One year ago, Kristin Cavallari began writing a book about “really just everything” in her life. That book has yet to be published.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Donald Trump is either continuing his campaign for Racist in Chief, and he’s only getting more adept at it—or, he’s got really terrible eyesight.

At a rally in Muscatine, Iowa, on Sunday, a pair of protestors carrying a sign that read “Stop Hate” was reportedly met with just that. MSNBC captured the moment when, as one protester wearing a red turban was escorted out of the arena, the Republican presidential candidate asked aloud, “He wasn’t wearing one of those hats, was he?”

A version of the speech posted on Mediaite shows Trump adding that the protester “never will” wear “one of those hats,” suggesting that Trump was referring to his “Make American Great” hats, not the man’s turban.

The rally was held at the gym of the Muscatine High School, which, judging from online photos, does not look particularly large. Is it really conceivable that Trump could not distinguish between a turban and a baseball cap in such a relatively small room? For that matter, wouldn’t his supporters want him to act more charitably to a man who is protesting in the name of stopping hate, regardless of the hat atop his head?

The crowd of Trump supporters can be heard shouting “U-S-A” as the protesters were led out. Clearly, the answer to my previous question is a resounding no.

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

Yesterday, we brought you cops playing snow football and swimmers fighting the snow. Today, please enjoy the best videos people made of themselves enjoying the snow from yesterday’s blizzard, most of which involve them flinging themselves into massive drifts of it.

For my money, this is the best one.

Some people even took the blizzard as an opportunity to take winter sports to the literal streets.

Oof.

Windows were popular during last year’s biggest blizzard as well.

Triple X!

And here’s a compilation. If you have any other good ones, email ‘em to us at tips@deadspin.com.

Update: Snow baby.

Update: Snow beer.

Update: Snow dreads.

Screenshot via

In a story that is quite the Escape from Alcatraz tale (sans swimming), a group of three inmates escaped from a maximum-security jail in Southern California on Friday, and now authorities say they are probably armed.

The Associated Press reported Sunday that Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens told the public to “presume that they are armed and do not approach them.” They were last seen early in the morning on Friday, and escaped from about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles wearing orange jumpsuits.

The felons escaped by cutting through a series of steel bars and plumbing tunnels and then rappelling from the roof three stories down using bedsheets they’d tied together.

The escapees were in jail for an array of violent crimes: 20-year-old Jonathan Tieu for murder and attempted murder, 37-year-old Hossein Nayeri for torture, kidnapping and burglary, and 43-year-old Bac Duong for attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon among other charges.

It’s the first escape from the Orange County Central Men’s Jail in 20 years, but it’s not the only high-profile prison break in recent memory—though we all know how well that one ended.

[Image via AP]

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

On Sunday, the Islamic State released a new, 17-minute video threatening to attack the United Kingdom and other “coalition” countries. In it, nine men, thought to be those who carried out the November Paris attacks, are seen executing prisoners in ISIS-controlled territory in the Middle East.

In the video (which can be seen here), the men are identified by their noms de guerre—including Bilal Hadfi, Samy Amimour, and Abdelhamid Abaaoud. From the Guardian:

If the identities of the men in the video are confirmed as those who carried out the Paris attacks, it would indicate that the nine men were not only influenced by Isis – but rather were coordinated by the group from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

The video seemingly aims to show that the attackers, some of whom had French and Belgian passports, had committed atrocities and trained in Isis-held territory.

According to the New York Times, it’s unclear why it took so long for ISIS to release this video, which they began teasing in this month’s issue of Dabiq.

One of the attackers, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, is not depicted executing anyone, but appears in a room with the flag of ISIS. “We will not stop fighting you in every part of the world regardless of whether you are on a tourism trip or a work trip,” he tells the camera, speaking in French. “So expect more. Expect a mujahid to show up to kill you.”

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

Cheap activewear, CamelBak hydration packs, and $40 Fallout 4 lead off today’s best deals. Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more.

Today only, Amazon’s offering great prices on Champion activewear for men and women, including (but not limited to) plenty of cold weather gear to get you up and moving this winter. [50% or more off Champion activewear]

Speaking of going outside, Amazon’s running another Gold Box deal on CamelBak hydration packs, with prices starting at $36. [25% off select CamelBak hydration packs]

If you’ve somehow avoided picking up a copy of Fallout 4 up to this point, Amazon has it for an all-time low $40 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One today, no charisma points required. [Fallout 4 [PS4/Xbox One/PC], $40]

http://www.amazon.com/Fallout-4-Xbox...

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I’ve got good news and bad news. The truly wireless Moto Hint Bluetooth headset just dropped all the way to $60. That’s bad news for people who bought it for $80 earlier this week (which seemed like a great deal at the time), and great news for everyone else. [Motorola Moto Hint Bluetooth Headset, $60]

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Sometimes, you just have to vacuum in every nook and cranny, if only when you’re expecting guests. This Black & Decker Dustbuster is great for that kind of detail cleaning, or even vacuuming out your car, and $33 is a solid deal. [Black+Decker CHV1510 Dustbuster 15.6-Volt Cordless Cyclonic Hand Vacuum, $33]

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I’m an unabashed fanboy of Nomad products, and you can save over $130 on a gift set of three today, courtesy of Best Buy.

• Nomad Key - A tiny Lightning cable that fits on your keychain. (Normally sells for $25)
• Nomad Roadtrip - A dual-port (one USB-A and one USB-C) car charger with a 3,000mAh rechargeable battery built in. (Normally sells for $60)
• Nomad Wallet - A genuine saffiano leather wallet with an unobtrusive 2400mAh battery and Lightning cable built in. (Normally sells for $100)

Needless to say, with these tools at your disposal, you’ll be like some kind of USB charging mystic. [Nomad Holiday Gift Set, $50]

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There are plenty of multiport USB chargers with one or two Quick Charge 2.0 ports, but if you’ve fully embraced the Quick Charge lifestyle, this Tronsmart hub has five. [Tronsmart Titan 10A/90W 5-Port USB Charger Charging Station with Quick Charge 2.0, $24 with code 5USBPORT]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

Update: Sold out

If you’ve got the cash and the counter space, Amazon’s top-selling espresso machine is down to an all-time low $480 today, $120 less than its usual selling price. [Breville BES870XL Barista Express Espresso Machine, $480]

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Please don’t poke anyone’s eye out (said Shep, whose profile picture is a selfie taken with a drone). [Gogogu Selfie Stick, Extendable Selfie Handheld Stick Monopod, $6 with code K4B2A7DL]

http://www.amazon.com/Gogogu-Extenda...

If you’ve ever thought about pulling out your blender to make a smoothie, sauce, or dip, and then held off because you didn’t want to clean 3,000 different parts, this deal is for you.

The big advantage of Cuisinart’s 4.6 star-rated Smart Stick is that, unlike a traditional blender, you can dip it into whatever container you were already using to hold your ingredients; be it a single-serve cup or a huge mixing bowl. That saves you time, and means fewer dishes to clean up once you’re done. Reviewers also say it chops through everything from fruit to ice cubes with no trouble, so it really can be a full blender replacement for most use cases.

As always, we don’t know how long this deal will be available, so be sure to grab one before the price shoots back up. [Cuisinart CSB-75BC Smart Stick 2-Speed Immersion Hand Blender, $31]

http://www.amazon.com/Conair-Cuisina...

If you’ve been in the market for a ~250GB SSD, you’ve already had two great deals to choose from this week. If you missed out though, here’s a third. [Crucial BX200 240GB SSD, $57]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/3814762023...

If you didn’t get a life-changing wake-up light for Christmas, the high-end model is down to $110 today, which is a match for the best price we’ve ever seen [Philips HF3520 Wake-Up Light, $110]

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We’ve seen a lot of motion-sensing night light deals, but this one can automatically turn on when it detects a power outage, and will even work as a flashlight for up to 90 minutes while untethered from the wall. [Etekcity LED Night Light, Flashlight: Rechargeable Emergency Light, $14 with code 8FZJEC8C]

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More Deals

Tech

• Tronsmart Titan 10A/90W 5-Port USB Charger Charging Station with Quick Charge 2.0 ($24) | Amazon | Promo code 5USBPORT
• Nomad Holiday Gift Set ($50) | Best Buy
• HMDX - Daze Portable Bluetooth Speaker ($20) | Best Buy
• Fujitsu - ScanSnap iX500 Document Scanner ($400) | Best Buy
• Mini Projector Sale ($45-$85) | Woot
• Seneca Desktop Monitor Mount with Adjustable Arms ($35-$70) | Woot
• Motorola Moto Hint Bluetooth Headset ($60) | eBay
• Gogogu Selfie Stick, Extendable Selfie Handheld Stick Monopod ($6) | Amazon | Use code K4B2A7DL
• OtterBox Defender Series iPhone 6 Plus ONLY Case ($24) | Amazon

Home

• 50% or more off Champion activewear | Amazon | Today only
• 25% off select CamelBak hydration packs | Amazon | Today only
• Bushnell NEO XS Golf GPS Rangefinder Watch ($90) | Amazon
• RECARO Performance RIDE Car Seat, Midnight ($180) | Amazon
• Black+Decker CHV1510 Dustbuster 15.6-Volt Cordless Cyclonic Hand Vacuum ($33) | Amazon

• Insignia - Ceramic Tower Heater ($55) | Best Buy
• Insignia - 6-Sheet Crosscut Countertop Mail Shredder ($20) | Best Buy
• Cuisinart - Juice Extractor ($100) | eBay
• Refurb Dyson DC50 Multifloor - Purple ($225) | Woot
• iRobot Roomba 880 Vacuum Cleaning Robot For Pets and Allergies ($595) | Amazon
• Vivo 2 Person Far Infrared Sauna ($845) | Woot
• Yukon Tactical Scout Sling Pack ($35) | Woot
• Stainless Steel Can Opener from X-Chef ($6) | Amazon

Gaming

• Fallout 4 [PS4/Xbox One] ($40) | Amazon
• WWE 2K16 ($38) | Best Buy
• UNCHARTED: The Nathan Drake Collection ($31) | Amazon
• Forza Motorsport 6 ($40) | Amazon

Media

• The World Wars ($10) | Amazon
• One Life ($7) | Amazon
• The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ($8) | Amazon

Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Send deal submissions to Deals@Gawker, click here to learn more.

According to a police report released Saturday, Dane Gallion, the man suspected of shooting a stranger at a 13 Hours screening in Renton, Washington, was carrying a firearm because he was afraid of mass shootings. He also gave police three different, contradictory accounts of how the accidental shooting happened.

http://gawker.com/drunk-guy-acci...

“He told some people he’d taken the gun out because he was concerned about the possibility of mass shootings there,” Detective Robert Onishi said Saturday. Gallion, 29, who told police he’d taken Xanax and drank a 22-ounce beer before the movie, did not have a legal concealed weapons permit, KOMO News reports.

“Preliminary accounts indicate that an intoxicated suspect entered one of the theaters and was fumbling with a handgun he had in his possession when it went off, striking another patron seated in front of him,” Renton Police said in a statement.

Gallion’s victim, Michelle Mallari, 40, is being treated at Harborview Medical Center, and was stable as of Saturday, the Seattle Times reports. (Also: “The movie both went to see was 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, a documentary about the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya.” It is not a documentary.)

The Times reports that the police were given three different explanations for the shooting:

The suspect’s father, Donald Gallion, had called the police saying that his son had returned home “extremely upset,” claiming that the gun had fallen out of his pocket and gone off.

The suspect then told the arresting officer that another moviegoer reached for his crotch and that’s when he accidentally fired the gun. Gallion said he fled the theater immediately afterwards because he didn’t want to appear as a mass shooter.

Finally, at the police station, he told another officer that a man was bothering him but wouldn’t go into the details. Gallion alleged that the gun accidentally went off and scared him, prompting him to leave; the suspect denied having handled the gun. The officer wrote in the report that he didn’t notice any powder burns or injuries on Gallion.

Gallion was booked Thursday night and was charged with third degree assault. A judge set bail at $25,000. “From having talked to him, it seems he didn’t have any intent to shoot anybody,” Detective Onishi said.

Gallion was booked into the King County jail Thursday night, and now faces a third degree assault charge. He also has one prior conviction for driving under the influence nearly five years ago.

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

Donald Trump went to church today: “When the collection plate was passed, Mr. Trump tossed in money; two crisp $50 bills peeked out from under a handful of singles minutes later.” The sermon was on the concept of humility. “I have more humility than people think,” he told reporters afterwards.

On December 20, 2003, a torrent file was created for an ASCII version of The Matrix. In January 2016, after countless other albums, movies and TV shows have come and gone, it’s still active.

Since there’s no official world governing body of the torrent scene, the guys at TorrentFreak are the closest thing we’ve got, and having tracked the torrent for over a decade (they first wrote about it in 2005, when it only had a single seeder) they’re comfortable calling it “the oldest torrent that’s still being actively shared”.

While in 2016 it’s easy for even the most obscure stuff to find a home in someone’s HDD, a lot of older torrents are gone because back when BitTorrent had “only a fraction of the users it has now” (the first client was released in 2001), it was a lot harder for torrents to remain continuously active.

This, though? Well, it’s fitting. If anything was going to survive from the days of a system like BitTorrent first crawling out of the internet, it was going to be an ASCII version of the Matrix.

Responding to earlier reports that filmmakers had cut footage, damaging to the Clinton campaign, from a new documentary about Anthony Weiner, co-director Elyse Steinberg said, “There was no footage that was taken out.” That, presumably, is an overstatement, as the filmmakers were working with 400 hours of raw footage.

http://gawker.com/the-new-anthon...

Steinberg and co-director Josh Kriegman addressed the Marc Theatre audience after the film’s world premier at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday afternoon, the Hollywood Reporter reports. Kriegman, formerly Weiner’s district chief of staff, said the accusations had been made “by people who haven’t even seen the movie.”

Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is Hillary Clinton’s top aide. According to reviews, the film does not explicitly show Clinton or her surrogates pressuring Abedin to distance herself from her perennially embarrassing husband. And yet:

There is, however, an implication that Abedin opted not to join Weiner on election day on the advice of someone named Phillipe (Phillipe Reines served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Clinton and is the likely person referenced).

Multiple parties who viewed early cuts of the film told The Hollywood Reporter that Clinton’s team is seen trying to pressure Abedin. It is unclear if what they saw is the same footage that appears in the film, where Phillipe is referenced twice in regards to Abedin keeping a low profile as Weiner’s political career detonates.

Despite that detonation, Weiner has managed to keep himself in the public eye—or at least our Twitter feeds. “I have no choice but to not let it debilitate me,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune, after being asked why he doesn’t quit social media (which seems to have facilitated most, and possibly even all, of his bad behavior).

“It also doesn’t make me care any less, or make me think that if I have something clever to say on Twitter I shouldn’t say it, or if I have an idea I shouldn’t espouse it, or if I have a company that needs my help I shouldn’t help, or if someone calls me for advice on how to run for office I shouldn’t sit down with him. I don’t know what my alternative is.”

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

According to the New York Post, Donald Trump commutes to campaign events in Iowa from Manhattan, so that he can stay involved in the family business—The Trump Organization. “I’m still running a business,” he said. “It’s doing phenomenal, and the hotels are doing even better because of the excitement factor.”

That’s good, because, over 28 years, he wasn’t even beating the stock market. In August, the Associated Press reported that if Trump had put all of his money in an index fund in 1988, when he published The Art of the Deal, he’d be worth $13 billion today, or more than triple Forbes’ estimate of his worth ($4 billion).

(Also, on the reverse commuting from Manhattan point: He stayed in a motel in Sioux City, Iowa, overnight on Friday, the New York Times reports. But usually he takes his private Boeing 757 either to to Trump Tower, in New York, or to his estate in Palm Beach, Florida.)

The campaign, Trump told the Post, is “even more of an asset internationally. I have many projects all over the world and for those partners, in China, India and other countries, they read about the [presidential campaign] and they see the big picture.”

“I deal with the top people of these countries. They want to meet me and talk to me. I am more tested with international leaders than a governor or senator.”

Of course, if he wins, he’ll have to put his assets in a trust and turn the business over to someone else—probably his kids (who, incidentally, already have three surprisingly cluttered offices right next to each other on the floor below their dad’s headquarters).

“The kids do a good job, and I have very good executives,” Trump said.

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

Aspiring actors and artists have long turned to the restaurant industry for extra cash, but they’ve found a far more convenient alternative: driving for Uber, Lyft, or in some cases, both.

As the New York Times reports, “over the last two years droves of [actors and artists] have gone to work for ride-sharing services...because of their flexible hours and, until recently, decent pay.”

As Krystel Harris, a 27-year-old actress, tells the Times, the typical gig at a chic restaurant or boutique often became an impediment to one’s success. “I was a lead hostess at three different restaurant,” she says. “It really didn’t allow for much flexibility at all. I ended up getting fired for going to an audition. Even when I got my shifts covered, they gave me a hard time.”

Fellow actor Carlton Totten explains that driving for Uber allows him the freedom to cultivate the look associated with his brand. He once resisted shaving “because a casting director was looking for someone with stubble” — an issue for restaurant managers who demand a clean-cut aesthetic.

However, the glory days seem already to be fleeting. From the Times:

“Two years ago, drivers for Uber and Lyft could hope to make as much as $25 an hour, according to interviews with more than a dozen Los Angeles-based drivers. Today, with a glut of Uber and Lyft cars on the road, those drivers say that their average fares have dropped from $2.40 per mile in December 2013 to $.90 per mile for most trips after Uber’s most recent rate reduction this month.”

So will “Hollywood’s new creative underclass” return to waiting tables and folding rag & bone tee-shirts? Totten mentions to the Times that he may work for Postmates, “the app-based service that delivers artisanal food in under 60 minutes and guarantees its drivers a minimum of $25 an hour.”

“You can’t live on this anymore,” says Totten. And so it’s on to the next thing — all the while scanning the casting calls.

Contact the author at rachel.vorona.cote@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

A University of Missouri professor caught on camera demanding “muscle” to prevent a student reporter from covering a campus protest has been formally charged with assault, an important reminder that although you can hate the press, you cannot express that hatred physically.

http://gawker.com/you-can-hate-t...

Melissa Click, a professor of mass media at the university, quickly overshadowed what were at the time peaceful student demonstrations against the school’s perceived lack of response to several racist on-campus incidents. When a student reporter tried to enter the protest area, Click attempted to physically prevent him from approaching the public campus quad in a confrontation captured on video.

http://gawker.com/professor-of-m...

“Hey who wants to help me get this reporter out of here,” Click was filmed shouting. “I need some muscle over here!”

The move drew ire at the time, and now, two months later, a prosecutor from the Columbia District Attorney’s office tells the Kansas City Star Click has been charged with third-degree assault, a class-C misdemeanor punishable by a fine and/or up to 15 days in jail.

Click is still reportedly employed at the university as an assistant professor.

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

Racial inequality and economic inequality are not synonyms, but they are as closely linked as it is possible for two things to be. They are the bread and butter of American problems.

The racial wealth gap. The racial wealth gap. The racial wealth gap. Let us focus here, for a moment, on the real enemy: The racial wealth gap. For an up-to-date picture of the economic discrepancies in America by race, here is a quick snapshot of facts taken from the newly released Assets & Opportunity Scorecard from the Corporation for Enterprise Development:

Unemployment: For whites, 4.9%; for Latinos, 7.5%; and for black people, 11.5%.

Poverty: 10.9% of white households earn incomes below the federal poverty line, versus 23.5% of Latino households and 26.1% of black households. Furthermore, we can see that there is a racial gap not only in income but in wealth; here is a racial breakdown of the asset poverty rate, defined as the Percentage of households without sufficient net worth to subsist at the poverty level for three months in the absence of income: for white households, 18.7%; for Latino households, 43.3%; and for black households, 45.6%. Perhaps the starkest measure of racial wealth inequality is median household net worth: for white households, $111,000; for Latino households, $9,000; and for black households, $7,000.

Business ownership: What percentage of the labor force are business owners? For whites, 19.1%; for Latinos, 13.8%; and for black people, 14.4%. And the average value of a white-owned business is 4.1 times greater than the value of a Latino-owned business, and 8.8 times greater than the value of a black-owned business.

Homeownership: 71% of white household are homeowners, versus 45% of Latino households and 41% of black households. And 57% of black households that rent are defined as “cost-burdened” (meaning they pay more than 30% of their income in rent), versus 56% for Latino households and 45% for white households.

Health insurance: 9.8% of white people are uninsured, versus 24.7% of Latinos and 14.9% of black people.

Education: The high school graduation rate for white students is 87.2%; for Latino students, 76.3%; and for black students, 72.5%. And 33.5% of white people have a four-year degree, versus 14.4% of Latinos and 19.7% of black people.

The facts tell the story: minority households, particularly black, are losing in virtually every measure of economic health. This sort of inequality is a trap that feeds itself. Black people are born with less family wealth, earn less income, have a harder time buying a home, and therefore have a harder time getting credit that might offer them a lifeline out of poverty. We can talk about The American Dream all we want, but this is the American reality.

The close correlation between race and poverty clearly has its roots in historic racism—and, for black people, the legacy of slavery, which was a very direct system of building white wealth at the expense of black people. The close correlation between race and poverty also means that if you attack poverty itself, you are by definition attacking the racial wealth gap. Nobody suffers from poverty’s effects in this country more than black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has long made the moral case for slavery reparations in America, has taken Bernie Sanders to task for failing to endorse reparations, saying that the candidate carrying the “radical” flag should support reparations specifically for black people, writing “treating a racist injury solely with class-based remedies is like treating a gun-shot wound solely with bandages. The bandages help, but they will not suffice.”

The racial wealth gap is the living, thriving manifestation of racism’s legacy. It does not represent the totality of American racism (rich black people can get shot by police, too), but it is the thing that captures the broadest picture of the real-world effects of hundreds of years of discrimination. Economics are not the only effect of racism. But economics do have the useful quality of being something that politicians are able to directly and meaningfully address through government policy, unlike some of racism’s murkier aspects. No one who is being honest can deny that America owes an enormous debt to black people that it has never even attempted to repay. The moral case for reparations is sound. What would those reparations look like? Coates doesn’t say. (I took a crack at imagining what an American system of reparations would like once, and came up with a system of payments to poor people.) It would certainly be healthy for America’s soul to have a debate about reparations in the mainstream dialogue. To do it, we need some idea of what those reparations would be.

I do not know the what the best system of reparations would be. But I do know that the racial wealth gap is real, and the correlation of race and poverty is real, and that those facts are responsible for destroying millions of black lives in America, and that those things can be addressed through government policies. By addressing income inequality, and wealth inequality, and predatory lending, and unemployment, and affordable housing, and lack of credit and good education and good health care for the poor, you do a whole lot to help black people, who suffer the effects of these things more acutely than any other group. So let’s fix the problems. “Does this count as reparations?” It doesn’t have to. It counts as fixing the problems that we know that we have and we know how to fix, right now, if only we can muster the political will to do so.

[Photo: Flickr]

Anyone serving a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for a crime they committed as a juvenile has a right to challenge their punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today. The decision will give roughly 1,000 inmates a shot at reducing their terms, according to NBC News.

In a 2012 case known as Miller v. Alabama, the Court ruled that imposing mandatory life without parole on juvenile offenders constituted a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, citing a child’s “diminished culpability and heightened capacity for change.” Today’s decision retroactively applies that thinking to those who were already imprisoned in 2012, giving them an opportunity to argue for a shorter sentence or a parole opportunity.

Many states had already begun retroactively applying Miller, and the ruling will compel the handful of states that have not.“The opportunity for release will be afforded to those who demonstrate the truth of Miller’s central intuition—that children who commit even heinous crimes are capable of change,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Court’s majority opinion today.

One inmate who will be unaffected by the change is Making a Murderer’s Brendan Dassey, whose lawyers may currently be experiencing the strange dissonance of wishing he were sentenced more harshly back in 2007. Dassey was a picture of “diminished culpability” when he confessed to killing Teresa Halbach alongside his uncle Steven Avery: sixteen years old, 70 IQ, fourth-grade reading level. However, Dassey’s sentence included the possibility of parole in 2048, excluding him from a review. He will be 59 years old.

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

As the country attempts to untangle exactly who is to blame for the residents of Flint, Mich. being forced to use lead-poisoned water for well over a year, the Michigan ACLU has dug up a little bit of evidence that at least absolves one important person.

http://gawker.com/how-much-did-m...

Curt Guyette, an investigative reporter for the Michigan ACLU, writes in the Daily Beast about a previously undiscovered deposition given by a man named Jerry Ambrose in a civil case related to the health care benefits of Flint’s retired municipal workers. At the time Ambrose was deposed in 2014, he was working under Ed Kurtz, who at that point was Flint’s emergency manager, given full control of the city via the controversial program enacted by currently embattled governor Rick Snyder.

Per Guyette, the following exchange took place between Ambrose and an attorney:

“There was brief evaluation of whether the city would be better off to simply use the Flint River as its primary source of water over the long term,” Ambrose said. “That was determined not to be feasible.”

“Who determined it wasn’t feasible?” Gibbs asked.

“It was a collective decision of the emergency management team based on conversations with the [Michigan Department of Environmental Quality] that indicated they would not be supportive of the use of the Flint River on a long-term basis as a primary source of water,” Ambrose answered.

“What was the reason they gave?” Gibbs asked.

“You’ll have to ask them,” Ambrose said.

Guyette doesn’t explain why exactly the topic of Flint’s water was raised, and the meaning of this back-and-forth itself requires a bit of context. It was under Ambrose and his boss Kurtz that Flint decided to stop buying water from the city of Detroit. From our initial story on Flint’s water crisis:

The move to detach Flint from Detroit’s prohibitively expensive water supply in favor of a more affordable plan that would draw water from a pipeline connected to nearby Lake Huron was made in April 2013 by a man named Ed Kurtz, who had been appointed as Flint’s “emergency manager” by Snyder under a program that was controversial from its inception. Kurtz’s decision was backed up by city council in a 7-1 vote, but Flint would still have to find an interim source of water while the Lake Huron pipeline was being constructed.

Kurtz, acting in his role as emergency manager, and the city of Flint collectively decided to move Flint away from Detroit’s water and towards a planned pipeline that would pull water from nearby Lake Huron. At the time, simply moving Flint away from Detroit’s water was accepted as a necessary cost-saving measure, though newly released emails seem to indicate that perhaps it wasn’t about saving money after all.

What’s in dispute is exactly who chose to use the corrosive Flint River water in the period between Flint disconnecting from Detroit and hooking up to Lake Huron, a decision that happened when Kurtz had already been succeeded by a man named Darnell Earley.

Though Ambrose cryptically declines to state a reason, his deposition would seem to indicate that he and Kurtz, in consult with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, were aware that the Flint River was an unsafe source of drinking water when they evaluated it as a longterm option. Still, that’s just one implication decoded from Ambrose’s deposition, and it’s complicated by the fact that the head of the MDEQ resigned last December after his department botched several tests of Flint’s tap water.

It’s also possible that decision-makers in Flint thought that the Flint River would be safe as a temporary, but not permanent, source of water. They would have been gravely wrong, as we all now know, but it might at least explain the discrepancy. Guyette points out that in an email obtained by the ACLU, Earley, the second emergency manager, told the Detroit Water and Sewage Department that the city “has actively pursued” the Flint River as its temporary source:

“Thank you for the correspondence [...] which provides Flint with the option of continuing to purchase water from DWSD… The City of Flint has actively pursued using the Flint River as a temporary water source… There will be no need for Flint to continue purchasing water to serve its residents and businesses after April 17, 2014.”

Though Guyette’s report doesn’t exactly pin the Flint crisis on any one person—if such a thing can even be done—it does at least reinforce what we believe to be an important part of the timeline: that the decision to take water from the Flint River was made after Kurtz left the position of emergency manager.

The ultimate question, of course, is the extent to which Gov. Rick Snyder is to blame. Given that the city was under the direction of two emergency managers during the extended period in which key decisions about Flint’s water source were made, and that the emergency manager program was unprecedented until Snyder implemented it, it’s impossible for him to escape culpability even in the hypothetical scenarios in which he has the most distance from the decisions that resulted in the crisis.

Guyette, though, makes a more direct claim based on an interview conducted by the Michigan ACLU with Howard Croft, the former director of public works in Flint.

In the interview, Croft said that the decision to use the river was a financial one, with a review that “went up through the state.”

“All the way to the governor’s office?” the ACLU of Michigan asked him.

“All the way to the governor’s office,” Croft replied.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com / image via Getty

Since the San Bernardino massacre, you’d be forgiven for believing the American homeland is under siege by men planning to kill you in the name of ISIS, one of the very few things everyone alive can agree on fearing together. But how many scary men doing scary things in America have any actual connection to the Islamic State?

“ISIS” has drifted, in the American popular understanding, from a quasi-political entity, with members and leaders and specific territorial and strategic goals, to an amorphous scare-blob that more closely resembles an evil Islamic Anonymous than, say, Hamas. Before, one had to actually make a perilous voyage to Syria or Iraq and pledge fealty in order to be considered a “member” of ISIS in some capacity. But the door seems to been flung wide open and pretenses of exclusivity dropped, thanks to the particularly dumb trend in law enforcement (at both the federal and local level) to grant ISIS membership to any penny-ante malefactor who merely says the word ISIS, before, during, or after a crime. Want to be in ISIS? Write down ISIS on a sticky note and get arrested with a knife. Congrats, buddy, you’re a jihadi.

On New Year’s Eve, a 25-year-old man named Emanuel Lutchman was arrested in Rochester after he “planned to commit an armed attack against civilians,” according to law enforcement, in the name of ISIS. New York governor Andrew Cuomo swiftly praised the arrest and noted, solemnly, that it provided “an important reminder of the new normal of global terrorism.” What he didn’t mention was the fact that Lutchman was a homeless man with a history of mental illness, and that the attack he had “planned” was an incredibly vague plot to use knives provided to him by an undercover FBI agent. According to The Buffalo News, police “obtained copies of electronic communications between Lutchman and a person who said they were an member of the Islamic State in Syria,” but there’s no proof this person was any more a terrorist than Lutchman himself.

Even dumber was the ISIS affiliation pinned to Philadelphian Edward Archer, who shot a cop in the beginning of January and later told authorities he’d done it “in the name of the Islamic State,” according to CNN. Only later was it reported that Archer wasn’t a practicing Muslim, had no evidence of radicalization, and most importantly, appeared to be schizophrenic: “He’s been acting kind of strange lately. He’s been talking to himself . . . laughing and mumbling...He’s been hearing voices in his head. We asked him to get medical help,” his mother told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Men who both hear voices in their heads and own guns are frightening, to be sure, but they’re neither a new development in American law enforcement nor part of an overseas militant group, even tangentially. Nonetheless, NBC News described him as an “ISIS lover.” As a descriptor for an alleged criminal, that is about as germane as referring to someone who holds up a pizzeria as a “Meat Lover.”

The NYPD is willing to play ball with this strain of crazy, according to a Capital New York post:

The NYPD is looking for an Upper Manhattan-based man who they believe may be looking to shoot police officers, police officials said Wednesday. New York police got information about the unidentified man first from a phone call Tuesday from the Philadelphia Police Department. Then, the NYPD received an anonymous call about the same man which “indicated ISIS,” said NYPD Chief of Intelligence Thomas Galati. “We are taking it seriously.”

There are also “alleged ISIS fans” now, a term ridiculously applied in a recent Daily Beast headline about a teen who might’ve killed his neighbor:

“I don’t know if it is ISIS or what, but he is destroying Buddhas, and figurines, and stuff,” the frightened dad told a 911 operator. He said Sullivan had poured gasoline on “religious items.” “I mean, we are scared to leave the house.”

An undercover officer made contact with Sullivan a little more than a month later. “1000 [victims]...Yes I’m thinking about using biological weapons...Coat our bullets with cyanide...and then set off a gas bomb to finish off the rest,” Sullivan allegedly wrote to the agent.

Your fucked up teenager isn’t a terrorist—he’s fucked up teenager. It’s doubtful your fucked up teen has any meaningful understanding of the political doctrines of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Your fucked up teen may very well be a criminal and need some serious help (or even prison time), but don’t give him the satisfaction of taking ISIS fantasy play seriously.

This fantasizing, the risible idea that a deranged, desperate person with zero understanding of ISIS beyond what they might see on CNN closed captioning while sitting at a bar can be counted among the ranks of a highly organized military group half the world away, has real consequences. The specter of “lone wolf” ISIS attacks is already shaping domestic and foreign policy as the 2016 election approaches—there’s no doubt the San Bernardino massacre has made Trump’s codified Islamophobia more palatable to moderate bigots (never mind that there’s no evidence either of the married shooters had ever made any actual contact with ISIS). In the most recent Democratic debate, NBC’s Lester Holt asked the candidates about this very canard:

You have all talked about what you would do fighting ISIS over there, but we’ve been hit in this country by home-grown terrorists, from Chattanooga to San Bernardino, the recent shooting of a police officer in Philadelphia.

But we weren’t “hit” in Philadelphia (note how keen Holt is to use the language of foreign terror). A man who needed serious medical intervention shot a cop and recited something he’d recently heard or read as justification. Fringe groups and boogeymen will come and go. This has happened (copycat killers still obsess over Charles Manson) and will continue to happen long after the Islamic State is gone, when some other spooky worm works its way into our psyches. Let’s not form policy based on what scares us right this very second.

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

In 1990, Donald Trump’s marriage to a beautiful blonde model was nearing its end, and his marriage to a different beautiful blonde model was just about to bloom. The two ladies (Ivana Trump and Marla Maples, respectively) allegedly became aware of this on the scenic slopes of Aspen, where they got into a verbal—or, depending on who you ask, physical—confrontation over the rotting jack-o-lantern and real estate tycoon himself.

The basic details of the Trump love triangle are as follows: Donald and Ivana, his then-wife of 13 years, were in Aspen for the winter holidays. Marla Maples, the woman who was purportedly and unenviably having sex with Donald Trump on the side, was also in town. This was not a coincidence.

Ivana told the story, in her words, in a 1991 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters:

WALTERS: Donald repeatedly said that your marriage broke up because you just “grew apart,” and he, in a sense, outgrew you.

Mrs. TRUMP: I really wasn’t aware of growing apart. I wasn’t aware of problems. Every marriage takes a give and take.

WALTERS: And then came Christmas, Aspen, December 30th- can you tell us what happened, what you felt, what you learned? It’s still hard, isn’t it?

Mrs. TRUMP: It’s tough.

WALTERS: [voice-over] At first, Ivana could not discuss what happened at Aspen Mountain that day, but later, she was able to talk about it. [interviewing] We know what Marla said about that day in Aspen - we have read about it in all of the papers - that she came up to you and said or you met her and she said, “I love Donald. Do you?” Is that pretty much the way it happened?

Mrs. TRUMP: It was pretty much the way it happened. Actually, I did find out first time on the telephone, when I did pick the phone in the living room and Donald did take the phone in bedroom-

WALTERS: In Aspen?

Mrs. TRUMP: -in Aspen and he spoke to the mutual friend of ours and he was talking about Marla. And I really didn’t understand. I never heard a name like that in my life. And I came to Donald. I said, “Who is Moola?” And he said, “Well, that’s a girl which is going after me for last two years.” And I said, “Is that serious?” And he said, “Oh, she’s just going after me.”

WALTERS: [voice-over] The next day, Ivana said, she was skiing on the slopes when she passed Donald with dark-haired girl. She was told that girl was a friend of “Moola” or Marla, whom Donald said had been chasing him. Later, she saw that girl again.

Mrs. TRUMP: And I saw her in the line, in the food line and-

WALTERS: You were at a restaurant-

Mrs. TRUMP: In the restaurant. And I said, “I understand from my husband that you have a friend which is after my husband for last two years.” I says, “Will you give her the message that I love my husband very much.” And that was it and I walk outside. And I didn’t know this Marla was standing behind this girl in line but because I never met her, I had no idea. And Marla just charged right behind me and she said- well, you said and in front of my children - they were about five feet away - and all were just looking up like nothing would happen, so-

WALTERS: She said, “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?”

Mrs. TRUMP: Yes.

WALTERS: What did you say?

Mrs. TRUMP: I said- I really said- I said, “Get lost. I love my husband very much.” It was very unladylike, but it was as much as I really could- that was as much as I- as harsh as maybe I could be.

WALTERS: And what did Donald say?

Mrs. TRUMP: Not anything, nothing.

WALTERS: And that’s how you found out?

Mrs. TRUMP: Yes.

(Donald reportedly tried to cut off her alimony payments after the interview aired, claiming she had violated the terms of their divorce settlement. A judge ultimately struck a provision of their agreement barring Ivana from speaking about him publicly.)

“[Ivana] came up to [my friend] and said, ‘Are you Moola? Are you?’ And she said no,” Marla said, according to “Trump Nation” author Timothy O’Brien. “Then she came up to me and asked if I was Moola. I said no, because well, that’s not my name. I felt awful, just terrible.”

Other witnesses also gave contemporaneous accounts of the public spat.

“I saw him walking with his arm around a blond and I just assumed it was Ivana,” a Chicago decorator “who spent the holidays in Colorado” told the Chicago Tribune in 1990. “Same size, same hair. I walked around to look, but it wasn’t her.” Via the Tribune:

The two women had words at Bonnie’s, a restaurant where everyone goes for lunch, the most public spot in Aspen, the equivalent of, oh, say, the lobby of Trump Tower. Then, Donald and Ivana put on a show for the holiday skiers.

“They walked out of the restuarant together,” says the decorator. “She was talking and he was trying to shush her. Then they both stopped to put on their skis. She was a little behind him and she was being kind of playful, bumping into him. But then they stopped about 50 feet away from the sundeck. She was facing us and he had his back to us and it`s now clear that they’re fighting. She’s waving her hands and yelling at him. And now everybody decides, ‘This is interesting’ and we all go over to the railing. It goes on for 25 minutes. It went on forever! Every now and then she tried to make up and put her arms around him, but he pulled back, he wouldn’t respond. He finally skied off, and everyone started clapping and cheering. She smiled and waved to the crowd and skied away in his direction. But I saw them near the next lift, and they were still going at it.”

“They were like two bag people fighting on the subway,” says E. Graydon Carter, co-editor of Spy magazine, which engages in frequent Trump-bashing.

The Aspen Soujourner has a slightly juicier version of the encounter:

When Ivana Trump and Marla Maples encountered each other on Aspen Mountain during the Christmas holidays of 1990, the story went around the world in at least three or four different versions, one of which made the front page of the next day’s New York Post. What is known for sure is that both women were in Aspen, with The Donald, at the same time. And only one of them, Ivana, was married to him. The rest of the details varied considerably.

Some claim Ivana approached Marla in Bonnie’s restaurant and demanded, “You bitch, leave my husband alone!” Others say the confrontation occurred on the ski slope at the bottom of Little Nell, where they threw snowballs and hissed at each other. Ivana has said, “She came to me on the mountain and told me she was in love with my husband and they were having an affair. It was extremely painful.” Still others insist that the real source of the contretemps was that both were wearing identical expensive ski suits, possibly purchased by Trump for each of them. Whatever really happened, the result was divorce court.

And People provided a similar account in a February, 1990 article.

By most accounts, the ailing marriage took its fatal downhill plunge during the couple’s stormy Christmas holiday in Aspen, where they were seen arguing on the slopes and outside Bonnie’s, a popular restaurant on the mountain. Another vacationing skier reports that on Dec. 29 Ivana became enraged when she learned that actress-model Maria Maples was also at the resort.

Two days later, according to one witness, when Maples, 26, walked out of Bonnie’s, Ivana confronted her, demanding, “You bitch, leave my husband alone.” Trump, who was sitting within earshot putting on his skis, took off down the mountain. Wrong move: Ivana is an excellent skier; Donald is not. When the formidable Czech pushed off in hot pursuit, fascinated observers swear they saw her whip in front of Donald and then ski backwards down the slopes, wagging her finger in his face.

Trump, who is now married to an entirely different brunette model, would allegedly go on to regret the affair, which ultimately cost him a conservative estimate of tens of millions of dollars.

But there are, of course, two sides to every story—whatever Donald says happened and the truth.

“We were actually standing near the restaurant, getting ready to put skis on. And I was standing there like an idiot and Marla and Ivana were there,” Trump would later tell a reporter, according to Timothy O’Brien’s “Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “And there wasn’t shouting, but you could obviously see there was some friction. And a man who was standing right next to me, who weighed about 350 pounds and wasn’t a very attractive guy, said to me ‘It could be worse, Donald. I’ve been in Aspen for twenty years and I’ve never had a date.’ And I’ll never forget the statement and it sort of lightened it up a little bit for me.”

Images via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

On Friday, xoJane published a most necessary confession. The women’s site that brings you the “It Happened To Me” first-person essay series (“It Happened To Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes And I’m Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable With It,” “It Happened To Me: My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina,” “It Happened To Me: I Live With My Abuser,” which the site fucked up royally by posting the name of the writer) ran a piece by xoJane editor Amber Rambharose that reads like an explainer of the confession industry in which xoJane traffics. “Editors Don’t Cry in the Office — I Still Can’t Believe I Did Last Night” isn’t exactly a warts-and-all self-exposé, but a fine piece of meta-journalism that captures the difficulty of having to perform your life in front of strangers when you aren’t quite comfortable with doing so.

Rambharose shares a story about a brief emotional breakdown and the work stress that contributed to it:

We talk a lot in meetings about the spaces we occupy as writers at xoJane. Sometimes, Jane and I talk about the fact that I don’t occupy a space yet. I’m here and there. I’m ether amber. Jane calls it an “air of mystery.”

I’m not mysterious. I’m closed off. As I write this, I think that’s actually too easy. I’m not closed off. I’m hyper conscious at all times of the “optics perspective.” I’m a meticulous, ambitious, young editor until I completely inevitably lose my shit. Last night, I lost my shit. I sobbed. I couldn’t breathe.

Since the late ‘80s when she was running Sassy, xoJane’s editor-in-chief Jane Pratt has filled her staff with personalities expected to perform their designated roles. Here’s how New York magazine explained it in a 2012 profile of Pratt:

At Sassy and Jane, writers were “cast” for their roles in the magazine, making it more like a sitcom with characters that readers could become invested in. It’s harder to do that with so many people filing from all over at xoJane, which can at times feel more like an all-talk-radio program (tune in and hear the overshare!) than a plotted television program. “I hope that there’s enough written by who I consider the key characters that I’m wanting to build,” she says. “So that people feel like they do know the main characters and are following their trajectories.”

You can see, then, why the space a writer occupies would be of particular concern to Pratt and Rambharose. The trouble is that Rambharose doesn’t feel particularly comfortable airing her laundry on xoJane’s line as it involves mental illness, medication, and a host of tragedies:

I staunchly refuse to “go there.” I don’t want to write about sexual assault, incest recovery, self-harm, suicide attempts, hospitalizations, eating disorders, and so on and so forth. It’s so, so ugly. I don’t want to be ugly. I want to be beautiful. I want to be surrounded by beautiful things.

It would appear, then, that Rambharose has been miscast. For the site, she’s also written about books, makeup, hair, Scream Queens’ problematic racism, and mistakes she made in her ‘20s. Those topics don’t deviate from the xoJane’s normal mix of beauty and culture writing, but they aren’t the tough revelations that drive traffic, the ones that made feel like former xoJane full-time editor Mandy Stadtmiller feel like a “roving predator bent on turning other people’s lives into 1,200-word essays on the human experience” as she solicited them from freelancers.

Rambharose’s piece maintains its grim tone throughout, seeming to suggest at its conclusion that she is writing against her will:

I don’t care about my feelings or my blood sugar or my mental illness, but Jane does. Jane wants me to write. So I’m writing and I’m feeling and, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing and it sucks, but I’m doing it for her because she told me to breathe in and breathe out and she called the car and told me I could go home. I’m writing this way for her. If it sticks, maybe I’ll keep at it for myself. We’ll see.

Once commenters responded by accusing Pratt of editorial vampirism, Rambharose left her own comments in defense of her employer. “The Jane-blaming here is totally absurd,” she said in one. “I reviewed the language in this piece and nowhere does it say, ‘JANE MADE ME WRITE ABOUT TRAUMA.’ Jane has never pushed me to write about trauma. She encourages me as a writer to be honest and not veil my work in jokes I don’t think are funny or trite tweeness I don’t feel or mean,” she wrote in another.

Rambharose also shared a story about Pratt dissuading her from writing about trauma:

I confided in another coworker about some of my published incest poems (this was before the pushcart nom. and me feeling stronger about my poetic voice) and she brought it up in a staff meeting to Jane as a possible traffic driving IHTM. Jane wouldn’t hear of it. She spoke with me afterwards and told me that I am in control of my voice as a writer, my work as and editor, and my future and that I should never feel like I have throw myself to the wolves for clicks.

That stuck with me and that’s why I’ve stuck around and why I could finally write this piece and feel like a bad ass.

Perhaps the pressure to confess that Rambharose seems to feel comes more from the site’s mission than directly from Pratt. In that case xoJane may not be the right platform for her. (She’s good and could really use a platform, too.) Perhaps the confessional essay just isn’t the right medium for her to share her trauma—as she says, she’s written poetry on the subject—but for now, the confessional essay is the primary medium through which people consume the traumas of others, and xoJane is an industry-leading producer.

But as troubled by her job as she appears to be, Rambharose’s description of her misgivings is a refreshing read at a time when it’s very easy to take for granted just how brutal the experience of pouring your life onto the internet can be. Besides, reluctant xoJane staffer is a much more unique cultural space than victim/survivor.

I reached out to Time Inc. (which now owns xoJane), and Rambharose for comment. Time Inc., declined to respond and I have yet to hear back from Rambharose. If I do, I will update this post.

[Image via Getty]

Earlier today, rapper B.o.B. declared to his millions of Twitter followers that, despite everything they’ve been led to believe their entire lives, the earth is flat. And the weirdest part isn’t just that he believes the earth is flat, but that he’s not even remotely alone.

http://gawker.com/why-the-earth-...

There’s an entire Flat Earth Society that is 200 members strong and, purportedly, not a joke. In an interview with Live Science, the group’s vice president explained:

The question of belief and sincerity is one that comes up a lot. If I had to guess, I would probably say that at least some of our members see the Flat Earth Society and Flat Earth Theory as a kind of epistemological exercise, whether as a critique of the scientific method or as a kind of ‘solipsism for beginners.’ There are also probably some who thought the certificate would be kind of funny to have on their wall. That being said, I know many members personally, and I am fully convinced of their belief.

My own convictions are a result of philosophical introspection and a considerable body of data that I have personally observed, and which I am still compiling.

There are many (many) YouTube videos ready to open your eyes to the Truth, each of them special in their own way. This one I particularly like for its use of clip art and incorrect arithmetic:

Basically, the earth is a flat disc protected by an invisible barrier called “the firmament,” a dome-like feature that also happens to be referenced in the Old Testament so you know it’s real. Copernicus, of course, fucked everything up by introducing his theory of heliocentrism. Flat Earthers acknowledge that while Copernicus’s math was right, he lacked the technology necessary to definitively prove his theory. Still, the idea took hold, governments started preaching it, and a centuries-long lie was born.

Makes you think.

Then as soon as Russia and U.S. managed to get rockets in the sky, they realized their error and quickly set about protecting the shameful secret at all costs. The Antarctic Treaty went into place in 1961, making it in “off-limits” to any wandering eyes.

It’s worth noting here that there’s also something called the “ice wall,” which is the towering expanse of maybe absolute zero, pitch black ice barriers at the edge of Antartica that may or may not go on forever and that no human could ever possibly explore.

Perhaps this will help explain:

Or not! Either way, that’s a story for another day.

So, to keep their incredible secret, NASA began faking all sorts of photo and video “evidence”: space launches, moon landings, Shuttle journeys—you name it. It’s physicists and astronauts were sworn to secrecy,

http://blackbag.gawker.com/did-stanley-ku...

The villains in this tale are, of course, NASA and the U.S. government as a whole. NASA has been going to incredible lengths to fool the world about not only the moon landing (an obvious forgery) but about everything we thought we knew about our very planet itself. GPS readings? Faked. Photos and videos from space? Faked. Lunar eclipses? An invisible “anti-moon” that occasionally obscures our also-flat moon.

But why would NASA do so much work to keep the truth hidden from the masses? Money, of course. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper to keep a global charade going than it is to actually do all of the impossible projects that NASA claims to be working on. That money, in turn, gets funneled back to the government.

NASA’s made its first huge mistake when it hired contract artist Matthew Boylan and decided to let him on the shocking truth.

Boylan asserts that a large part of the reason the lie has gone on for so long is sheer hubris. In an interview titled “NASA Insider Exposes the Flat Earth!”, Boylan explains that “if I tell you [the shape of the Earth] is a certain thing, without having an instrument to prove it for over 1,000 years... if you’re wrong, are you going to tell everybody?”

What’s more, the extra land that comes along with a flat earth means more natural resources. And if word got out about the secret store of oil hiding at the edge of the Earth, any remaining notion of scarcity would be shattered.

Still, some questions remain. What about seasons, you might ask. To which a Flat Earther might say, Well what about this.

Or put another way:

Gravity is something that might also have thrown a wrench in the Flat Earther’s personal Truth—if it weren’t for something called universal acceleration, that is. You see, the world is constantly accelerating upwards, forcing everything else “down.” From the Flat Earth Wiki:

According to Flat Earth Theory, gravity does not exist. Instead, there is a force that produces identical effects as observed from the surface of the earth. This force is known as “Universal Acceleration” (abbreviated as UA).

Objects on the earth’s surface have weight because all sufficiently massive celestial bodies are accelerating upward at the rate of 9.8 m/s^2. The mass of the earth is thought to shield the objects atop it from the direct force of UA. Alternatively, it is possible that the force of UA can actually pass through objects, but its effect on smaller bodies is negligible (similar to gravity in RET cosmology, which only has a noticeable affect on very large objects).

None of the answers, of course, ever actually answer your question entirely, and more often than not they just open up a whole host of other questions. But such is the cost of finally waking from your conformist slumber.

Welcome to the world of Truth, friends and also B.o.B. And remember, just because the Earth is flat doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still watch out for the chemtrails.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.