A whole bunch of Twitter eggs took offense with Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance of “Formation,” which used imagery inspired by the Black Panthers. It made excellent copy for the insatiable content mill which we all must feed—it’s good and healthy to make fun of stupid people—but it didn’t have staying power. If only there was a way to drag the controversy out for another week? Enter today’s non-existent protest, which for the purposes of metaoutrage, is every bit as good as a real protest.
Are you offended as an American that Beyoncé pulled her race-baiting stunt at the Superbowl?
Do you agree that it was a slap in the face to law enforcement?
Do you agree that the Black Panthers was/is a hate group which should not be glorified?
Come and let’s stand together. Let’s tell the NFL we don’t want hate speech & racism at the Superbowl ever again!
Manna from heaven. Just about every blog and newspaper you can think of covered the impending rally. Eyes were rolled. Affronts were taken. A counter-rally was organized. Thinkpieces were thoughtpieced. And just about no one stopped to consider that there was no reason to believe there was an actual anti-Beyoncé rally planned.
It is an incredible leap from “Eventbrite page created” to “rally planned.” Eventbrite requires only a free, anonymous form sign-up, giving it all the legitimacy of a prank Wikipedia edit. Even a Change.org petition carries more heft, because people have to actually sign it.
The original rally announcement was totally unsourced—only a few days ago was it retroactively credited to “Proud of the Blues,” a pro-police group with exactly zero web presence. The group now has a ramshackle website, a Twitter page, and a Facebook page, all created within the last couple of days. There’s no reason to think this group existed before last week, and there’s no reason to think it exists now.
I saw only one article expressing skepticism about the group and the rally, a Daily Beast piece in which the authors tried and failed to get comment from the organizers, and noted that the whole thing could have been arranged without so much as a credit card or working email address.
Every other outlet was more than happy, for business reasons, to announce that the anti-Beyoncé rally was real, and happening, and preposterous. Any more preposterous than the hordes of reporters standing out in the rain right now waiting for phantom reactionaries?
A new study finds that even though everyone HATES IT when racist people say “but I have [insert minority] friends,” that shit does kind of work.
The new study published in Social Psychological & Personality Science showed people various racist or non-racist posts on Facebook, accompanied by various permutations of single-race or mixed-race group photos, or statements like “some of my best friends are Asian” as a preface to an anti-Asian comment.
Let’s flash forward to those scientific findings! “The presence of Asian friends made the conceivably racist comments seem relatively benign, and observers were less offended and upset by them. The data suggest that minority friendships can partially offset costs associated with expressing prejudice.”
In other words, the world’s most annoying and transparently self-serving tactic for shielding oneself from charges of racism is, in fact, effective.
David Bowie died on January 10, 2016, two days after his 69th birthday and the release of Blackstar, his 25th album. The news came meteorically; we were dazed and flattened, looking at the world through debris and glitter that suddenly it seemed we’d borrowed from him. Lady Gaga paid extended, exhaustive tribute to him at the Grammys on Monday night; in the week following his death, there was a second line for him in New Orleans, a shrine outside his apartment in Tribeca, a series of farewells from his musical echelon, a million Instagrams, a segment on SNL. Bowie was that rare thing, a revolutionary who was also near-universally beloved. He gave off an uncanny combination of generosity and brilliance, in which he seemed to give everything to and ask nothing of the people who idolized him—except for, I guess, the bodies of the young teenage girls he fucked.
Word choice is hard here. Should we say “raped” automatically if a grown man has sex with a teenager? Does it matter at all if the 15-year-old, now much older, describes their encounter as one of the best nights of her life? What is our word for a “yes” given on a plane that’s almost vertically unequal? Does contemporary morality dictate that we trust a young woman when she says she consented freely, or believe that she couldn’t have, no matter what she says?
These questions became prominent on the day of Bowie’s death, which was—as with all celebrity deaths now—a day in which people all over the internet tried to marry a dead celebrity to something which is important to them, which is easy enough to ignore when that something is a brand of novelty koozies (“Jezebel, today we celebrate individuality”) or Twitter stances about how grief is best packaged for public consumption (“badly,” seems to be what people say), but impossible to ignore when the thing is present-day decency and David Bowie violated it, likely night after night.
The story widely recirculated after Bowie’s death was that he’d had sex with a 13-year-old, specifically the famous “child groupie” Lori Maddox (who was, by her account, 15 at the time of the encounter, and told Thrillist her story last fall). As the piece recirculated, people emailed us, saying that it was our political obligation to write that David Bowie had been a rapist, even a pedophile, too.
The facts are not debatable. Bowie was accused of rape in 1987 by a 30-year-old woman named Wanda Nichols (though never indicted, due to a lack of evidence; through a spokesperson, he called the accusation “ridiculous”), and he participated in a groupie scene that normalized and valorized statutory rape. The usual first line of defense in these arguments is “separating the art from the artist,” which is in many cases a necessary coping mechanism for women to be able to enjoy anything produced before men began to be held accountable for their behavior—but in this case, it doesn’t apply. Bowie’s artistic life was tied up in an ethos of seeing, validating and inducing intimacy with anyone in front of him; the fact that this ethos turned sexual in the case of painfully young teenagers is inseparable from his art.
On the day of his death, we considered posting his first reply to a fan letter:
In answer to your questions, my real name is David Jones and I don’t have to tell you why I changed it. “Nobody’s going to make a monkey out of you” said my manager. My birthday is January 8th and I guess I’m 5’10”. There is a Fan Club here in England, but if things go well in the States then we’ll have one there I suppose. It’s a little early to even think about it.
Written in 1967,the letter was sweet and generous and easy, closing with: “Thank you for being so kind as to write to me and do please write again and let me know some more about yourself. Yours sincerely, David Bowie.” It’s incredible, and also, he wrote it to a 14-year-old girl.
Lori Maddox, according to her as-told-to Thrillist piece, was also 14 when she met Bowie. “He wanted to take me to a hotel room,” she wrote.
I was still a virgin and terrified. He had hair the color of carrots, no eyebrows, and the whitest skin imaginable. I grabbed on to [DJ and club co-owner] Rodney Bingenheimer and said I was with him. So we all just hung out and talked. I had probably kissed boys by that point, but I wasn’t ready for David Bowie.
Next time Bowie was in town, though, maybe five months later, I got a call at home from his bodyguard, a huge black guy named Stuey.
Maddox had implicitly declined the encounter at age 14, and notes no pushback in her account. At age 15, she was less afraid.
We got to the Beverly Hilton and all went up to Bowie’s enormous suite...He was beautiful and clever and poised. I was incredibly turned on. Bowie excused himself and left us in this big living room with white shag carpeting and floor-to-ceiling windows. Stuey brought out Champagne and hash. We were getting stoned when, all of a sudden, the bedroom door opens and there is Bowie in this fucking beautiful red and orange and yellow kimono.
He focused his famously two-colored eyes on me and said, “Lori, darling, can you come with me?” Sable looked like she wanted to murder me. He walked me through his bedroom and into the bathroom, where he dropped his kimono. He got into the tub, already filled with water, and asked me to wash him. Of course I did. Then he escorted me into the bedroom, gently took off my clothes, and de-virginized me.
Two hours later, I went to check on Sable. She was all fucked up in the living room, walking around, fogging up windows and writing, “I want to fuck David.” I told him what she was doing and that I felt so bad. Bowie said, “Well, darling, bring her in.” That night I lost my virginity and had my first threesome.
Maddox, enthusiastic and starry-eyed a full 43 years later, does not recount her encounter as rape; legally, however, it would have been in the state of California, and a strong subset of today’s moral vocabulary dictates that it was, qualitatively, regardless of what Maddox says, an act of coercion—that he was an abuser and a predator no matter what.
There’s a sense right now of a watershed: because of new language, newly open channels, and new consensus on what constitutes abuse, once-beloved men are being exposed on what feels like a weekly basis for having taken sexual advantage of less powerful women. These incidents are brought to light as exceptions, but they’re beginning to feel like the norm—particularly for industries in which women are expected to be both easygoing and sexual to variously exaggerated degrees: comedy, music, acting, porn.
And the “separate the art from the artist” argument has been permanently changed by Bill Cosby, who will be remembered as a serial rapist, as he deserves. For Bowie, the same idea has started to foment—that this encounter with Maddox (and the others it implies) should be, as with Cosby, his major legacy. “RIP a child rapist,” said a tipster. On Twitter, a search for “David Bowie rapist” pulls up hundreds of people expressing combinations of anger, smugness, contrarianism, righteousness, and sincere conviction that the Grammys should not be celebrating him, that Tavi Gevinson should not be writing about him, the “rapist” description is primary and exactly right.
There are two underlying assumptions here that I question: first, that we either have to write off David Bowie in deference to the women, or write off the women in deference to David Bowie—that we can’t value one without devaluing the other. The second is that it’s a critical dodge to even bring up the fact that we’re talking about the 1970s. Erin Keane makes this point at Salon:
And wasn’t it, as she says, “a different world”? Oh, the ‘70s. Things were different then. But they were not, really, no matter how many times we all collectively wish that to be true. If you can say with a straight face “men don’t have sex with young girls anymore” — well, good luck to you with that. What changes is this, only — which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed.
But “which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed”—those changes do matter. If they don’t, neither does any of the political and cultural movement that distances now from then. Outside a courtroom, it is impossible to overvalue the role of context (which includes but certainly is not limited to age) in a sexual encounter; acknowledging the landscape of a few decades ago doesn’t vanish the blame but enlarge it. It is important, not incidental, that Bowie was part of the norm.
On the day of Bowie’s death, Kate Harding started a thread of discussion on her public Facebook page. The perpetually wise Rebecca Solnit wrote in. “Speaking as someone who actually lived through the 1970s as a teenage girl in the Bay Area,” she wrote, “I want to interject that mores were really really REALLY different.”
She went on (and we asked if we could excerpt this):
The dregs of the sexual revolution were what remained, and it was really sort of a counterrevolution (guys arguing that since sex was beautiful and everyone should have lots everything goes and they could go at anyone; young women and girls with no way to say no and no one to help them stay out of harmful dudes’ way). The culture was sort of snickeringly approving of the pursuit of underage girls (and the illegal argument doesn’t carry that much weight; smoking pot is also illegal; it’s about the immorality of power imbalance and rape culture). It was completely normalized. Like child marriage in some times and places. Which doesn’t make it okay, but means that, unlike a man engaged in the pursuit of a minor today, there was virtually no discourse about why this might be wrong. It’s also the context for what’s widely regarded as the anti-sex feminism of the 1980s: those women were finally formulating a post-sexual-revolution ideology of sex as another arena of power and power as liable to be abused; we owe them so much.
Solnit has written about this time and place before. From an essay collected in 2014's The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness:
For San Francisco in particular and for California generally, 1978 was a notably terrible year, the year in which the fiddler had to be paid for all the tunes to which the counterculture had danced. The sexual revolution had deteriorated into a sort of free-market free-trade ideology in which all should have access to sex and none should deny access. I grew up north of San Francisco in an atmosphere where once you were twelve or so hippie dudes in their thirties wanted to give you drugs and neck rubs that were clearly only the beginning, and it was immensely hard to say no to them. There were no grounds. Sex was good; everyone should have it all the time; anything could be construed as consent; and almost nothing meant no, including “no.”
“It was the culture,” she wrote. “Rock stars were open about their liaisons with underage groupies.” It doesn’t excuse these men to note that there was an overwhelming, meaningful, non-dismissible sense in this decade that sex with young female teenagers was if not explicitly desirable then certainly OK.
Louis Malle released “Pretty Baby” in 1978, in which an 11-year-old and sometimes unclothed Brooke Shields played a child prostitute; in Manhattan, released the following year, director Woody Allen paired his middle-aged character with a 17-year old; color photographer David Hamilton’s prettily prurient photographs of half-undressed pubescent girls were everywhere...at the end of the decade Playboy attempted to release nude photographs of a painted, vamping Shields at the age of 10 in a book titled Sugar and Spice.
[...] In 1977, Roman Polanski’s implicit excuse for raping a 13-year-old girl he had plied with champagne and quaaludes was that everyone was doing it. Polanski had sequestered his victim at Jack Nicholson’s Bel Air house on the grounds that he was going to take pictures of her for French Vogue. Polanski’s victim pretended she had asthma to try to get out of his clutches. It didn’t work. Afterward, he delivered the dazed, glassy-eyed child to her home, he upbraided her big sister for being unkind to the family dog. Some defended him on the grounds that the girl looked 14.
Reading Solnit on this, you can understand how Lori Maddox could have possibly developed not just a sincere desire to fuck adult men but the channels to do it basically in public; why an entire scene encouraged her, photographed her, gave her drugs that made all of it feel better, loved her for it, celebrated her for it, for years. You can understand that the way she consented to the loss of her virginity could have been the way women have consented throughout history—under implicit duress and formative coercion, and yet as wholeheartedly as we could understand.
There are no precise enough words or satisfying enough conclusions to fully account for her story, or any like it. It’s easy to see what Bowie represents here: a sexual norm that has always appallingly favored men, and the abuse that stems from and surpasses even that. It is easy to denounce the part Bowie played in this, even with any number of purportedly mitigating factors: the political context, Maddox’s story, the fact that he lived with generosity and openness, the less generous fact that his synapses were perpetually blitzed with cocaine. It is less easy to turn over what Maddox evinces in this narrative, from the late 1970s to her account of it now—which is that women have developed the vastly unfair, nonetheless remarkable, and still essential ability to find pleasure and freedom in a system that oppresses them.
The persistence of that reality—that we learn to have sex not in a utopia but within and around whatever norms we are presented with—is why it matters that things were different in the ’70s. It is possible to say that there don’t ever need to be any other Lori Maddoxes without saying that there never were. It is possible for me to read all the rape stories in my inbox and still know with certainty that something enormous is different—and, that acknowledging that is the only way to credit the second-wave women who forced that change with rhetorical fervor that girls now would find insane. It’s because of them that we have both the words to identify power and, now, the freedom to do so more ambivalently. It’s their stringency that spared me from having to know how I would have played it if I’d grown up at a time when there was no vocabulary to separate a party girl from a body for the taking, when grown men said fair game at the age of 13.
It is Maddox who interests me, in the end, not Bowie. But if there’s an argument for labeling Bowie a rapist that gets me, it’s how much I owe to the inflexible spirit that calls for it. Look, what a miracle; we are talking about this, when out of all the interviews Bowie gave in his life, he seems to never have been asked on the record about Maddox or any of the other “baby groupies,” or to have said a thing about Wanda Nichols after the case was dismissed.
Manny Pacquiao is a professional boxer who’s easy enough to never once consider if you don’t follow the sport, unless you happen to read the internet and have an interest in gay rights and where, when, and via whom there is a lack thereof. In that case, you may know Pacquiao from his commentary on gays, a group that by virtue of his professed identity he is not part of and thus is no kind of an expert on.
Fast-forward to an interview that recently aired on TV in the Philippines, where Pacquiao is running for Senate. “It’s common sense,” he said regarding gay people in a translation that circulated. “Do you see animals mating with the same sex? Animals are better because they can distinguish male from female. If men mate with men and women mate with women they are worse than animals.”
You do, in fact, see animals mating with the same sex. All kinds, even bed bugs. Is it surprising that Pacquiao used bullshit to justify his bullshit world view? No it is not. But that prevented neither the outrage that greeted Pacquiao’s words nor his ensuing apology—which is, you guessed it, more bullshit.
Pacquiao says, “I’m sorry for hurting people by comparing homosexuals to animals. Please forgive me for those I’ve hurt. I still stand on my belief that I’m against same sex marriage because of what the Bible says, but I’m not condemning LGBT. I love you all with the love of the Lord. God Bless you all and I’m praying for you.”
Interestingly, Pacquiao may have gotten around to reading Leviticus, one of the few Bible passages that actually seems to condemn those who engage in homosexual behavior. Less interesting: everything else Pacquiao (or more likely, one of his people) has shared. He’s not sorry. It’ll happen again. He’s just saying this because that’s what you do when you’re a celebrity with lucrative endorsement deals and large numbers of people are shaming you for bigotry. This apology shouldn’t satisfy anyone, nor should any apology that has been coerced by social media outrage. This is the corrupt offend-then-apologize cycle: bullshit begets bullshit, a process that Pacquiao is, in fact, an expert on.
If you believe in LGBT people’s innate humanity, you believe that their emotional framework is equal to straight people’s, thus they should be afforded the protections and ability to display their love that comes with the human construct deemed “marriage.” To believe in less is to condemn gay people, and if your religion calls for you to do so, your religion is hateful, oppressive, and wrong. If you actually care about people as a whole, and not just your own personal salvation, you should find a new religion.
All of this should be obvious to anyone with a working brain and the capacity to think outside of their own existence, but then also obvious is the fact that boxers aren’t sociologists, and most of them would probably make terrible politicians.
Former Republican congressman turned TV guy Joe Scarborough will host both of MSNBC’s town halls this week, putting him in charge of moderating Donald Trump, the man he may or may not have had a late-night hotel sesh with last week.
It’s an interesting choice, given recent allegations that MSNBC staffers are feeling “widespread discomfort” with Trump’s and Scarborough’s are-they-or-aren’t-they connection.
Lotta good conspiracy theories floating around these days. Did Obama’s infamous gang of Pillow Assassins kill Antonin Scalia? Is Trump a false flag candidate for Hillary? Is Ted Cruz secretly still Canadian? Is Ted Cruz secretly still Robert Kardashian Sr.?
The conspiracy goes like this: “Ted Cruz” is a disguise employed by Armenian-American entertainment lawyer Robert Kardashian, who did not die of esophageal cancer in 2003 as the world believed. Instead, he faked his death and assumed the role of “Ted Cruz,” leaving his family to fend for itself in Calabasas to begin a flourishing political career. To complete the masquerade, “Ted Cruz” married “Heidi Cruz”—who is actually former Saturday Night Live cast member Ana Gasteyer.
Ed Chiarini, founder of the website WellAware1.com, appears to be the driving force behind this theory. Chiarini, who also goes by “Dallas Goldbug,” believes that Lorne Michaels is a key player in the hoodwink, helping actors (and Robert Kardashian Sr.) assume the identities of political players. He believes the improv comedy scene is a hotbed for political imposters.
Unlike theorists obsessed with “connecting the dots” and “making a modicum of sense,” Chiarini’s technique is refreshingly simple: Slapping together photos of people who look vaguely similar and insisting they’re the same person. His collage of “Grandpa Cruzdashian” is a masterwork of this genre of evidence.
Chiarini hasn’t quite fleshed out his theory, but he has a good excuse. He is busy exposing a vast network of celebrities who have disguised themselves for nefarious political gains. Take Jackass star Steve-O. To you, maybe he’s just a washed-up TV prankster. To Chiarini, he’s obviously Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the disgraced Marine who murdered Iraqi civilians in 2005:
And you may know Megyn Kelly as a Fox News star and horrible person—but could it be that she’s Nicole Brown Simpson, hiding in plain site?
Unfortunately, Chiarini doesn’t keep an open mind when alternative celebrity political imposters are suggested by his fans:
According to the AP, American airstrikes on I.S. oil depots, refineries, and cash vaults have put a serious pinch on the caliphate’s ability to pay out decent wages and perks:
Islamic State group has slashed salaries across the region, asked Raqqa residents to pay utility bills in black market American dollars, and is now releasing detainees for a price of $500 a person.
The extremists who once bragged about minting their own currency are having a hard time meeting expenses, thanks to coalition airstrikes and other measures that have eroded millions from their finances since last fall. Having built up loyalty among militants with good salaries and honeymoon and baby bonuses, the group has stopped providing even the smaller perks: free energy drinks and Snickers bars.
It’s a Silicon Valley truism that the abundance or scarcity of perks are a good bellwether of financial doom—when your startup stops giving out free Diet Cokes and fancy granola bars, things are about to get ugly. If ISIS can’t even hand out some damn Snickers anymore while its soldiers are firing off rounds and decapitating people, they’ve fallen on tough times.
This wasn’t supposed to happen: ISIS leaders once boasted of their plans to mint a unique currency, as a play for political legitimacy. But this never really got off the ground, and the group’s leaders have long relied on American cash to procure arms and compensate its ranks.
Videos of that cash being incinerated and raining from the sky following aerial attacks mean even this backup monetary plan isn’t tenable. The AP reports that in some towns, ISIS fighters aren’t even drawing a salary anymore: “In the Iraqi city of Fallujah, fighters who once made $400 a month aren’t being paid at all and their food rations have been cut to two meals a day.” Are layoffs next? Increases in out-of-pocket healthcare costs? Hiring fighters as “interns”? Freelance budget slashed at Dabiq?
Our advice to ISIS: Form a union while you still can.
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint: PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7
A dead Supreme Court Justice, a mysterious pillow, missing autopsies, the 10-year anniversary of Dick Cheney shooting a guy in the face, and he was a mere 79 years young. Whether or not these factors have any bearing on what happened to Antonin Scalia is irrelevant, because put together, it’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream come true.
For the hordes of amateur internet sleuths asking the questions no one else dares, the question is less what happened to Scalia than who. Some of their cases are more diligently compiled than others, and none of them totally make sense, but then again—that’s what They want you to think.
So, to support the pursuit of truth, here are some of the best Scalia conspiracies the internet has to offer. Trust no one.
Obama Murdered Scalia
Is there anything Barack Hussein Obama wouldn’t do?
Exhibit A: Obama was told hours before the public knew
According to (what else but) Infowars.com, President Obama knew about Scalia’s death hours before the information became publicly available. They point us to a report from DC Whispers, which, according to the internet’s leading Jade Helm conspiracy resource, “routinely publishes controversial reports based on inside sources”:
Word reached the White House hours before formal media announcements were made regarding longtime Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia having been found dead while vacationing at a Texas resort. First the speechwriters were summoned to provide the appropriate tone for Barack Obama’s remarks.
During that same time, Obama and Valerie Jarrett were already initiating a long-standing plan for what they viewed as a prime opportunity to make Mr. Obama relevant once again and an opportunity that the President was said to be thrilled to have before him.
Thrilled, you say, Mr. Hussein Obama? How very curious, indeed.
Exhibit B: The Judge who blocked an autopsy was previously accused of a murder coverup
Now that Justice Scalia’s body has been embalmed (at the “family’s” “request,” so they say), any hope that an autopsy might reveal the truth is null and void. Which is awfully convenient considering the fact that the usual justice of the peace for Presidio, Texas, Juanita Bishop, just so happened to be indisposed that day for a “work-related event.”
Exhibit C: The last roadblock to Obama’s global climate change agenda
Conveniently for Obama and his coterie of climate change alarmists, Scalia’s death came just a few days after the Supreme Court blocked Obama’s centerpiece climate legislation. But now, with that pesky judge out of the way, there’s a good chance the plan will move over to the D.C. Circuit Court, where it’s very likely to finally get approved.
Exhibit D: Huge if true
Conclusion
Sure—unless it’s a false flag attack from the Republican base to rally their voters.
Cruz Murdered Scalia
Much like the Obama theory, except this time—Cruz!
Exhibit A
The day before Scalia’s death, Trump supporters attempted to file a lawsuit against Ted Cruz declaring the man ineligible to run for president.
Exhibit B
According to the redditor HonorableJudgeHolden, Scalia had once said that Cruz is not eligible to run for president. Of course, the article the user links to does not, in fact, say this anywhere, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Conclusion
Until we get something more solid under our belt, this seems unfortunately unlikely.
Scalia’s Still Alive
Much like Tupac and Aaliyah before him, what if Antonin Scalia is still living amongst us, alive and well? This one differs significantly from the Obama hitman theory above in that, here, Obama is actually Scalia’s savior.
Exhibit A: The chart
See this chart? In it, you’ll note that Scalia’s positions have been getting progressively more liberal in recent years. Since he was no longer playing the role the GOP had set him up to, the only option left was to put out a hit.
Exhibit B: Thanks Obama
Rather than let the man perish, the Obama administration knew it owed it to the Justice to put him into protective custody. The lack of autopsy, the pillow over his head—all of it was set up to obfuscate the identity of a dead man who was never actually Antonin Scalia in the first place.
Conclusion
If you are Antonin Scalia and you are still alive please send me an email here, thank you.
Scalia Was Having a Cocaine-Fueled Sex Romp
Maybe the forces behing the Scalia coverup weren’t malicious at all—and it was simply the work of a family who wanted to maintain their patriarch’s good name
Exhibit A: He was old!
A 79-year-old man would most likely need a little boost should he want to get his rocks off. And there’s no rock-getting boost better than a potent stack of cocaine and viagra. Of course, being a 79-year-old man also means having a heart that’s in no shape to handle such a hard-hitting cocktail. A heart attack would only make sense.
Exhibit B: No autopsy means no toxicology report
If this is what happened, then of course they’d want to keep the reality of the situation of the papers. No autopsy might open the death up to all sorts of speculation, but even that’s preferable to a damning certain truth.
Exhibit C: True
Conclusion
Not unlikely.
Chupacabra?
Who knows!
Exhibit A: An email from an imaginative reader
This email received by our own J.K. Trotter:
Exhibit B: Chupacabras are real
While some may snark, just a few years ago we had a report of a euthanized chupacabra in, of course, Texas. But a chupacabra does not simply spring out of thin air—where there’s one chupacabra, many more lie in waiting.
What havoc has been wreaked by Beyoncé’s black pride and the mere suggestion that she’s sick of the blatant disregard for black lives that some police officers exhibit? A real live shooting outside of the Tennessee home of Rutherford County Sheriff Robert Arnold, for one, according to that sheriff. Regarding eight shots Arnold heard last night outside his home, the sheriff told local news station WATE:
Once I kind of figured everything out you know, with everything that’s happened since the Super Bowl, and with law enforcement as a whole, I mean I think we have lost five to seven officers, five deputies and sheriff’s since Sunday’s Super Bowl. You know, that’s what I am thinking. You know here is another target on law enforcement.
WATE adds:
When asked to clarify what he meant by Super Bowl, he said, “well you have Beyoncé’s video and how that’s kind of led over into other things it seems like, about law enforcement.”
OK, ladies, now let’s get information...about Arnold. WATE reports:
In May 2015 Arnold’s home and office were raided by the FBI, TBI and Rutherford County Sheriff’s office. An allegation of public corruption against Arnold stemmed from a contract the company JailCigs had with the sheriff’s office, where it sold e-cigarettes to inmates as a source of income.
Chief Deputy of Administration Joe Russell and Arnold’s aunt and uncle co-own the company. Arnold listed the company as a source of income, but said he did not believe it was a conflict of interest.
Sounds like a smart guy who has everything figured out, as his initial quote states.
If only one photo survives the nuclear apocalypse, I hope it’s this one. Ted Cruz is taking a selfie with confused onlookers as his other hand hangs in the air like normal humans would pose. This photo sums up politics in 2016 as far as I’m concerned.
The Presidential campaign trail is rough. In the old days, you’d pose for a million photos with fellow politicians or by cutting the ribbon on some new bridge with giant scissors or making a speech on the back of a train.
But gone are the days when a presidential candidate could have some distance from the crowd. Here in the early 21st century, if you want to be president you need to get right down in the thick of it. You’re not just a candidate anymore, and you’re not just shaking hands and kissing babies. In the age of the selfie, you’re often the photographer.
So today, we present a snapshot (sorry) of political photography in the age of the selfie. Because we don’t know for certain what the future of self-photography holds. Maybe people of tomorrow will have hoverphones, or all human heads will be replaced with one giant camera lens. Or maybe an EMP attack will free us from our devices, and we’ll start life anew as an agrarian society. I don’t know. But we can make a pretty safe bet that if the internet persists today’s photos will look even more awkward with age.
If you’re reading this blog post in the year 2026, just know that we think this form of campaigning looks as silly as you do. What a time to be alive.
Ted Cruz
Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Do you see him? Do you see the man back there? Look behind you before it’s too late! I’m not 100 percent convinced that those young women know that Ted Cruz is in their selfie. But photobomber or not, his awkward smile pretty much sums up every selfie you’ll find of Cruz.
Donald Trump
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
“I just wanted a selfie,” the creeped out girl thought to herself as she slowly tried to squirm her way from the orange man’s clutches.
Jeb Bush
AP Photo/Nati Harnik
When it comes to technology we know two things about Jeb!: 1) He loves Apple products and 2) He recently discovered that his Apple Watch could tell time. I’m not entirely sure what kind of angle Jeb is fixing on here, but hopefully he’s not just checking to see if that iPhone has the time.
Hillary Clinton
AP Photo/John Locher
Whatever your political leanings, you kind of have to admit that Hillary Clinton is the natural selfie candidate. She’s more than happy to take selfies with anyone, even if they’re using a tablet rather than the more traditional selfie enabler: the smartphone. She usually looks pretty comfortable doing it too. Unlike so many of the other candidates.
John Kasich
AP Photo/Charles Krupa
I’m going to be honest with you: I couldn’t find many photos of people taking selfies with John Kasich. And if we’re being brutally honest, it’s hard to find photos of John Kasich period.
Carly Fiorina
AP Photo/Joe Cavaretta
The most awkward Carly Fiorina selfies predate her run for the Republican nomination. Most photos you’ll find of her posing for selfies in 2016 are simply the look of a tired person on the campaign trail. But this photo from 2005—a magical age before the term selfie would even enter the national lexicon—is truly a selfie gem that I had to include, despite the fact that she has dropped out. Yep, that’s Gwen Stefani taking a selfie with Carly Fiorina at CES.
Marco Rubio
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
To be fair to Marco Rubio, he clearly doesn’t know that his photo is being taken here. But that kind of sums up the modern election cycle as well. Everything a candidate does is always being documented, whether they know it or not.
Ben Carson
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Ben Carson seems like a nice guy and let’s just leave it at that.
Bernie Sanders
And finally we have a BernieBro who may or may not know that he’s posing with a cardboard cutout of Sanders. Either way, it’s a whole new level of self-ifying.
If you have any political selfies you’d like to share in the comments, please do.
Neel Kashkari, the current Minneapolis Fed president and former Goldman Sachs banker who led the US Treasury’s bank bailout program in 2008, says that major banks are still “Too Big to Fail,” and that we should consider breaking them up. I’m sick of these crazy ideas from radicals who don’t understand Wall Street.
After a federal judge ruled that the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional in 2013, and New York City elected its most liberal mayor in at least two decades the following year, the going theory has been that cops here would all but abandon the practice in favor of arresting lots of poor people—also known as “broken windows policing.” As it turns out, they’re still doing their fair share of stopping and frisking.
This revelation comes from Peter Zimroth, an attorney who was federally appointed to monitor the department after the ruling was handed down. Zimroth’s latest report to the court alleges that NYPD officers are still conducting themselves in much the same way as they were before the ruling. Nearly three years later, he writes, cops still don’t quite understand what they’re supposed to be doing. From the New York Daily News:
“Many police officers, including supervisors, are not well informed as yet about the changes underway or the reasons for them and, therefore, have yet to internalize them,” said monitor Peter Zimroth in court papers to Manhattan Federal Judge Analisa Torres.
“Many appear not to understand what is expected of them,” said Zimroth, who was appointed in August 2013 to oversee stop-and-frisk reforms.
In addition to his claim that unconstitutional stops have persisted at the department, Zimroth also alleges in the report that the department’s Civilian Complaint Review Board does not act on racial profiling complaints, the News notes.
Recently, the city made strides toward cutting back on the arresting-all-the-poor-people stuff as well, with a package of bills that would reduce some of the most common broken windows crimes to civil violations. If stop-and-frisk is any indication, NYPD officers will continue to arrest people for excessive noise and drinking in public anyway.
As we near ever closer to Kristin Cavallari’s literary debut and the sweet release of death, new details about the promotional schedule for Balancing in Heels have emerged. Today Kristin announced that she plans to embark on a cross-country “book tour” next month, making stops in “NYC, Chicago, and LA.”
The location listed on Kristin’s website for the “NYC” tour stop is as follows:
Book Revue
313 New York Avenue
Huntington, NY 11743
“Huntington, NY” is not in New York City. It is two hours away in Long Island.
Bethesda just announced that they’ll be releasing at least $60 worth of Fallout 4 DLC, which means at the end of the month, the Season Pass will increase from $30 to $50. You don’t need the Cap Collector perk to understand that this means you should buy it now. [Fallout 4 Season Pass, $30]
Between the Oculus Rift itself, and the powerful computer you’ll need to run it, it’s no secret that being an early VR adopter won’t be cheap. That said, if you buy an Oculus-ready bundle from Amazon right now, you can save a few hundred bucks. [Oculus-Ready Rift + Computer Bundles]
Bonus: These are expected to ship in April, while the earliest you can get a standalone Oculus right now is July.
We see deals on car-starting battery packs just about every week, but even by our standards, $28 is a really fantastic starting price (with code UCSB794Q) for a 300A model. And for owners of larger cars, 400A and 600A versions are also on sale. No matter which one you choose, they all include a DC charger to juice it back up inside your car, and they’re all small enough to fit in your glove box.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you don’t have a pressing need for a laminator. But even so, odds are that it’d come in handy at least a few times per year, so you might as well add one to your home office while it’s on sale for $23. Outside of a one-day Gold Box deal, that’s the best price Amazon’s ever offered. [Scotch Laminator, $23]
If your current vacuum isn’t getting the job done, you can upgrade to this highly-rated Hoover WindTunnel for just $79, today only. That’s about what you’d expect to pay for a very basic stick vacuum, but this one includes some nice touches like an accessory hose and a rinsable filter.
If your iPhone 6 or 6s isn’t getting the kind of battery life that you need, this $15 case can more than double it. That’s one of the best prices we’ve ever seen in this product category. [Bestek Apple MFi Certified 3100mAh iPhone 6/6s Battery Case, $15 with code A4K4QEYT]
I own this drill. I don’t build houses or fix tanks with it or anything, but it’s great for drilling small holes in the wall and basically acting as a very fast and powerful screwdriver. If you don’t already own something like it, $22 is a great price. [Black & Decker LDX172C 7.2-Volt Lithium-Ion Drill/Driver, $22]
Need a new pair of dress shoes? Amazon’s offering big discounts today on a handful of Cole Haan men’s oxfords, starting at $79. [Up to 60% Off Cole Haan Men’s Oxfords]
Whether you’re hiking, camping, or just going to your kid’s soccer game, sometimes you need to take a seat and relax. Luckily, this $10 folding stool is small enough to fit in any bag, and weighs barely more than half a pound. [OUTAD Folding Hiking .6 Pound Tripod Stool, $10 with code ZA5GFIQX]
Do you still use a tape measure, like some kind of caveman? This laser distance measurer takes instant distance readings of up to 131’, and includes several built-in area calculation functions, in case you’re a little rusty on your elementary school math. [DBPOWER Handy Laser Measure with Extended Ruler, $34 with code MCJJTITS]
Amazon’s Prime Pantry program is great for stocking up on household goods and non-perishable foods without actually having to visit a store, and with these stackable deals, the prices will blow away any brick and mortar store in your town.
Next, promo code 10PANTRY will take $10 off any $75 Prime Pantry order, regardless of what’s in it. As long as you hit that minimum, that means you can save a whopping $16 on your order, or even $22 if you had an existing no-rush shipping credit. Not bad at all!
This discounted flash drive doesn’t look like anything special at first blush, but hit one button, and it transforms into tiny wireless media server, allowing you to pull up files on any of your devices, including phones and tablets.
That means next time you travel, you can stream movies to your tablet or store photos from your phone without filling up your device’s precious onboard storage. Today’s $35 price tag is an all-time low for the 64GB model. [SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick 32GB for Smartphones and Tablets, $35]
Stick-anywhere motion-sensing lights are perfect for dark hallways, cabinets, and closets, and the more you buy today, the more you’ll save. Just add as many as you want to your cart, and use the appropriate code from below.
You can’t control these power outlets with your smartphone, or tie them to IFTTT recipes like the Belkin WeMo line, but they sell for a tiny fraction of the cost of their smarter brethren, and can be controlled from across the room via the included remote. It’s only a half-measure towards creating a smart home, to be sure, but they might be worth a look at the price. [3-Pack Etekcity Wireless Remote Control Electrical Outlet Light Switch, $14 with code GPMNXU4Z]
Water resistant Bluetooth speakers are great for camping trips, or just for singing in the shower, and we’ve got deals on two of them today. One is a Gizmodo favorite, and a member of the distinguished UE line of speakers. The other costs $19, so...it won’t sound quite as good. But still; it’s a wireless speaker that you can get wet. That’s really cool!
Today you can grab a Fitbit Aria smart scale on eBay for an all-time low $75, and with no tax for most. The Aria will give you your weight, BMI, and body fat % and of course sync them to your Fitbit app to track changes over time. [Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Weight/Body Fat/BMI Digital Smart Scale, $75]
If you enjoy cooking, and you don’t own a KitchenAid mixer, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you want one. You can pick up a refurb of the KitchenAid Artisan on eBay today in a spectrum of colors for just $170, one of the lowest prices we’ve ever seen. [Refurb KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer, $170]
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At the Brookings Institution on Tuesday, Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury Department official in the Bush and Obama administrations, said that he believes “the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy.”
A moderate Republican and former Goldman Sachs employee who was the head of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (more widely known as the bank bailouts) in 2008, Kashkari’s remarks reflected the populist mood influencing this election cycle:
Given the enormous costs that would be associated with another financial crisis and the lack of certainty about whether these new tools would be effective in dealing with one, I believe we must seriously consider bolder, transformational options. Some other Federal Reserve policymakers have noted the potential benefits to considering more transformational measures. I believe we must begin this work now and give serious consideration to a range of options, including the following:
Breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities.
Turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).
Taxing leverage throughout the financial system to reduce systemic risks wherever they lie.
“There are lines in your speech I can imagine a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren saying,” David Wessel, a former economics editor at The Wall Street Journal who moderated the Brookings event, told Mr. Kashkari during a panel discussion after the speech. “It’s not what one expects from a Goldman Sachs Republican.”
Mr. Kashkari, who joined the Minneapolis Fed in January after a postcrisis stint at the investment management firm Pimco and an unsuccessful run for governor of California, responded that he was calling things as he saw them. He said his views on financial regulation were shaped by the crisis, convincing him that strong, simple safeguards are the most sensible.
“If I’m not willing to stand up and share my concerns, then I wouldn’t be doing my job,” he said.
Bernie Sanders released a statement on Tuesday saying that he was “delighted” by Kashkari’s speech, which also criticized the “endless objections” the banking industry’s lobbyists have brought against proposals for stricter regulation. “We need to move before we as a society have forgotten the lessons of ’08,” Kashkari said.
Of course, if Kashkari and his boss, Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, had stood up to their finance friends’ endless objections in 2008 perhaps our situation would not be quite so precarious now.
Earlier today, after a campaign stop at the FN America manufacturing plant in Columbia, South Carolina, Jeb Bush tweeted a photograph (caption: “America.”) of a .45-caliber handgun engraved with his name. As it happens, FN America is a subsidiary of the Belgian company FN Herstal, which, the Washington Post points out, was requisitioned by the Nazis in its previous incarnation as Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre.
Anyway! In September, Bush told the Telegraph that he did not own a gun. This raises some questions: Does he own this gun now? Is it registered? In a sense, yes—it has his name on it. Does he have a license? Does he have one in Florida? Or South Carolina? Law enforcement officials might wonder all of these things, and more, if Jeb Bush was almost anyone other than himself.
On the same day in December 2013, police responded to photographs of guns two Connecticut boys posted to Instagram—the first turned out to be a pellet gun (although the boy was still charged with disorderly conduct), and the other was taken from the Internet. A year later, a 17 year old in Texas was arrested for posting a photograph of an Airsoft replica gun pointed at a police car with the caption, “Should I do it?”
In January of last year, the NYPD arrested a 17 year old for allegedly threatening police officers after he posted the emoji gun pointing at the emoji policeman. In March, a Virginia woman was arrested after she posted a picture of herself holding a gun on Facebook. “Be careful what you put on the internet,” she said at the time. “Because you can go to jail for it. Facebook thugging is a crime.”
In October, a Dallas middle schooler was arrested after posting a photo of a man holding a gun she’d found through Google to Instagram with the caption, “everybody at t.w. Browne gone die,” referring to T.W. Browne Middle School, where she was a student. She told police that she wanted to see how many followers she could get.
The St. Louis Police Department has been posting photos of guns they are taking off of the streets on their Facebook page. Young criminals, however, are also showing off weapons and high-capacity magazines on their Facebook pages and social media, in a way police view as taunting. Dotson and other police officials are worried the posts may be leading to violent confrontations.
“So if you’re from a rival school, or from a different neighborhood and you see that, it’s almost sticking your chest out and saying ‘my gun’s bigger than your gun, let’s see what you’ve got,’” Dotson said.
Following Beyoncé’s very good, very black performance at the Super Bowl, a collection of people with little to do and even less sense announced that they would be holding an anti-Beyoncé rally at the NFL headquarters.
Great idea, guys. That’ll show her. Unfortunately for the anti-Beyoncé movement, they don’t seem like a particularly dedicated bunch: Nobody showed up for the protest. The demonstration was supposed to be held at 8am today and was organized by something called Proud of the Blues, which is both a terrible and ironically perfect name.
I can sort of forgive them for the disorganization. This is a group of people who have probably never had the rights afforded to them by the Constitution or human decency threatened in a serious way, so all this hootin’ and hollerin’ about discrimination is new territory.
Luckily for those who cannot stomach the sight of a black woman singing and dancing about how happy she is to be black in between their buffalo wings and inauthentic salsa, a sheriff in Tennessee is holding down the anti-Beyoncé, almost definitely pro-shooting black people faction.
On Monday night, someone fired shots outside the home of Rutherford County Sheriff Robert Arnold. Naturally, this morning Arnold decided to hold a press conference about the shooting in which not a single person was injured. During this highly necessary press conference, Sheriff Arnold suggested that the shooting was motivated by Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video and Super Bowl performance. He was being completely serious.
Referencing a spike in shootings of law enforcement officials, Sheriff Arnold did some real smart detective work and traced it all the back to Beyoncé. You can watch the video here.
Once I kind of figured everything out, you know, with everything since the half at the Super Bowl and with law enforcement as a whole. I mean I think we’ve lost five to seven officers. Five deputy chairs since Sunday’s Super Bowl. You know that’s what I’m thinking, you know, here’s another target on law enforcement.
He later added:
Well you have Beyoncé’s video and how that’s kind of bled over into other things it seems like about law enforcement.
Yes, of course. I can see it now.
Two young thugs, (black, of course) watch “Formation” on loop for hours. One thug turns to the other thug and says in ebonics: I know that the United States has a long, bloody history of law enforcement discriminating against and regularly gunning down black people for no godly reason whatsoever other than the fact that they were alive and black. Sure, there are a million reasons for the racial tension between black and white people in this country and police officers often serve as living, breathing metaphors for the government’s continued interest in breaking us down financially, physically and spiritually. Obviously you can see the tangible effects of this damage all around us in our food, schools and mental health. But damn, it’s this Beyoncé music video that’s really clarifying things for me. Grab your hoodie and your gat, Tyrone, we’re about to go shoot some warning shots outside the home of some local sheriff.
Alternatively, we should remember that this did occur in Tennessee’s Rutherford County, an area that’s 85 percent white. So maybe somebody was just celebrating Taylor Swift winning a Grammy and things got a little out of hand.
These have been the latest updates in white people losing their goddamn minds over a song about a black woman enjoying being black but not enjoying unarmed black people being murdered by police officers. Also, Red Lobster.
At a campaign rally in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on Tuesday, Marco Rubio deflected a supporter’s suggestion to “waterboard Hillary” with a laugh. “The press is here,” he said, the AP reports, before smiling and adding, “I didn’t hear what they said. I know it wasn’t a bad word.”
“I just think it’s very disturbing [that] you can just come and make things up about people and believe no one is going to call you out on it. And it’s now become a pattern, so we have to clarify that we can’t let that stand unchallenged.” From the Guardian:
Rubio added that Cruz had misrepresented his position on a host of issues, including immigration, funding for Planned Parenthood, and same-sex marriage. Cruz and his allies have launched a series of attacks against Rubio aimed at portraying him as insufficiently conservative – even though Rubio holds one of the most conservative records in the US Senate.
By Tuesday evening, Rubio’s campaign spokesman Alex Conant was blasting Cruz in a fundraising email with an aggressive subject line: “Ted Cruz is a liar.”
“First it was lying about Marco on fundamental issues like life and marriage; now Cruz and his supporters’ attempts to slander and distort Marco’s record have reached a new low,” Conant wrote.
One ad by a pro-Cruz Super Pac was pulled down on Monday after a legal review determined it to be misleading in its charge that Rubio supported so-called “sanctuary cities” while shepherding a comprehensive immigration reform bill in 2013. Cruz also asserted that his Senate colleague shied away from standing at the forefront of the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, even though Rubio has voted numerous times to strip the women’s health organization of its federal funding.
The waterboarding suggestion later in the day on Tuesday came after Rubio promised to keep the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay open “forever.”
In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, President Obama spoke about replacing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died on Saturday.
“I’m shocked,” said Obama, jokingly, upon hearing that the first question asked after his remarks at U.S. ASEAN Leaders Conference was not about the ASEAN Leaders Conference. He first expressed, again, “heartfelt condolences to the Scalia family,” calling him a “giant on the Supreme Court” who “helped to shape the legal landscape,” as well as a good friend and family member. Obama then spoke directly to the fuck tons of wasteful Republicans who have said that there’s not a precedent for him to nominate someone before he leaves office.
The constitution is pretty clear about what is supposed to happen now. There’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The President of the United States is to nominate someone. The Senate is to consider that nomination, and either they disapprove of that nominee or that nominee is elevated to the Supreme Court. Historically, this has not been viewed as a question. There’s no unwritten law that says this can only be done on off years. That’s not in the constitutional text.
Obama went on to say that he’s “amused” by those who say they’re strict interpreters of the Constitution putting things in it that aren’t there, adding that “There is more than enough time” for the Senate to get someone through. (CNN reports that the White House started working on their list of nominees Saturday night.)
He also rejected a reporter who wondered whether anyone could take his comment that his nominee could be someone he disagrees with politically as an indication he is going to nominate a moderate.
“Your job doesn’t stop until you’re voted out, or until your term expires,” Obama said of the Senate, a body he says we now expect to block proposals and nominations merely because of political disagreements (yeah, we know!). “I intend to do my job until January 2017 and I expect them to do their job.”
