Russian Sledges

Wow, thanks, @jhw. No wonder Jaden wants to be emancipated!

Will Smith has never spoken openly of his connections to the Church of Scientology, but they are well documented. Whether or not Smith is a devout member or simply curious about this Hollywood faith, he has visible ties to the group. In 2007, he donated $122,500 to several Scientology rehabilitation organizations. Two years later, he and wife Jada Pinkett Smith opened California's New Village Leadership Academy, a private school founded on the teachings of Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard. Yet to this day, when asked about his own involvement, Smith suggests close friend Tom Cruise introduced him to the practices of Scientology, but that he's not a member. He's simply a "student of world religion."

The clearest evidence of Smith's investment in Scientology might be his newest blockbuster film — this weekend’s After Earth. Based on a story by Smith (and a script by Gary Whitta and director M. Night Shyamalan), the film is a father-son adventure that teams the superstar with his wunderkind offspring Jaden. Together, they traverse the dangerous landscapes of a creature-ridden future Earth. Surprisingly, what's been advertised as an Avatar remix plays out more like Battlefield Earth, another film that hews to the tropes of a science-fiction epic — just like Hubbard's doctrines for Scientology. Here’s how the film parallels the faith’s teachings:

The Movie's Villain Is Emotion
"Danger Is Real. Fear Is a Choice," reads the tagline on the After Earth posters. Its vast cosmology aside, at its core, Scientology is about setting doubts and conflict aside in order to value the self. That's the main hurdle for Jaden's character Kitai Raige, who finds himself failing to measure up to his commander father, Cypher. The film is set 1,000 years after humans have departed an ecologically devastated Earth. Mankind is asserting itself as an intergalactic military presence on the outskirts of the universe. There is only one problem: Their new planet, Nova Prime, hosts a vicious alien race that feeds on fear. Luckily they have Cypher — he's known as a "ghost," a human who can suppress his emotions and the accompanying pheromones that allow the aliens to sniff people out.

In Scientology terms, Cypher is a properly cleansed "thetan," the Church's version of a soul. He's calm and collected, empowered without having to demonstrate that power. As Cypher puts it in the film, "fear is imaginary," and if a person is able to see past that illusion, they can be maximally effective. Kitai is the opposite of his father. In Church terms, he is a misguided thetan — full of rage, haunted by memories, and terrified when out of his comfort zone. He has a desire to be a hero, but it’s not instinctual. His choices are guided by what he thinks are his father's demands. Hubbard's writing has indicated that Scientology's goal is to rehabilitate a thetan's control over MEST (matter, energy, space, and time). Kitai’s journey over the course of the film is that pursuit. He must regain control over the physical world through management of his fear.

Will "Audits" Jaden Over the Course of the Movie
One of the most powerful moments in 2012's The Master is when Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) "processes" Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). An interrogation meant to peel back the layers of the emotionally damaged sailor, it's a riff on Scientology's practice of auditing. The Church believes people are stricken by engrams, mental images akin to memories that cause pain and confusion. Members of Scientology are audited to rid themselves of these emotional blockades by talking through them while using an E-meter (a device that tracks electrical resistance) to measure precisely where the engrams live.

The bulk of After Earth is essentially that scene from The Master on a blockbuster scale. Following a crash landing on Earth, circumstances require Cypher to remain at a control panel while his son battles his way through the wild. Kitai can barely take a step outdoors without flashing back to a moment when he witnessed someone's death back home. Thankfully, Cypher is able to audit him from afar. Coached by his Dad, Kitai finds inner peace, the knowledge that he's stronger, faster, and more capable than anything Earth throws at him. Cypher even has a futuristic version of an E-meter at his disposal — Kitai's "Smart Fabric" suit delivers up-to-date health stats to his auditor. Heart rate is going up? Kitai must be lying or afraid or unable to cope with his pesky engrams.

Level Up
After Earth is essentially a map of Scientological development. It's a man-vs.-nature story because Scientology suggests that all of life is just that. Before Kitai is set on his journey of personal discovery, he trains to be a Ranger (like his father) in the fashion of Scientology students. Smith's New Village Leadership Academy is said to employ the techniques of "Study Tech," a Hubbard concept that focuses on climbing the ladder. Kitai's biggest woe is that he can't reach the next level of military school. That's par for the course in Scientology, where learning is described as a gradient, "a gradual approach to something, taken step by step, so that, finally, quite complicated and difficult activities or concepts can be achieved with relative ease." It’s one of the parts of Scientology that many have focused on — the idea of having to pay for classes in order to advance upwards through the religion’s levels. Some critics have compared After Earth's structure as being like that of a video game, Kitai going from level to level. That's really Study Tech.

It's only when he reaches Earth and is audited by his father that the trainee looks inward and aligns himself with the priorities of Scientology. For the Church, life is subdivided into eight "urges of survival," known as dynamics. The first dynamic prioritizes survival of the individual over everything else. In the film, Kitai confronts harsh elements and outruns hoards of animals all to save his father, but he's only able to succeed because of self-actualization. Typically, a hero might pick up skills and adapt to an alien environment. Not in After Earth, where Kitai separates himself from everything he knows in life and invests in his potential invincibility. He quests on, trusting his own abilities even when there hasn't been an established reason to trust them.

Anti-Psychiatry Aliens?
With After Earth's Scientology roots in mind, every element starts to ring familiar in the context of the religion. The threatening alien, turned murderous by the scent of emotion, is a literalization of the organization's hard stance against psychiatric medicine. From the very beginning, Hubbard was critical of psychiatry, calling it an evasive practice that sidelined spiritual thinking. In his paper "Crime and Psychiatry," he claims that psychiatrists "advertise man as a push-button stimulus-response robot" and use inhumane practices to elicit response. That's the role of After Earth's blind, carnivorous beast, who hungers for fear while simultaneously provoking it.

Without being too obvious, Smith has delivered an incredibly mainstream platform for the Church's ideology. After Earth’s subtext makes every beat feel like a nod to the lessons of L. Ron Hubbard. Fleeing Earth to another planet only to return to home mirrors the idea of thetan resurrection. The ship Cypher and Kitai take on their mission isn't that far off from the Douglas DC-8–esque ship that took Xenu's kidnapped souls to earth. And the prominently advertised volcano that functions as a backdrop to a large After Earth set piece? Just look at the cover to Hubbard's book that started it all —Dianetics.

Original Source

via http://attackofthecute.com/

irrevocablysherlocked:

Goddammit Quinto you and your vocabulary battle bullshit (x)

In which the actors are their characters.

WASHINGTON—Saying that she’ll be gone soon anyway so she might as well, Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann introduced H.R.

This Domo-Kun toaster is a great gift for the toast eater who prefers his bread half-untoasted, half-burned-to-shit.

Students of Japanese often get confused about when to use "Nihon" and when to use "Nippon" as the name of the country.  In truth, there are many names for the "Land of the Rising Sun (a translation of Nihon / Nippon にほん / にっぽん / 日本), and sometimes the English name "Japan" gets thrown into the mix.  All of these variants came together in an incident that is recounted for us by Jim Breen.

Ben Bullock (a Brit resident in Japan) remarked on the sci.lang.japan group recently that his local university library used "Nippon" instead of "Japan" for shelf labels, so it has "History of Nippon" and "Nipponese" for the language itself. All quite bizarre.

The discussion thread is here, and photos Ben took are here and here.  I speculated it might have been a particular staff member at that library with a bee in his / her bonnet about the word "Japan" (which of course is not derived from any Japanese word), but Ben unearthed a 2012 bulletin from the "Japan Library Association" which says they are changing "Nippon" to "Japan". The bulletin is here and the passage is:

４）
Nihon no yomi Ōbun hyōki tsuite

NDC 10-ban kara,`Nihon' no yomi wa `Nippon' kara `Nihon' ni henkō shi,
Ōbun hyōki ni tsuite `Nippon'`Nipponese' wa `Japan'`japanese' ni henkō suru.

日本の読み・欧文表記ついて
NDC10版から、「日本」の読みは「ニッポン」から「ニホン」に変更し、
欧文表記について「Nippon」「Nipponese」は「Japan」「Japanese」に変更する。

Regarding the Latin letter notation of 日本:

Starting from the NDC10 version, the notation for the Latin letter reading of 「日本」will change from "Nippon" to "Nihon".
For European notation, "Nippon" and "Nipponese" will change to "Japan" and "Japanese".

So perhaps that "Nippon" usage is a bit more widespread. It certainly had some currency in library circles as they use / used it for their cataloguing standards, e.g.,

Nihon jisshin bunruihō「日本十進分類法」（Nippon Decimal Classification: NDC）
Nihon mokuroku kisoku「日本目録規則」（Nippon Cataloging Rules: NCR）

It appears in company names: NHK, NEC, etc. NHK is understandable - it's a contraction of the Japanese name (Nippon Housou Kyoukai). NEC as the public label of Nihon denki 日本電気 is a remnant - they changed the English version of their name to "NEC Corporation" 30 years ago, and even before then they avoided using "Nippon" in favour of just "NEC".

Nathan Hopson notes:

Nippon remains the preferred designation on the news, and is often somewhat self-consciously used on TV and radio to express a certain nationalist pride. As demonstrated by the use of "Nadeshiko Japan" (なでしこジャパン) and "Samurai Japan" (侍ジャパン) for the women's and men's national soccer team names, "Japan" is occasionally used in katakana transcription to mean "Japan as viewed from the outside world."

We may also observe that "Nippon~" is often used in Linnaean Latin names.  People started to give scientific names to plants and animals in Latin in the 18th century, but in ancient Latin there was no word for Japan.  Consequently, since Nippon is the original name for Japan, taxonomists felt free to use Nipponicus / Nipponia / Nipponicum when they named newly discovered plants and animals, and these names have been accepted by the scientific community.

[Thanks to Jim Unger and Hiroko Sherry]

An anonymous reader writes "NPR reports that an Oregon wheat farmer found a patch of wheat growing where he did not plant. After RoundUp failed to kill the plants, he sent them to a lab for testing. Turns out the wheat in question is a GMO strain created by Monsanto but never sent to market. Oregon field trials for the wheat ended in 2001. 'Nobody knows how this wheat got to this farm. ... After all such trials, the genetically engineered crops are supposed to be completely removed. Also, nobody knows how widely this genetically engineered wheat has spread, and whether it's been in fields of wheat that were harvested for food.' The USDA is currently investigating and says there is no health-risk. Meanwhile, Monsanto has released a statement and Japan has suspended some wheat imports from the U.S. 'The mystery could have implications on wheat trade. Many countries around the world will not accept imports of genetically modified foods, and the United States exports about half of its wheat crop.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're going to go into battle wearing a full suit of metal armor, you'd better do it in style. Here are some of the most amazing (and bizarre) helmets you've ever seen, from the age of knights and swords.

Read more...

Shh! Wait quietly and we may meet the keeper of the donuts. Psycho Donuts made this Totoro with a chocolate covered raspberry filled chocolate donut.

Link

You can’t fool me, Animal Crossing. I bought the original and played it, and it was fun, and then boring, so I turned it off. Then I bought the Nintendo DS version and I was like “Wait, this is the exact same game.” Then I bought the Wii version and it was also exactly the same. Maybe the animals talked more. I don’t remember. All I know is that if I want to pick fruit for hours and go in debt to buy a house I can do that in real life.

The new one supposedly has new features, which I’m guessing amount to “there’s more fruit to pick” and “if you pick fruit for 50 hours in a row you can get a new couch.”

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me…. four times… We won’t be fooled again.

To greet African leaders arriving for conference in Japan, event organizers force group of Penguins to dress up in 'African' costumes ...

From Shorpy: "Anne Anderson in Whirlpool 'Miracle Kitchen of the Future,' a display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow." Kodachrome by Bob Lerner for the Look magazine article "What the Russians Will See."

The 1611 treatise "A Nevv Booke, containing all sorts of hands vsvally written at this day in Christendome, as the English and French Secretary, the Roman, Italian, French, Spanish, high and low Dutch, Court and Chancerie hands: with Examples of each of them in their proper tongue and Letter. Also an Example of the true and iust proportion of the Romane Capitals. Collected by the best approued writers in these languages" is archived at the Folger Shakespeare Library and features extensive, cutting-edge 17th century advice on penmanship and ergonomics:

Place your body right forward, as it shall be most seemly and easie for you: and tourne not you head too much aside, nor bed it downe too lowe, for auoyding of wearines and paine: and for such as haue occasion to sit long, I would wish them to sit soft, for their better enduring to write ...

Let not your pen be too full of inke, for feare of blotting: and when it writeth not cleane, or is ouer worne, either wipe it, or mend it: If you should write smaller, tourne your pen a little more a side, and write with the lower neb thereof.

'Hovv Yov Ovght to Hold Your Penne'

The best visualization of JOINS by C.L. Moffatt:

Original title and link: SQL JOINs visualized (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

~Niklas Luhmann

EDITOR’S NOTE: A French reader of this site whose moniker is Eldhoraz has devoted an impressive amount of effort gathering and analyzing data from Encyclopaedia Metallum about the release of metal albums over an extended period of time. He has organized the information both within geographic regions and according to eight metal genres and has created a variety of interactive charts displaying the results.  At the end of this article, you’ll have the chance to download a spreadsheet file containing his analysis, along with a document describing his methodology in further detail. Very interesting stuff, and we’re very happy to share it with you.

Well. Although I spend all my spare time listening to and fun-facting about metal, I’m basically a graduate student in a scientific field. And when these two aspects of my personality spend a night together, there comes, sometime later, this cute and cheeky baby.

Here and there, I often read sentences such as, “Finland is definitely the most metal country on Earth,” or “I knew Southeastern Asia was mostly death metal,” and it inspired me to quantify “metalness” in time and in space, in order to distinguish the factual from the fictional.

So I spent some days – and some nights – on the amazing database of Encyclopaedia Metallum, collecting data to satisfy my curiosity. And here are some of the interesting things that came out of that analysis.

First, I’d like to denounce an urban legend: Finland is NOT the most metal country on Earth. It’s Luxembourg! Well, if we don’t consider countries with fewer than 500,000 people, Finland wins up the irons, with 1780 bands per million people. Finland is followed by Sweden (1129), Norway (781), Denmark (363), and… Estonia (342) ! Needless to say, it seems that Northern Europe has the touch. In comparison, the United States ranks 25th with only 150 bands per million people, the UK ranks 24th, France is 27th, Germany 9th, etc. But Finland is even more impressive. It is not only first in the general ranking, it’s also the most metal country in every granular metal sub-genre defined for purposes of this analysis!

But these insights are not the only ones that the data give us. We also obtain interesting charts like this one:

It shows us the evolution of album releases across the whole world. We see that metal is highly dependent on the dynamism of the music industry and the medium in which it propagates. The invention and popularity of CDs in the late 70′s and early 80′s triggered an impressive acceleration of record releases across the world, thanks to the increased ease of producing and obtaining albums. It also demonstrably led to the accelerated growth of metal scenes in countries distant from the West.

Similarly, the invention of the Internet boosted the growth of metal in the late 90′s and early 00′s, and in even more recent years the availability of metal has again boomed due to the increase in digitally self-released albums, and the increased ability of new bands to disseminate their music via a widespread broadcast. We can also see in the data the dramatic influence of the most recent global economic crisis, which has had a dampening effect on releases despite the development of the Internet and the rapidly growing number of digital-only releases.

The data also show the varying effects of the crisis on releases by bands in different countries:

For example, we note that American bands on average seem to be more independent of the labels (whose business we would expect to have suffered from the economic downturn), and therefore production of albums didn’t decrease during the recession, while it shrank in an unprepared Europe.

Another interesting thing about the American chart is the diminution of album releases from 1994 to 1997. This may be explained by the sudden expansion of the grunge scene and the creation of a large alternative rock/metal offspring that largely wiped out metal from the mainstream, and partly from the underground, for five years.

The Metal Archives information is also revealing about local preferences among metal subgenres. For example, in the US, the scenes are mostly thrash and death oriented, while in Western Europe, black metal wins. And as Islander would say, “black metal is the most saturated subgenre”.

The reasons for these variations in local preferences remain to be discussed and explained, as do the differing musical evolutions within each of the various geographic zones and their link to local economic, societal, and political conditions. Metal is in opposition with society, but, as the subgenres embody different philosophical positions, their distribution among countries may give us information about the mood of the underground and its impact on the country in which it evolves. If Norway’s and Sweden’s metal preferencies are so different, for example, it is because Norwegian and Swedish societies must somehow be drastically different.

And by the way, yes, black metal IS the main export product of Norway.

One last important feature of the database is that it also allows us to study the dynamics of the expansion of an underground trend. For example, the following map enables us to monitor the expansion of doom metal in the last decade across the United States:

We can observe the expansion of doom/sludge, apparently originating in New Orleans and spreading around in the neighboring states. I haven’t tried it yet, but it would be interesting to visualize the expansion of death metal from Florida, or the second wave of black metal from Norway, etc.

For those who are interested, the file I worked with can be downloaded from here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ye3kfkm7e2da711/Metal%20World%20Map.rar

In the archive, you’ll find a “Read Me” explaining how the file works and how you can play with it. Don’t do as usual. Read it.

jbarr3b-114 copy (by Phoenix Comicon Photo Ops)

The pastime of dwile flonking (also dwyle flunking) involves two teams, each taking a turn to dance around the other while attempting to avoid a beer-soaked dwile (cloth) thrown by the non-dancing team.[1] "Dwile" is a knitted floor cloth, from the Dutch dweil, meaning "mop",[2] and "flonk" is probably a corruption of flong, an old past tense of fling.[3]

Patrick Stewart's answer to a fan's question about his most important work outside of acting is something everyone should take some time to watch.

The friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev who was shot by the FBI during questioning last week was, contrary to initial reports from anonymous sources, unarmed.

The cronut business needs to go global tomorrow.

That's the message I take, anyway, from my Grub Street colleagues' great coverage of the cronut craze. A cronut, if you're unfamiliar, is the new hybrid pastry — half croissant, half doughnut — that is sweeping New York. Or would be sweeping New York, if people could get their hands on them. As of today, the only place cronuts are sold is at the Dominique Ansel Bakery in Soho, where people now line up down the block as early as 6 a.m. — two hours before opening — for the chance to snag one of the 200 cronuts the bakery produces daily. The competition for cronuts is so hot that there is now a sizable black market, with people charging as much as 800 percent markups for scalped cronuts.

Dominique Ansel, the inventor of the cronut, is trying to keep up with the boom as best he can. He's reportedly "staffing up" to increase his production capacity and trying to point customers to his other, non-cronut pastries to alleviate demand, while keeping prices for cronuts locked at $5 apiece.

But these are the wrong moves. What he needs to do is stop making other pastries immediately and focus on getting his cronut business big, fast.

Ansel could justify raising cronut prices, which should rise naturally in an efficient market given a small supply and a huge demand spike. That's what happens with Uber cars, airplane tickets, hotel rooms on holiday weekends, and any number of other industries with dynamic-pricing schemes.

But by insisting that he'll keep the price of a cronut stable at $5, Ansel is ensuring scarcity, and all but promoting black-market activity. He's doing that for a good reason, of course — part of the fun of the cronut craze is that they're affordable but hard to get, making your ability to find one more a question of dedication than ability. And he'd be accused of gouging if he raised the price of a cronut to $200. Still, he's putting a rather low ceiling on his profits.

Ansel's main problem, as I see it, is that he's experiencing the kind of growth typical of tech start-ups, but he's limited by the supply constraints of a physical brick-and-mortar business. Fueled by appearances on Fox News, ABC, the Today show, and other big-time media outlets, the cronut could be selling in great numbers all over the country. But while a tech start-up can accommodate a huge spike in demand simply by adding a few more servers, Ansel would need to spend weeks buying real estate and baking equipment, hiring and training bakers, and coming up with a more effective distribution scheme than simply handing cronuts to customers over the counter, one-by-one.

Ansel — who has smartly trademarked the word cronut — has a bit of a head start on his competition. The process for making cronuts is notoriously tricky — you can't just throw croissant dough in a deep-fryer. But given enough time and food-science expertise, big national bakeries will figure out how to make a decent facsimile soon enough. And when they do, it's off to the races. These mass-produced cronut knockoffs (or "dossaints," or whatever they'll be called) may only be half as good as the original, but they'll be good enough that diehards who used to wait outside Ansel's bakery at 6 a.m. will get their fix elsewhere. (For a good comparison, look at the way the market for Silly Bandz — another consumer fad — was quickly saturated with knockoffs.)

Ansel could theoretically get a venture capital infusion and try to grow his business himself. But there's no guarantee he'd be able to hold off imitators for long enough. Instead, he should try to get his cronuts into every city in America as fast as possible, while he still has a monopoly. The easiest way to do this would be to license the cronut's secret recipe to a large bakery conglomererate like Entenmann's and let the conglomerate make Dominique Ansel–branded cronuts on their own machinery, distribute them in their trucks, and put them in supermarkets on the shelf space already occupied by Entenmann's products.

Alternately, he could strike a deal with Starbucks — like the $100 million deal Starbucks made to acquire Bay Bread last year — that would increase his production capacity and distribution while preserving some of the exclusivity associated with cronuts. (You'd still have to go to a Starbucks to get the authentic Dominique Ansel cronut, but you'd be able to get them in thousands of places around the world.)

Mass-producing cronuts, of course, would instantly dilute their appeal to a certain coterie of trend-seeking New Yorkers. And Ansel may well abhor the idea of a cronut sold in a Des Moines Safeway or a Starbucks in Shanghai. (He told Eater he's focused on "quality over quantity.") But Ansel must know that if he did manage to turn the cronut craze into a nationwide business, his profits from selling in supermarkets and coffee shops would make up for any lost New York sales a hundredfold, and could make him a household name.

The truth is that most celebrity chefs have made peace with mass commercialization — whether it's Wolfgang Puck restaurants in airports or a Nobu hotel in Las Vegas. And if Ansel truly wants to capitalize on his famous pastry creation in a big way, he'd better hurry. Time for a cronut cash-in is running out.

Read more posts by Kevin Roose

Filed Under: the cronut economy ,business ,dominique ansel

New York City's new Citibike program (which — yes, D.C. people — isn't unique) has been received with a mix of emotions by New Yorkers. But one thing is clear: after less than a week, it's already in heavy use, if the real-time data the city makes available is any indicator.

There's something quintessentially Bloombergian about an emissions-reducing, health-improving system that can also be used to track people. Only very, very loosely, mind you: the data the city provides won't let you see where a bike is or even where a bike started and ended its trip. What it does allow, however, is for those with an inclination to track the number of available bikes at the various pick-up and drop-off points around the city and see when someone picks up (or drops off).

We made this little map that does exactly that. A few times a minute, it checks the Citibike database and reports when the bike count changes. The city's data also updates only sporadically, so give it a second before the map — and the list of transactions below it, including any empty racks — shows new information. Then, sit back and watch the tiny people of New York City scramble around Brooklyn and Manhattan, picking up bikes and returning them in other locations. Imagine you're dictating where they go and what they eat. It may help the realism if you do so while wearing a satin sash that reads, "MAYOR."

This curious cylinder on stilts is a Little Free Library located at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral School in Manhattan. The library has portholes built into its walls so visitors can peek in (or out). Inside, a shelf holds a small selection of books for borrowing. Designed by Marcelo Ertorteguy and Sara Valente of Stereotank, the library is 1 of 10 different designs that were built in New York City as part of the recent PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, in a project organized by the The Architectural League. The 10 Manhattan libraries are part of the ongoing Little Free Library project. Stereotank’s library is scheduled to remain open until September 2013.

via designboom

This post has been generated by Page2RSS

Deep in the heart of Doctor Who fandom is a small group dedicated to television show reconstructions—building piecemeal renditions of 1960s-era episodes using photographs of the original broadcasts. They don’t do this because they’re following some bizarre fan doctrine only other Whovians understand. They do it because “wiping,” the practice of erasing seemingly unimportant show recordings to free up archival space or re-use tape, obliterated decades of programming. The television industry practiced wiping broadly until the early 1970s, destroying many early Who episodes permanently. And it wasn’t just silly science fictions shows that were lost. The industry proved remarkably bad at choosing what was worth archiving, erasing influential works like The Avengers and cultural touchstones like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

Such a practice would never occur in television today. It’s generally understood that the medium is a deeply important part of our culture, that ...

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The Library Lounge at the B2 Boutique Hotel Zürich is one of those amazing temple-of-books rooms that always make me catch my breath. If I had a teleporter, this is where I'd go every time I felt stressed out. (Except for the wallpaper with the pattern that looks like JPEG artifacts -- that'd have to go).

Library Lounge – B2 Boutique Hotel Zurich (via Attack of the Bonniegrrl)

miwako-sher:

Dr.Slippery

Sorry, but I don't get @cumber_world and am unfollowing everyone who's pimping it. I like to understand the funny that is lain before me.

The Associated Press found something amazing: a note from al-Qaeda, addressed to an underperforming jihadist, berating him for a laundry list of failures, including his negligence of required monthly expense reports. But the letter, as beautifully passive-agressive as it is, ended up having deadly consequences when its recipient struck out on his own. 

The employee in question is Moktar Belmoktar, who later took credit for carrying out the BP gas plant hostage situation in Algeria, and last week's attacks in Niger, killing 101 in all. Essentially, as the AP explained, Belmoktar's attacks appear to be motivated by the terrorist's disgruntlement with al-Qaeda, who repeatedly "sidelined" him. Here's what the group's North Africa chapter said to make Belmoktar snap:

"Your letter ... contained some amount of backbiting, name-calling and sneering...We refrained from wading into this battle in the past out of a hope that the crooked could be straightened by the easiest and softest means. ... But the wound continued to bleed, and in fact increasingly bled, until your last letter arrived, ending any hope of stanching the wound and healing it." 

The letter mixes the deadly with the banal: a lot of the group's complaints are about money and personality, like the worst middle manager imaginable. Belmoktar didn't file his expense reports, for instance, nor did he play nicely with his peers. And when given responsibility, the chapter's leaders didn't think he performed well (he's referred to under a pseudonym, "Abu Abbas," in the letter): 

"(The chapter) gave Abu Abbas a considerable amount of money to buy military material, despite its own great need for money at the time. ... Abu Abbas didn't participate in stepping up to buy weapons...So whose performance deserves to be called poor in this case, I wonder?"

It sounds like the chapter behind the letter had a number of other complaints. Belmoktar apparently stopped taking their phone calls, griped about his employers in jihadist forums, and refused to attend meetings that he found "useless," too.

Belmoktar, rather than wanting to leave al-Qaeda altogether, apparently decided to bypass his local chapter and try to work directly with the group's leaders. As the Associated Press explains, Belmoktar's story actually predates a new development in the group's organization, where "charismatic jihadists can carry out attacks directly in al-Qaida's name, regardless of whether they are under its command."  The letter, notably, was just one of thousands of documents found by the AP in Mali months ago.