It’s not easy to make money running a video game website. In June 2015, popular mobile outlet TouchArcade said it was having cash problems and asked for help, and lots of people did—including mobile developers. But recently, following a mixed game review, one developer decided to pull their funding.

“We could load the site up with the same obnoxious advertising you see on most other sites these days,” said TouchArcade EIC Eli Hodapp last year. “We could start doing sponsored posts, as we’re always being asked to publish those. Or we could do a number of other really nasty things which have become ‘normal’ for sites trying to survive. The problem with all these possibilities is that they all come with the significant drawback of making TouchArcade worse for our readers.”

Hodapp and TouchArcade turned to Patreon, an increasingly popular service to help fund creatives. (Gaming critics Jim Sterling and Greg Miller’s Kinda Funny group helped achieve independence using Patreon.) Funding was a success, eventually getting as high as $9,127.55, according to tracking site Graphtreon.

TouchArcade never quite hit $10,000, which the site described as “operating without worrying about needing to do anything crazy to keep the lights on.”

Unfortunately, contributions have declined in the last few months, with enormous dips in both December and January. (Side note: not long ago, Patreon recalculated how funds are displayed, resulting in an across-the-board dip for how much it looked like most were making.) Most recently, the nearly $1,000 funding drop came as the result of one specific backer pulling out: a developer.

On January 18, TouchArcade reviewed 8-bit platformer Venture Kid as 3.5 out of 5, concluding the FDG Entertainment game was “entertaining, but unspectacular.”

Venture Kid is unquestionably a decent game, a platformer that’s entertaining enough if you were curious about it. There are far better retro tributes and original platformers, and Venture Kid never really gets past the “Hey, remember Mega Man” stage of being a good platformer.

Only a day later, FDG publicly announced it was pulling support for TouchArcade’s Patreon, saying it was “not an easy decision” but deciding “it’s not a good idea to support a game review oriented site as a developer and publisher” because “there’ll always be a subtle feel of editors being biased.”

The statement, penned by FDG co-founder Thomas Kern, claimed the move had nothing to do with Venture Kid’s score and everything to do with transparency.

LONEWOLF, one of our new games was recently chosen as ‘Game of the Week’ and we’ve been very happy about it. Unfortunately, since we’ve been a Top Patreon supporter, the coverage had to come with a disclaimer explaining this fact, saying that journalism is in no way influenced. For many readers this goes without saying but we also heard multiple doubts and there’s always this stale taste when positive news can only come with a disclaimer. In a subtle way it’s discrediting our work.

One week later, our new game Venture Kid got a review score of 3.5 stars. Obviously a bad score, because the review didn’t come with a disclaimer. So yeah - in this case, it was not necessary. We could go even further and say: this review makes an example that Toucharcade is not biased. And here’s the dilemma on a different perspective. We believe Venture Kid is a fine example of a mobile action platformer and delivers a lot of fun at just $.99 . We can’t stop but having a stale taste when reading the review. Did it get a worse score to make an example ? Of course not, but we’re not having peace in our minds.

Kern concluded by encouraging others to support TouchArcade’s Patreon, but it set off a fiery back-and-forth between the community and the site’s editors, including EIC Eli Hodapp.

Kern seemed to take the review personally, remarking in the TouchArcade comments for Venture Kid that he had to walk away “so [he] can stop crying.”

Trying to push back on criticisms that FDG’s move was vindictive, Kern said they previously “already had a 3.5 star review during our Patreon support.”

“We continue to support Toucharcade with ads for new releases,” said Kern, “a healthy relationship between dev and press. As Philipp [Doeschl, another FDG co-founder] says the market is tough for both developer and press and we need to do what is healthy for our business and relationships.”

Everyone seems to have a point in this uncomfortable mess.

It’s understandable why a developer financially backed TouchArcade—mobile games don’t get the same level of coverage on other sites, including Kotaku. It’s also understandable why Kern and FDG would want some distance between themselves and TouchArcade. And it’s definitely understandable why TouchArcade would question why this move comes right after a less-than-glowing review.

I spoke with Hodapp about this incident, and while he expressed concern over the Patreon numbers, he said TouchArcade’s financial eggs aren’t in a single basket, and the website has been working hard to ensure it’s making money elsewhere. In other words, Patreon dipping won’t mean the end of TouchArcade.

The lesson here? Running websites and selling mobile games really sucks.

You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.

Sean Ludwick, the New York real estate developer who allegedly dumped his dead friend’s body in the street after getting into a car wreck, was arrested this week, the Associated Press reports. Prosecutors said he’d tried to buy a boat in Puerto Rico that could get him to South America.

http://gawker.com/nyc-developer-...

Robert Clifford, a spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney, said that Ludwick was apprehended by federal and local authorities on Tuesday, at his home in Sag Harbor. (The East Hampton Star reports that the developer was arrested by U.S. Marshals in Puerto Rico.)

Assistant District Attorney John Scott Prudenti, the chief of the Vehicular Crimes Bureau, told the AP that authorities had learned that Ludwick, while visiting Puerto Rico last week, had been asking around about buying a boat capable of making the trip to South America.

“For the next several days the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, acting with local law enforcement and federal authorities, conducted an investigation that led to his arrest,” Prudenti said.

Ludwick was out on $1 million bond—now, presumably, forfeit—after being indicted for vehicular homicide in his friend Paul Hansen’s death last summer. (Four hours after the crash, Ludwick’s blood alcohol content was 0.18. (New York’s legal limit is 0.08.)

Ludwick was arrested on a bench warrant and held without bail.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

In a joint statement this morning, NASA and NOAA confirmed that 2015 was the hottest year on record by a huge margin. We basically knew this—scientists have been calling it since at least July—but now that the official numbers are in, we can see just how wacky a year it was.

“2015 was by far the hottest year on the records we’ve put together,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in a press conference this morning. “Even without El Niño, this would have been the warmest year on record. We’re looking at at long-term trend, and this is just a symptom.”

For the first time this year, the global average temperature was unequivocally 1 degrees Celsius warmer than the 19th century average, placing the planet halfway to the 2 degrees C global warming target climate scientists say we need to stay below to avoid catastrophic climate change. To stay below that 2 degrees C target, Schmidt says, the world would need to cut fossil fuel consumption “pretty much starting now, at historically unprecedented rates.”

As we’ve been reporting throughout the year, ten out of twelve months in 2015—every month except January and April—broke its respective monthly temperature record. According to Schmidt, many monthly records were surpassed by a much larger margin than they’d been broken in previous years.

NASA, NOAA, and UK Met Office global temperature anomalies, dating back to 1880. Via NASA

And thanks to El Niño, 2015 went out guns blazing: December 2015 was the most anomalously hot month of any in history, at 1.11°C (2.00°F) warmer than its monthly average. (Remember our July-flavored Christmas? It wasn’t just the northeastern US.) As NASA and NOAA stressed today, whether or not 2015 had been an El Niño year, it would have been a roaster.

2015 swiped the warmest-year-in-history title from 2014, but it might not keep the record for long. We’re starting 2016 out with the most extreme El Niño conditions in history, and we can expect more monthly records to be obliterated as the winter continues. “The factors causing this trend are continuing to accelerate,” Schmidt said, adding that there’s “no evidence that the long-term trend has paused, slowed, or hiatused anytime in the last few decades.”

“We anticipate that 2016 is to be an exceptionally warm year, and perhaps even another record,” he said.

Hold onto your butts: the future’s just starting to heat up.

Top image via Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against three convicted murderers, including two brothers, whose death sentences had been vacated by the Kansas Supreme Court. The decision—which ultimately revolved around sentencing procedures, the New York Times reports, and will likely not have very much impact on the court’s death penalty jurisprudence—returned the case to the state Supreme Court. The sentences may be vacated again.

The case involved three inmates facing the death penalty in two separate cases: the brothers Jonathan and Reginald Carr, and Sidney Gleason. The state Supreme Court vacated their sentences, the Kansas City Star reports, on the grounds that the brothers should have been sentenced separately, and that the jury instructions for all three had been unclear.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion, overturning the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision. He was joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, without comment. Breyer and Ginsburg have hinted that they believe the death penalty may be unconstitutional.

In 2000, the Carr brothers, who are black, were found guilty in the deaths of four white people, in what is known as the Wichita Massacre. Scalia details the massacre, which has come to be the subject of a right-wing conspiracy about a media cover-up—despite (or perhaps because) the Sedgwick County district attorney’s insistence that there was no evidence race was the motive—in detail:

In December 2000, brothers Reginald and Jonathan Carr set out on a crime spree culminating in the Wichita Massacre. On the night of December 7, Reginald Carr and an unknown man carjacked Andrew Schreiber, held a gun to his head, and forced him to make cash withdrawals at various ATMs. On the night of December 11, the brothers followed Linda Ann Walenta, a cellist for the Wichita symphony, home from orchestra practice. One of them approached her vehicle and said he needed help. When she rolled down her window, he pointed a gun at her head. When she shifted into reverse to escape, he shot her three times, ran back to his brother’s car, and fled the scene. One of the gunshots severed Walenta’s spine, and she died one month later as a result of her injuries.

On the night of December 14, the brothers burst into a triplex at 12727 Birchwood, where roommates Jason, Brad, and Aaron lived. Jason’s girlfriend, Holly, and Heather, a friend of Aaron’s, were also in the house. Armed with handguns and a golf club, the brothers forced all five into Jason’s bedroom. They demanded that they strip naked and later ordered them into the bedroom closet. They took Holly and Heather from the bedroom, demanded that they perform oral sex and digitally pene- trate each other as the Carrs looked on and barked orders. They forced each of the men to have sex with Holly and then with Heather. They yelled that the men would be shot if they could not have sex with the women, so Holly— fearing for Jason’s life—performed oral sex on him in the closet before he was ordered out by the brothers.

Jonathan then snatched Holly from the closet. He ordered that she digitally penetrate herself. He set his gun between her knees on the floor. And he raped her. Then he raped Heather.

He goes on for another two-and-a-half pages.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the Supreme Court should not have even heard the case: “I see no reason to intervene in cases like these—and plenty of reasons not to. Kansas has not violated any federal constitutional right. If anything, the State has overprotected its citizens based on its interpretation of state and federal law.”

“The Carr brothers committed acts of ‘almost inconceivable cruelty and depravity,’” Sotomayor wrote, quoting Scalia, “and the majority is understandably anxious to ensure they receive their just deserts.”

However, she added, “The standard adage teaches that hard cases make bad law...I fear that these cases suggest a corollary: Shocking cases make too much law.”

Image via New York Times/Kansas Department of Corrections. From left: Sidney Gleason; Jonathan Carr; Reginald Carr. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

There is almost never a good reason to hit “reply all.” Especially not when “all” includes a listserv that goes out to thousands of employees at Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher.

It’s still ongoing (send us more of the chain!), but we were forwarded a portion of it as of about an hour ago. It’s going how these things usually go: with some genuinely baffled folks, some angry that it’s 2016 and no one knows how email works, and some trolls just content to sow chaos.

It started with a polite request from a photo editor, curious about their healthcare plan.

Hello,

Can you confirm what date the HSA seed money will appear in our Wageworks accounts? I have not yet received mine, and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a problem, as last year we’d already gotten it by this time.

Thanks and best

Unfortunately that photo editor didn’t send her email to HR; she sent it to the Health and Wellness listserv.

One human resources employee asked another for help, and hit reply all so that the original question-asker would know it was being worked on. That reply all sent it off to everyone.

[Redacted], can you help?

And we’re off.

Not sure why I got this email. But I actually had the same question. I wrote to the Time Inc. One Exchange this morning. Asking why I don’t see the Time Inc. HRA balance in Wage Works.

I don’t know why I am on this email

Im also receiving this for some reason….

Clearly we are all ACCIDENTALLY in the group TI HR HEALTH WELLNESS. This is an IT fix. Stop replying.

I think you got the wrong [name redacted]

Nope, [name redacted], this is for you. And everyone else.

Please remove me form this email.

Que esta pasando aqui – no entiendo!

PLEASE STOP REPLY ALL. I AM NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS MATTER.

Thank you.

[Name Redacted]

This Old House Magazine

Note that a replyallpocaplyse can only be averted if people stop hitting reply all to complain about it—and once the smartasses show up, it’s too late for even that.

Keep us in the loop! I’m on the edge of my seat!

Ditto

[Original question-asker], this must be the worst moment of your life, but the most amazing at the same time.

Then the trolls came.

I’m selling Girl Scout Cookies!

Check out the latest of issue of InStyle!

While we have you all: Who’s on college football tonight? Signed, Thayer [Note: not actually from Thayer Evans.]

[A photo of a child clad in Spongebob Squarepants pajamas, for some reason]

Found the solution: to remove yourself from this email chain, click here.

You’ll pry the reply-all button from my cold, dead hands.

God bless you, Time Inc. employees. But you belong to the chain now.

A video uploaded to Facebook on Wednesday appears to show the armed militants occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge rummaging through a storage area, accusing the Bureau of Land Management of improperly storing artifacts belonging to the local, native Paiute tribe. “SHARE!” the video is captioned. “BREAKING UPDATE BURNS OREGON BLM LEFT NATIVE ARTIFACTS TO ROT IN MICE DROPPINGS!”

Earlier this week, Burns Paiute tribal chairperson Charlotte Roderique expressed concern over how the militia was handling the tribe’s history. “We are really worried about the status of the artifacts down there,” Roderique told the Indian Country Today Media Network. (Gawker could not reach Roderique for comment.)

“I understand they took a bulldozer and built a line around the refuge headquarters,” Roderique told Indian Country Today. “You can’t go and bulldoze things. I don’t know what these people are doing if they are doing things to just get a rise or to be martyr—all they are doing is making enemies out of the people they professed to support.”

Last week, the tribe delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service demanding the militants’ prosecution “if the occupiers disturb, damage, remove, alter, or deface any archaeological resource on the refuge property.” From Indian Country Today:

There are approximately 4,000 artifacts belonging to the tribe in the buildings the militants are holding. The occupation is entering its third week.

The tribe is demanding federal action under both the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 and a “protection against bad men” provision in the treaty the tribe signed with the United States in 1868.

Under ARPA, a federal law authorizing law enforcement and penalties in the defense of archeological sites on public land, removing artifacts is a felony offense. First time offenders can be fined up to $20,000 and imprisoned for up to one year. Second time offenders can be fined up to copy00,000 and imprisoned for up to 5 years.

Incidentally, in 2014, members of the Bundy clan driving ATVs through the Recapture Canyon, in southern Utah, to protest its closure to motorized vehicles, ended up trampling Ancestral Puebloan artifacts and dwellings.

“Damage to archaeological sites is permanent and the information about our collective past is then lost forever,” Jerry Spangler, director of the Colorado Plateau Archaeological Alliance, told the Salt Lake Tribune at the time. “It is sad that irreplaceable treasures of importance to all Americans would be sacrificed on the altar of anti-government fervor. It is worse that protesters would be so blinded to their own insensitivity as to what others consider to be sacred treasures of their past.”

Any posture towards historical stewardship the Bundys and their friends might take is completely disingenuous. “We also recognize that the Native Americans had the claim to the land, but they lost that claim,” Ammon Bundy’s brother, Ryan, said recently. “There are things to learn from cultures of the past, but the current culture is the most important.”

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent Martin Shkreli a subpoena to appear before Congress next week, Agence France-Presse reports. He will testify at a hearing on prescription drugs and drug pricing.

“A subpoena was issued to Mr. Shkreli,” a committee aide confirmed to AFP. Also, Shkreli tweeted about it.

“House busy whining to healthcare reporters about me appearing for their chit chat next week. Haven’t decided yet. Should I?” he sneered in another tweet, addressed to Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the oversight committee.

“I have been trying for the better part of a year to get information from Martin Shkreli about his outrageous price increases, and he has obstructed our investigation at every turn,” Cummings said in a statement.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

In response to the overdue but increasing amounts of attention being paid to the lead-poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan governor Rick Snyder has released his emails relating to Flint from 2014 and 2015.

Up top is the first email in the pile, sent three months before the city switched from Detroit’s treated Lake Huron water supply to the water from the Flint River. The move was a temporary measure, and was intended to save about $5 million over two years; it has now killed at least 10 people and sickened up to 10,000.

Let’s get a closer look at what the rest of this extremely telling email says.

Sorry, what was that?

Sorry, I am a little rusty on that old provincial tongue called The Most Important Email In This Shitpile Has Been Totally Redacted. Show me whatever else you got.

GREAT!

Work your way through these emails if you dare: it’s a nightmarish tangle of local bureaucracy trying and failing to manage a city whose post-industrial depression has left it with no tax base, in which the wild decision to semi-permanently damage public health in the city by switching to a water supply from the notoriously unclean Flint River is laid out in terms like this resolution, signed by the emergency manager on March 29, 2013.

And elementary school students being lead-poisoned is reported to Snyder on October 8, 2015, like this:

Cool. We’ll be hearing more about these in the following days, but if you’d like to take a look, they’re here.

Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.

Despite being convicted on corruption charges in federal court late last year, former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver will still receive his $79,224-a-year pension, at $6,602 a month. Crime really does pay!

A tony New England prep school that has educated the likes of Howard Dean, George H.W. Bush’s father Prescott Bush, and Tucker Carlson is now embroiled in a sex abuse scandal that has been covered up, victims say, since the 1970s. At least 40 former students of St. George’s School in Rhode Island have come forward to say they were abused at the school. The latest known case of abuse allegedly occurred in 2004.

The Associated Press reports that administrators at the $56,000-a-year Episcopal school may face charges for failing to report abuse. St. George’s is conducting its own investigation into the allegations, while Rhode Island state police are “looking into possible sex-crime charges and other offenses.” As the AP notes, there is no statute of limitations on rape in Rhode Island.

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/bec27b...

The Boston Globe first made the school’s problems public in December, when it reported on the case of alumna Anne Scott. Scott says she was raped multiple times by an athletic trainer named Al Gibbs when she was a 15-year-old student at St. George’s in the 1970s. Scott tried to sue the school in the 1980s, the Globe reported, but the school pushed back, and she dropped the case. (Her lawyer was none other than Eric MacLeish, the man who would go on to represent sexual abuse victims of the Catholic Church in Boston in the 1990s. Billy Crudup played him in Spotlight.)

Now, Scott is suing again, and many more victims are coming forward. St. George’s responded to the growing allegations a week after Scott’s story ran in the Globe with an in-house report about the abuse and an apology to the victims. The report identified three former school employees, including Gibbs, that allegedly abused multiple students in the 1970s and 1980s. A choir director named Franklin Coleman allegedly molested at least six students, and a minister named Howard White allegedly had “inappropriate sexual conduct” with at least one student. Gibbs allegedly abused at least 17 students including Scott. All three employees were either fired or forced out of the school, according to the report.

The AP reports, however, that St. George’s administrators and board members let these alleged abusers go quietly, and that nobody informed the police of any misconduct. One former board member told the AP that Howard Dean’s late father was involved in the cover up:

Dan Brewster, a 1974 graduate, went on to serve on the board of trustees in the early 1990s. He said that then-headmaster [Charles] Hamblet and Howard Dean, a former board chairman and father of the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, told him that in some past cases of teachers accused of abuse, the school would quietly let the educator go with a lump-sum payment, a nondisclosure clause and an agreement barring the faculty member from taking a job at another boarding school.

Brewster said that when he asked why the school didn’t notify parents and the authorities, the two men replied that teenagers might be dragged in to testify and that their parents might also bring an “avalanche of lawsuits” against the school. Hamblet and Dean are now dead.

This behavior by administrators and board members appears to have continued up through the 2000s. According to the AP, three students reported to then-Dean of Students Tim Richards that a teacher was touching them inappropriately in 2004. The teacher was simply placed on leave. Richards’ spokeswoman told the AP that he did not contact the authorities because Headmaster Eric Peterson told him that he did not have a legal obligation to do so.

Peterson remains the headmaster at St. George’s. According to the AP, he was told of abuse allegations several times in the last 10 years, and now many have called for his resignation.

If he is forced to resign, rest assured that Peterson has somewhere to go—Rhode Island NPR reported just this morning that Peterson obtained $190,000 in home loans from St. George’s in 2006 and 2009. He used the money to buy a house on Cape Cod, and in 2011 or 2012, the board even forgave the interest and remaining principal on the loans.

St. George’s spokesman Joe Baerlein told Rhode Island NPR that even though Peterson already has a house on campus as part of his job, the board was happy to offer the loans because they were pleased with his leadership. “The learning experience for the kids at St. George’s was top rate, alumni participation was very strong, the financial and fundraising support was very strong,” he said. Peterson’s current salary is $500,000.

Photo via AP. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

The affluent town of Scarsdale just saw its first murder in almost 40 years, and it’s lurid as hell: Police say a wealthy financier killed his pediatrician wife inside their multimillion dollar home not long after filing for divorce.

Jules Reich, a 61-year-old tax specialist described as a “financial guru” by the New York Daily News, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder Thursday. Police reportedly discovered the body of Reich’s 58-year-old wife, Dr. Robin Goldman, after responding to a call about a “seriously injured woman” Wednesday evening.

Prosecutors have not officially released a cause of death, though CBS reports Goldman was “stabbed to death” and the Daily News describes a bloody scene inside the $2.8 million home the couple shared. In his mugshot, Reich appears to have a black eye and several bruises on his face.

Either way, it’s clear their marriage had been troubled for some time—Reich reportedly filed for divorce in August after celebrating the wedding of their daughter. A court date with a mediator was set for next week.

Image via CBS. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Stephen Schwarzman, a private equity billionaire who threw himself a zillion-dollar birthday party during the recession and compared raising taxes on the rich to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, has a question: why are people in America so mad these days?

Schwarzman, who has advocated both raising taxes on the poor and lowering taxes on foreign billionaires, sat down for an interview at Davos, an annual gathering of the world’s worst people. Asked about America’s current political climate, he marveled aloud: “What’s remarkable is the amount of anger. Whether it’s on the Republican side, or the Democratic side. Bernie Sanders to me is almost more stunning than some of the stuff going on on the Republican side. How is that happening? Why is that happening? What is the vein in America that is being tapped into across parties that’s made people so unhappy?”

Good question, motherfucker.

[Bloomberg via IBTimes]

In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take.

Below all the legal jargon is the signature of the man who had composed “This Land Is Your Land,” the most resounding appeal to an equal share for all in America. Below that is the signature of Donald Trump’s father, Fred. No pairing could appear more unlikely.

Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.

Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the racially charged proclamations of Donald Trump, who last year announced, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”

A champion for equality

By the time he moved into his new apartment, Guthrie had traveled a long road from the casual racism of his Oklahoma youth.

He’d learned along the way that the North held no special claim to racial enlightenment. He had written songs such as “The Ferguson Brothers Killing,” which condemned the out-of-hand police killing of the unarmed Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Long Island, in 1946, after the two young black men had been refused service in a bus terminal cafe.

In “Buoy Bells from Trenton,” he denounced the miscarriage of justice in the case of the so-called “Trenton Six” – black men convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury in a trial marred by official perjury and manufactured evidence.

And in 1949, he’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger against the mobs of Peekskill, New York, where American racism at its ugliest had inspired 21 songs from his pen (one of which, “My Thirty Thousand,” was recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco).

A postwar housing haven – for whites

In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, affordable public housing had become an urgent priority.

For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.

When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.”

Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.

What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing” – or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects – a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.

‘Old Man Trump’s’ color line

Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.”

In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the color line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”:

I welcome you here to live. I welcome you and your man both here to Beach Haven to love in any ways you please and to have some kind of a decent place to get pregnant in and to have your kids raised up in. I’m yelling out my own welcome to you.

For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ....

And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees – strangers in their own strange land – Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a blistering broadside against his landlord:

Beach Haven ain’t my home!
I just cain’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God dont know much about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps – father and son alike – might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser”? And we know what Donald Trump thinks about losers.

One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for “Old Man Trump.”

We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.

“Racial Hate at Beach Haven,” “Beach Haven Race Hate,” “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home” and Guthrie’s untitled notebook writings: all words by Woody Guthrie, © copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission.

Will Kaufman is the Professor of American Literature and Culture at University of Central Lancashire.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photos: Getty, Village Voice.

In two letters drafted yesterday, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon requested direct and immediate help from the White House and Department of Justice to end the militia standoff in her state, calling them “armed criminals” and “[insisting] on a swift resolution” to the occupation.

http://gawker.com/oregon-wildlif...

The letters, obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting and published on Twitter, make repeated references to the criminality of the militiamen, who themselves claim to be fighting to end illegal federal ownership of grazing lands. So far this effort has consisted mostly of standing around, blowing horns, petty vandalism, and feuding with one another.

http://gawker.com/angry-militia-...

In the letter to President Obama, Brown refers to “the harm that is being done to the citizens of Harney County by the occupation, and the necessity that this unlawful occupation end peacefully and without further delay from federal law enforcement.” Brown’s letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey is even more forceful:

Since the beginning of the year, the militants have been allowed to occupy the federal building with virtually no interference or opposition from law enforcement, local or federal. Their supply of snacks has grown large.

You can read the letters in their entirety below.

Photo: Getty

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Ever since commissioner Bill Bratton took command of the NYPD in 2014, the department has placed special focus on arresting people who commit small crimes like public urination and panhandling. If a widely supported new legislation package in City Council is any indication, that may soon change. Get your pee on! Because this is excellent news.

You can expect to see many more headlines about public urination, the grabbiest item in a group of bills that also includes reduced punishments for violations like excessive noise and drinking in public. I would bet money that the piss-lovin’ New York Post puts it on their cover tomorrow.

http://tktk.gawker.com/the-new-york-p...

Under the legislation, which reportedly has the support of Bratton, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and a majority of council members, these low-level crimes would largely be treated as civil offenses, which do not carry the possibility of jail time or become a part of an offender’s personal records. But don’t be scared of a little pee pee. According to Bloomberg, one of Bratton’s conditions for approving the legislation was that cops still be given an option to use criminal charges if they are warranted. If a guy is running up and down your block, peeing in strollers or something, he can still be dealt with accordingly.

More importantly, the bills signal a potential scaling back of “broken windows” policing in New York, an approach that has led to a staggering 1.2 million arrest warrants that are currently open in the city. I would bet money that many of those warrants are for underprivileged people of color, and the stats are on my side. Who do you think is more likely to be arrested: the guy who takes a quick outdoor leak after his cigarette to avoid the bathroom line at 1 Oak, or the homeless guy in a poor neighborhood that’s crawling with cops who has nowhere else to go?

Image via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

The name’s Narcisse. Yeah, numbnuts, I’ve heard all the jokes. I’m a newspaperman. No matter how hard I try every night, I can’t scrub the newsprint off my palms. Problem is, the bastard politicians running Westport are threatening to add bloodstains to all that ink.

Out today from indie studio Double Zero One Zero for PC, iOS and Android, The Westport Independent is a game that has players acting as editor-in-chief at a privately owned newspaper. The titular publcation comes out in a fictional locale ruled by a totalitarian regime. At the game’s start, a newsreel rolls, explaining that the passage of a new law requires media outlets to present news in a way that pleases the ruling autocrats.

Players abide by these rules by spinning or censoring the news articles that come across their desks. Clicking on a headline toggles between two options and doing the same to paragraphs will cross them out, leaving them out of the final version of the piece. The choices you make—which also include how much to spend on marketing in different politically aligned—neighborhoods will either make the Westport Independent seem like a propaganda tool for the draconian Loyalist government or express sympathies for the Rebel insurgency trying to defy their rule.

You can see the first and third acts of my first playthrough—weeks 1-4 and 8-12 of the game’s twelve-week cycle—in the video above. Some of the raw copy that you handle has obvious pro-government bias and, depending on the editorial decisions that you make, certain members of the paper’s four-person staff can balk at transcribing them with their bylines attached. You can force them to do it, though, which lowers the comfort level of the person being coerced.

After the paper is published every week, the quartet of men and women drink and chat in a bar. It’s in these scenes that you’ll hear Anne or Julie talk about the pieces with their bylines attached or listen to Loyalist true believer Phil spar with fascist-hating Frank, who hates the fascists who run Westport. If a player’s editorial leadership keeps the paper alive at the end of the game’s twelve-week cycle, they’re treated to another newsreel with details about Westport’s political temperature and the fates of various employees.

Simply keeping the paper going and making sure I had a full complement of writers was the primary concern of my first playthrough of Westport Independent. Worried about inflaming civil unrest and calling down the wrath of the Loyalist strongmen, I tried for balance in my editorial decisions. Later on, I tried slanting my paper’s content more towards a Rebel point-of-view, uneasily confident that I could get away with the shift less than a month before the Public Culture Bill came into effect.

But when my endgame assessment scrolled out, I was surprised to see my iteration of the Westport Independent interpreted as Loyalist-friendly. So, I went full rebel for my second runthrough. We ain’t doing celebrity fluff anymore, I declared, and seized on any chance to stick to those assholes in government. As you play Westport Independent, you’ll get letters from both Loyalist and Rebel factions with serve as feedback to the articles you send out into the world. Some of the letters I saw on my second playthrough were much different, sharper in tone and increasingly more threatening. Those weren’t idle threats either; that follow-up playthrough only made it to week 7. I sat down at my desk as usual, but didn’t get any updates about sales. No employee dossiers either. One more fateful click and there it was: the notice that the paper had been shut down.

Westport Independent is didactic and heavy-handed, placing players in a fictional construct with a black-or-white morality continuum. But, like This War of Mine and Papers, Please, its unexpected triumph comes from making me care about the lives of the people I was managing. Even Phil—the abrasive Loyalist stooge who defended violent police beatings of innocent people—garnered some empathy from when he talked about talking his infirm brother to the hospital for physical therapy. Some feeling was coming back into his toes? Well, damn, that’s a minor miracle, right? Yes, I had a paper to run and vital truths I wanted to transmit into the minds of readers. I wanted to keep the paper alive, make it popular and use that popular to resist the in-game autocracy.

But it was my writers who paid the steepest costs. Was Frank—who’d called in “sick” and was later disappeared by the government—alive? Were any of them? I had no way to know. My writers were gone and the news was dead, shut down because I’d pushed things too far. The chilling effect was real, and as cold as an empty bar chair.

Contact the author at evan@kotaku.com.

There’s a blizzard coming! (Again.) People are freaking out! (Again.) And thank god for that. In situations like this, constant, irrational panic is your best course of action. Because do you know what happens to people who think everything’s going to turn out fine? Why don’t we ask a hungry little group called The Donner Party.

Unfortunately—the Donners and their party are long dead. Fortunately, Sierra Nevada pioneer Patrick Breen kept a diary during their whole, treacherous ordeal. We’ve provided the particularly applicable excerpts below.

And remember, don’t let the panic-shamers tell you otherwise. Just replace the names of Patrick’s friends and family with your own to find out why!

November 7, 1846

beautiful clear day wind E by S looks as if we might some fair weather no thaw

November 10, 1846

Snowed fast all night with heavy squalls of wind. Continues still to snow the sun peeping through the clouds once in about three hours, very difficult to get wood today now...

November 29, 1846

Still snowing now, about 3 feet deep… killed my last oxen today. Will skin them tomorrow. Gave another yoke to Fosters. Hard to get wood.

December 17, 1846

... Milt. & Noah went to Donners 8 days since, not returned yet. Think they got lost in the snow…

January 17, 1847

... Keyburg sent Bill to get hides off his shanty & carry them home this morning. Provisions scarce, hides are the only article we depend on. We have a little meat yet, may God send us help.

February 10, 1847

... J Denton trying to borrow meat for Graves. Had none to give. They have nothing but hides. All are entirely out of meat but a little we have. Our hides are nearly all eat up but with Gods help spring will soon smile upon us.

February 15, 1847

... Mrs Graves refused to give Mrs Reid any hides. Put Suitors pack hides on her shanty. Would not let her have them. Says if I say it will thaw, it then will not. She is a case.

February 25, 1847

Froze hard last night. Fine and sunshiny today... Mrs Murphy says the wolves are about to dig up the dead bodies at her shanty. The nights are too cold to watch them. We hear them howl.

February 26, 1847

...Hungry times in camp. Plenty [of] hides, but the folks will not eat them. We eat them with a tolerable good appetite. Thanks be to Almighty God. Amen. Mrs Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would Commence on Milt. & eat him. I don’t think that she has done so yet. It is distressing.

... The Donners told the California folks that they commence to eat the dead people 4 days ago if they did not succeed that day or the next in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow and did not know the spot or near it, I suppose they have done so ere this time...

Friends, don’t let the Donners’ fate be yours: Make sure to pick up groceries on your way home from work, and a safe and satiated blizzard to you all.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via Wikipedia.

When Love & Hip-Hop star Cardi B breezed into the Jezebel offices on Wednesday, you could tell an angel had just entered the premises. While Cardi frequently finds herself caught in a trifling love triangle between cast mate DJ Self and his girlfriend on the show, Yorma, she’s at the core a self-described relationship type (Cardi’s real boyfriend is currently serving time in prison) with a romantic spirit.

Can she help a man on a mission to land a winter boo? Jezebel recruited Deadspin staff writer Samer Kalaf—or, as Cardi B describes him, “a nice white light skinned guy with green eyes and long eyelashes” (Note: Samer is not white)—to get tips from Cardi about how to conquer cuffing season and the dreaded winter lockdown.

“If you want a fling, you just gotta go to a place that people relate to you,” she advises. “For example, the type of man I like, I’m most likely gonna find him in the strip club. You might like a girl that likes to go to the library, so you could just go the library.”

Watch this sage advice and more in the video above.

http://themuse.jezebel.com/america-loves-...

Contact the author at clover.hope@jezebel.com.

The president of Oberlin College says he “will not respond directly” to a list of “unmalleable demands” from students—demands that include specific faculty members that the students insist be promoted, granted tenure, or fired. Damn. It would have been awesome if that shit had worked.

EXTRA—EXTRA! Gizmodo has obtained exclusive footage of Marissa Mayer riding a Zamboni.

Mayer was criticized for throwing an absurdly extravagant holiday party in 2015 as Yahoo! struggled, especially since she spent part of the night literally sitting alone on a roped-off throne and making her peons come to her.

However, Mayer wasn’t always such a standoffish partier. This video shows off her playful, smooth-ice-lovin’ side.

We are not licensed Zamboni operators but give her performance a solid “A.”

We give Mayer’s performance as CEO of Yahoo! a “D.”