historical study, the pressures of a racist Hollywood system forced you to cast only white people in the lead roles of a movie about a known era of Middle Eastern history.

This is not one of them.

In a Variety piece (in which the writer expresses indignation that Exodus has already faced backlash for a whitewashed main cast by pointing out the lack of outrage over Biblical whitewashing in a movie with a notoriously racist director, a movie that actually faced quite a lot of backlash over whitewashing, and a movie that came out in 1956), director Ridley Scott was asked about why he decided to cast Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver as Egyptian royalty and Christian Bale and Aaron Paul as Moses and Joshua in his upcoming epic Exodus: Gods and Kings. And this time the answer wasn’t a platitude about “theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people.”

I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.

I’m not even really sure where to start here.

The fact that Scott, one of the best established auteur filmmakers in modern Hollywood, feels that his role is to be complacent to racism rather than to seek to prove wrong the assumption that an actor of color cannot lead a blockbuster film. The casual dismissal of the hard-won Hollywood careers of the numerous actors of color ready to take on a role as iconic as Moses in the story of Exodus as “Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such.” That the writer of the Variety article, and its editor, both felt that criticism of Exodus‘s casting could be dismissed by pointing out that Moses is historically white… in movies. That… “the question doesn’t even come up.”

Scott could have expressed regret that Hollywood is still so entrenched in racism that the idea of presenting historically Middle Eastern characters as actual Middle Easterners made his movie impossible to produce otherwise. He could have talked about a desire to combat what he felt was a significant restriction by casting a host of mixed-race actors and actors of color like Ben Kingsley, Golshifteh Farahani, and Indira Varma in secondary roles (Nun, Nefertari, and Miriam, respectively).

But instead, the question didn’t even come up.

(via Variety)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

The grand jury is made up of nine white and three black jurors; seven are men and five are women. A decision on criminal charges requires agreement from at least nine of the 12.