The Minneapolis Police officers involved in shooting and killing Jamar Clark last year will not be charged with criminal wrongdoing, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced at a press conference today. An investigation found that Clark was not handcuffed when he died, Freeman said—a crucial point of contention between activists and the police.
Clark, 24, was shot after midnight on November 15, 2015. Paramedics responded on a call that Clark had assaulted his girlfriend when she attempted to intervene in a scuffle he was having with another attendee at a party, according to Freeman. Police were called after Clark acted belligerently with the paramedics, he said. A witness gave the Minneapolis Star Tribune a different account, saying Clark was only attempting to talk to his girlfriend as she was being carted away.
From there, accounts of the incident diverge more widely. According to Freeman’s investigation, Clark struggled with Mark Riggenberg, one of the responding officers, and both men ended up on the ground. Riggenberg shouted to his partner, Dustin Schwarze, that Clark had gotten his gun, and urged Schwarze to shoot, Freeman said.
The Star Tribune’s Libor Jany reported from the press conference:
But several witnesses have said that Clark was handcuffed when the officer shot him. “The young man was just laying there; he was not resisting arrest,” one bystander was quoted in an NAACP statement as saying, days after the shooting. “Two officers were surrounding the victim on the ground, an officer maneuvered his body around to shield Jamar’s body, and I heard the shot go off.” The police disputed that account, saying that Clark was not cuffed.
Libor Jany also reported that several people in attendance, including one of Clark’s family members, began shouting at Freeman during the press conference.
Clark’s death prompted brief but intense protests in Minneapolis last year. At one protest, a group of apparent white supremacists shot and injured five black protesters.
“What a depressing state of affairs that making this web series about gay people is necessarily a political act. That’s so stupid,” says Adam Goldman, the creator/co-director/co-writer/star of The Outs, the cult web series that debuted in 2012 and returns today for Season 2 via Vimeo. Goldman says that he’s been asserting the inherent politics of making a show about a group of friends—many of them gay—in Brooklyn since its early days. What has changed in the past four years, though, is his comfort with labeling The Outs as a “gay show.” Goldman told The Atlantic in 2013:
What’s a gay show? It just doesn’t mean anything. There aren’t definitions of these things. I don’t think of every other show as a straight show. Is it gay because I suck dick? Or is it gay because it’s about two gay men? It just doesn’t mean anything.
During our chat last week at Gawker Media HQ, Goldman shared further thoughts about gay culture, where he and his show fit in, and why the writing is of paramount importance in a small-budget web series like The Outs. As this was a casual conversation between two friends, I think it is better to post it as such in a lightly edited audio file. That’s embedded toward the bottom of this post. But first, for your perusing convenience, here are a few choice quotes from my conversation with Goldman:
On queer representation:
We talk about representation, is it enough for there to be queer people, period? And I think the answer is no. They have to be doing things and they have to be people and they have to be characters. It’s a jokey thing to talk about, but where is my gay procedural cop drama? Where is my gay hospital show? Many of the queer characters are token, even when you don’t expect them to be, just because they don’t get to express anything about their identity or they’re just there to express their identity. The Outs is not about being gay. It is about gay characters. I no longer bristle at the notion of it being called a gay show. At the heart of the show is not anyone struggling with being gay.
On needing more of it:
It’s not to say that we all should embrace every shitty piece of work that comes out about queer people, because I think a lot of it is bad. And a lot of everything is bad. Every fucking stupid straight thing that comes out is also bad, with very rare and particular exceptions. From my perspective, I cannot vouch for the unimpeachable quality of my own work. All I can do is tell you that I’m making something that I like. I was in L.A. recently and I was bored at the apartment I was staying at, and I just wanted to watch some gay shit, and I could not. I had seen it all and it’s gone. What a stupid situation. Everybody should just be making stuff because we have to make 10,000 things for 9 of them to be good. That’s the ratio. Just making things is the way to do it because when they do catch on, when they do snowball and something becomes a cult whatever, then that indicates to people with money that there’s money in them thar hills and that they should invest a little bit in making something work.
On stereotypes:
My character collects cardigans and loves Sex and the City. If you look at a femme gay guy, a camp gay guy, and you see a stereotype then that’s actually your problem, because that’s a person. And that person, being what they are in the world, is a lot more difficult than it is to pass. I just view that as a superpower.
On tops and bottoms:
We did an interview the other day where someone was like, “I was watching The Outs, and I was wondering which character in each couple is the top and which one is the bottom.” I was just like, anal sex is such a small percentage of what being gay is about or what any gay relationship is about. Some men just don’t have anal sex because they don’t want to. If that’s what you’re seeing when you look at two men together, that feels like inherently…you should go to church. And buried in there was the implication of, “Who’s the man and who’s the woman?” It’s like ugh, god, don’t.
On positioning:
You talk about Girls, which we get compared to a lot. They decided to call that show Girls, and I think that brought a lot of expectations on it, that it was saying something about girls, about women, about women of that age. Or Love, on Netflix, is not really about love. It’s about how you position these things. I don’t feel a responsibility in that way. We’ve gotten a little bit of criticism about, “Where do these people live? What does this Brooklyn look like? Why are their apartments so nice?” It’s like, well I don’t know, those are the apartments of my friends and they pay out the ear for them and they’re actually not that nice and we photograph them well.
It flummoxes me why this flummoxes a lot of people. I guess you could call it a double flummox, like some sort of gymnastics move. If I were to imagine such a move it would involve me, my paws taped to a swinging trapeze bar, cutting myself loose at the highest point of its swinging arc and flipping once, twice, end over end, before splashing down safely in a landing pool full of butterscotch pudding. As I lick myself clean, the sports announcers wait patiently to interview me about my successful gym-mazement. Even if it takes a while, they’ll wait. That’s part of the job.
I never did learn the alphabet. Now that I think about it I never learned the alphabet, the coloring books, the regular books, the pages of books, the numbers, the math, the calculators, the computers, the wall posters, the yard signs, the billboards, the graffiti writing, or the cursive. I never learned to type. My one attempt ended ignominiously when it became clear that my unwieldy paws were ill-equipped for the precision needed to accurately strike the desired letters in the proper sequence. The letters themselves were Greek to me, too. So even if I had the dexterity for typing I still wouldn’t have been able to produce a sentence. Needless to say my challenges were myriad!
None of this means that I want your pity. “Here, take the pity,” people are always saying. “Did you say patty, as in hamburger patty, or Jamaican beef patty?” I’ll ask, just to clarify. They always say no. But I’d hate to miss the day when someone was actually offering me a patty and I mistook it for an offer of pity. Up until now, though, everyone has in fact been offering pity.
Keep it! Put it right back in your pocket and amble on to your work job. I’ll stay here, in the grass. My life is beautiful. Illiteracy has never held me back from my goals. My goal is to eat all of the food in my bowl, down to the last kibble, and when that one last kibble is left, to lap it up with my tongue, flip it up into the air, and let it bonk me on the head. Then it falls to the ground and I eat it. It’s a gorgeous kind of acrobatic performance, I promise you. A work in progress—but one I believe I can achieve. Words play no part. What does play a part? Kibble, tongue. And soul.
Me, my soul. My rump in the grass.
Symbols—what are they good for? “Absolutely nothing!” I cry, “headbanging” to the extent possible, my ears wildly flopping like the proverbial hair rocker’s hair, sending a message. Many people are defensive on my behalf. They want to defend me from the written word. “How dare you write that about the good boy?” they cry to the newspaper man. “How dare you publish the thing about the good boy being overweight?” they cavortle to the magazine lady. “Don’t you believe what the mean man wrote about you!” they cry to me, falling on their knees before me, overcome with emotion. It’s unsportsmanlike and frankly makes them appear deranged. Do I give a flying hey about a string of inscrutable symbols? I don’t care a whit! Meanwhile I sit in the grass. Rumpus planted. Kibble flipping. Flying on airways, mentally barking.
Don’t feel bad for me, baby. I’m happening right here on solid land.
When the faceless editors of Wikipedia decide an article is not fit for public consumption, it’s gone, only accessible to the site’s top editors—at least, it was. After a brief interlude, we’re back sucking up Wikipedia’s detritus to give you the best of what Wikipedia has deemed the worst. And this week’s set is very, very good.
Maybe you’re familiar withFive Nights at Freddy’s? Well, forget everything you know, because it’s gummy time, bitch.
Best line:
All of it. The whole thing is perfect.
Red Gummy Is one of the 3 antagonists in the five nights at gummys series In the game his starting place is at the stage he will be able to sprint to the players vent and jumpscare them. he is the main antagonist in five nights at gummys in the third game he is a phantom unlike a hallucination, although he isn’t as surprising as the other animotronics all of the other animotronics jumpscare the player and he does. Appearance: Red Gummy Is a animotronic Gummy that is red this is the leader and the five nights at gummys series has songs about this character Gender:male Species:Animotronic Gummy.
The article, for all of its faults, does make an excellent point about fun:
Most people on the internet use living memes as jokes to make other people laugh. This creates a huge amount of people wanting to join in the fun. They are shared over multiple social media sites:Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, etc...
It’s true. People fucking love fun.
Why it got deleted:
“Living meme” is a meaningless term invented by the author.
Don’t you think we’re all just a little too uptight these days? Whoever wrote this article definitely does
Best line:
To be quite frank, they’re all very, very good. But some highlights:
There were all kinds of sex that was being practiced such as oral, vaginal and anal. Men would have sex with men and they were not seen as homosexuals. All kinds of sexuality was practiced, homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality.
Although highlights might not be the right word:
That’s how they were able to learn about sex, thru seeing it from their parents or hearing adults talk about it. Some parents would even touch and kiss their children’s genitals. This was more when the children were babies.
I’m going to need to see a citation for this one:
When leaders decide to retire they pass their leadership title to the next person by having sexual intercourse with them.
Ah, the good old days:
The husband could divorce his wife if she could not give him healthy children. Any deformed babies were killed and at times so was the mother.
Why it got deleted:
According to one of the wet blankets over at Wikipedia, “This page has no place in an encyclopaedia. It is written like an essay, and has no claim to significance. The ‘sources’ this page cites are unreliable or unrelated to the subject of this article.” But according to me, that’s not how you spell “encyclopedia,” asshole.
Genesis 3D is a documentary (“documentary”) about the Book of Genesis—specifically “how modern science backs up Creation as well as the bible as a reliable historical record and document to ultimately demonstrate the authenticity and reality of the Biblical text.” Catchy tagline!
Best line:
Between 2012 and 2013, the film was renamed Genesis (and later Genesis 3D after having realized that introducing 3D adds another layer of realism and believability to what is being witnessed)...
As well as:
However, realizing that the support for the film exceeded the initial budget, the team decided to go for their original $800,000 budget.
The budget is now at a reasonable $900,000.
But please, don’t limit yourself to the film’s Wiki-ghost. There is plenty more three-dimensional content on the movie’s website—extras like this video, which explains the “cutting edge special effects that brings the Truth [capital assumed] of God’s word to life, like never before, in 3D.
Or this 30-minute(!) behind the scenes extra where you can watch a man speak inaudibly while getting his makeup done.
It’s important to note that even the behind-the-scenes scenes are, in fact, in three dimensions.
Why it got deleted:
The article is based almost entirely on promotional material and, since it’s been on the verge of release since 2009, there is a very good chance it will never actually come out.
A man (Jacques Hyzagi), deeply angered by the supposed editorial blunders that affected a story (an interview with Rei Kawakubo, the Comme des Garcons designer/artist/genius disdainful of press) he was writing for Elle, has decided to blowtorch the monoliths of the New York media industry, which is to say the outlets that could probably pay him more than what I assume he got from the Observer, where this piece appears.
(I only mention this because, in his kicker, he describes himself as a “broke writer,” though he does mention elsewhere that he was able to fly to France for a story on his own dime—“thousands”—which makes him sound markedly less broke than virtually every non-trust-funded freelance writer I have ever known.)
In Elle on Earth (I know), a highly readable and seemingly unedited piece that gets increasingly bonkers by the paragraph, Hyzagi details how procuring an interview with the elusive designer and attempting to place it in a well-regarded magazine turned into what he says was an unpleasant, unprofessional experience working with Elle that ended, he says, with editor Anne Slowey attempting to sabotage him and Hyzagi sending an accusatory email with the entire company CC’d.
He begins with his switchblade sprung; his thesis is that the big names in media are unmitigated trash, as he makes clear in his first paragraph:
Time Warner, Conde Nast and Hearst don’t hire editors in chief anymore but editors able to understand the value of the marketing division to the newsroom and how they should be merged, which is code for content branding.
Who doesn’t want to read a good takedown of the way media companies have adapted (or tried) to the digital world by allowing sales divisions to encroach ever more powerfully on editorial freedom? I don’t know if his claim about those specific companies is true, but most editors I know feel this weight, and fear it.
But what we mostly get from Hyzagi, and why this piece is so bananas, is a first-person account that spares no mundane detail in exacting revenge on the people the writer is holding responsible for the poor handling of a once-in-a-lifetime story—the taking down of establishment media is a secondary or even tertiary concern. (The clearer secondary concern, or possibly the primary one, seems to be letting us all know that the writer has absolutely, under no uncertain terms, dated models.)
And so, while the piece provides fascinating insight into Kawakubo’s inner workings (he published some of the interview here) it reads like the kind of screed that lots of people in the industry think or even write, but never publish. (Imagine if Amy Pascal had leaked all her trash-talking emails on purpose.) There’s a strong top note of rejected-writer bitterness and bottom note of overall disdain for the establishment—he sounds mad that the first places he pitched did not want to publish this interview, and he audaciously calls New York “bores,” and the New Yorker “very Reader’s Digest meets GQ” and, again, Vanity Fair under Graydon Carter “a giant bore.”
He also dishes specifics: fixating on the point that Kawakubo has never been invited to Anna Wintour’s “insufferable annual ball at the Met”—which is absolutely strange, and a question I would like answered!—he brings it up to his Elle editor Robbie Myers, and says she responded that “everybody is sick and tired of fucking Anna Wintour.”
That’s not a quote, though—there are no quotes in this piece, which contributes both to its boggling stream-of-consciousness flow and the sense that what’s going on here is a piece of realist satire, rather than an unhinged ramble from an utterly self-important, pretentious but obviously very smart French male who was stung by the audacity of someone actually editing him. (Lord knows he didn’t get much of that stifling editorial oversight here.) Hyzagi is a former writer for Charlie Hebdo, after all, and he includes an entire paragraph about setting up a meeting with Myers and Elle editor Anne Slowey, including the banalities of shortening their conversation because she had to pick up her kids.
But the idea that Hyzagi is at least partly joking seemed pretty strongly suggested by the time we get around to this part:
I talked to Robbie and explained to her what had happened and that I couldn’t work with a power hungry flake. Ten minutes later Anne was calling me. I could tell I was on speakerphone. We decided that better than Paris, Tokyo should be the venue for the interview since Rei lives and works there. I told Anne that I see Rei as a Romantic from early 19th century, a time when painters started depicting fires, ruins, decay and painted people from the back in a rebuke to the sickening self righteousness of the Enlightenment and by extension as a Dada trying to destroy art.
Sounds wildly self-important, yes, but the bolded part was the direct inspiration for Jeremy Scott’s Fall 2016 collection for Moschino, and something tells me this writer would or does think Jeremy Scott is a hack (or, very probably, something much meaner). Is this writer a Dadaist trying to destroy the industry? Is he a Dadaist trying to destroy his career? Probably both—maybe neither. Who knows?
On either side, though, I feel some sympathy. Hyzagi’s main gripe is that he says Elle essentially rewrote his interview with assistance from Adrian Joffe, Kawakubo’s husband and Comme co-owner—every writer has had a piece they loved transformed into something they hated by an editor, whether to fit the house style or to include more or less detail or because it was cut for space (ahh! print!) or, simply, because the editor fucking sucked and couldn’t read and sent you 11 rounds on a two-edit piece because she was incompetent.
(Hyzagi says he received no edits from Anne Slowey, and accuses her of wanting to sabotage his piece from the beginning. I don’t know about either point, but it’s not a best practice to let a piece go to print without the writer having worked on the edit, or at the very least having seen it—nor is it ethical or journalistically sound to allow a subject to see or edit a piece before it runs, if Hyzegi’s accusations are true. It’s not El Chapo and Rolling Stone, but it’s still advertorial at best.)
Alternately, every woman editor has had to deal with that one man (it’s always a man) who is just a total nightmare to work with, who challenges every edit, who doesn’t respect your position or your authority, who believes his writing is god’s gift to the world and bitch you betta genuflect. I don’t know if this is that man—his descriptions of Myers and Slowey are not only cruel and vengeful but also have a tinge of chauvinist condescension—but I do know that he wrote this:
I never received your emails because you never sent them you liar, I told her—making sure to cc Hearst’s entire masthead.
BRUH!
If the writer actually did cc Hearst’s entire masthead, this piece is fine, because he had no bridge left to burn at that publishing empire, anyway. But for any writer who is interested in continuing to be employed by major media outlets, this is really the number one thing you do not do, lest you want an entire corporation talking about you for the rest of your career/making jokes about how you are an unreasonable wildling. Earlier, I sent this piece to my music-writing students (even though it’s not about music), almost purely to instruct them never to cc an entire goddamn company. And yet, the fact of that line is one of the reasons I both love and loathe this piece. What if it’s true?! It is fucking bonkers!
Again, though, who knows if Hyzagi is joking or not. He is so mean; he is so funny. The entirety of New York media seems, if Twitter is any indication, to be completely divided on it—whether this piece is terrible, or whether it rules. Either way, it perfectly rides the waves of delicious and abhorrent and fascinating and rude.
And in the end the joke’s totally on all of us, because now the writer has milked three features out of one interview—he published a Kawakubo piece in The Guardian, and of course there’s the piece in this month’s Elle (which, obviously, I’m racing to buy immediately since reading this piece, probably defeating his purpose OR playing into his genius devil mastermind troll about branded content) and, as he tells us at the end of the piece, he published another one in the British fashion magazine 10. Get them checks, Jacques Hyzagi.
Image from Comme des Garcons’s Fall 2014 collection via AP
The media is very focused on the day-to-day minutiae and outrages of the presidential race, but it’s worth taking a step back to point out that the biggest outrage of all is looming in plain sight.
Yes, Donald Trump is a terrible human and a farcical presidential candidate who would be a disaster for America and the world. But who has the ultimate duty to affirm that? The voters in the Republican primary. That is how democracy works. The ideal of American democracy, flawed though it may be, is far more important than any one election.
[“But we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a Republic.” Hey, fuck off! Get in the American spirit!]
People are acting outraged about many things this election cycle, as they should be, because many outrageous things have been said. But one thing that is not drawing a lot of outrage is the fact that the Republican Party is openly plotting to steal the nomination from the candidate that receives the most votes. Hell, there are only three men left in the race, and one of them, John Kasich, is openly campaigning on the strategy of “Throw me the nomination at the convention, popular vote be damned.” Even candidates who have already dropped out of the race are pitching in their delegates for the express purpose of thwarting the will of the public. This is all reported as normal horse race politics. In fact, it should be criminal.
All of the feel-good democratic ideals that politicians like to brag about tend to shield the anti-democratic aspects of our system of government. The Senate is purposely anti-democratic. The electoral college exists solely as a mechanism to allow elites to circumvent the public will. As long as the public perceives things as functioning “normally,” nobody gives these barriers to their will a second thought. But when they are put into use—when Senators from tiny states use their disproportionate power to warp our government’s priorities, or when a president gets elected without winning the popular vote—people momentarily throw up their hands in dismay. “That’s fucked up!” they cry.
They are correct. It is fucked up. The outrage, though, has never been sustained long enough to actually change the system.
Now, we are faced with the impending use of another anti-democratic tool: nomination rules that allow political parties to baldly go against the voters in picking the party’s presidential nominee. Donald Trump is a bad man. But if we hold an entire country’s worth of state primaries and caucuses that clearly demonstrate the will of Republican voters to nominate Donald Trump, then Donald Trump should be the nominee of that awful party. (Then he should lose the election.) That’s democracy at work. For the political establishment to use procedural maneuvers to steal the nomination is not just a single, discrete occurrence of sophisticates beating the rubes by using arcane knowledge. It is a representative example of the sickening contempt that those who possess power hold for the public. We all know that America is an oligarchy with a corrupt campaign finance system; but the basis for trying to reform the broken parts of our system is the belief that the larger national democracy is worth saving. Naked power grabs do not inspire confidence.
Here we have one of America’s major political parties publicly preparing to demonstrate that it does not care what most of its voters think. This is the kind of thing that makes average people suspect that the whole idea of America even possessing democratic values is a sham. This is the kind of thing that proves their suspicion correct. This is the kind of thing that makes people want to break shit. This is the kind of thing that makes people want to smash the system. This is the kind of thing that demonstrates the system deserves to be smashed.
This election cycle, Donald Trump is a conservative, which means he’s against abortion. But Trump today took the conversation in a new direction: Punishing the women who have them.
The typical pro-life argument tends to focus on punishing the doctors performing the abortions, since there’s little political capital gained in prosecuting desperate women. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Trump, who, to be fair, has only recently begun speaking out against abortion.
Trump made the comments to Chris Matthews in a pre-taped Town Hall set to air tonight. In the clip, Matthews clearly asks Trump if, on principle, he believes women should be punished for having abortions. Trump says yes.
MATTHEWS: Should the woman be punished for having an abortion? This is not something you can dodge. If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under the law. Should abortion be punished?
TRUMP: Well, people in certain parts of the Republican party, and conservative Republicans, would say yes, they should be punished.
MATTHEWS: What about you?
TRUMP: I would say that it’s a very serious problem. And it’s a problem that we have to decide on.
MATTHEWS: But you’re for banning it.
TRUMP: Are you going to say put them in jail? Is that the punishment that you’re talking about?
MATTHEWS: Well no, I’m asking you. Because you say you ban it. What’s that mean?
TRUMP: I am against—I am pro-life, yes.
MATTHEWS: How do you ban abortion? How do you actually do it?
TRUMP: Well you’ll go back to a position like they had, where people will perhaps go to illegal places, but you have to ban it.
[...]
MATTHEWS: You running for president of the United States, will be chief executive of the United States. Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle.
TRUMP: The answer is there has to be some form of punishment.
MATTHEWS: For the woman?
TRUMP: Yeah. There has to be some form.
An interesting proposition, to be sure, and one Trump is already sort of walking back. Trump’s son just tweeted his father meant only if abortion were already illegal, which wasn’t what the question asked, and he Trump campaign just issued this statement: “This issue is unclear and should be put back into the states for determination. Like Ronald Reagan, I am pro-life with exceptions, which I have outlined numerous times.”
This week, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski was arrested for the crime of simple battery after he allegedly grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields at a campaign rally.
In the state of Florida, simple battery is defined under § 350.34 of the Florida Statutes, which holds that a battery occurs when a person
1. Actually and intentionally touches or strikes another person against the will of the other; or
2. Intentionally causes bodily harm to another person.
Basically, to be charged, you have to mean to touch another person in an offensive manner. There is no requirement that that person be injured. There is no requirement that that person scream, cry, flinch, or even change the expression on his or her face while being touched.
But none of this matters to Donald Trump, and none of these need matter to you if you intend to gaslight the woman your employee lied about grabbing.
“They said nothing happened, everyone says nothing happened. Perhaps she made it up. I think that’s what happened.” - 3/10
Step Two: Realize There’s Video and Distract from the Action by Talking About Her Face
“Trump acknowledged the question, but before he could answer I was jolted backwards. Someone had grabbed me tightly by the arm and yanked me down. I almost fell to the ground, but was able to maintain my balance. Nonetheless, I was shaken.” - Michelle Field’s official statement.
“How do you know those bruises weren’t there before? I’m not a lawyer. She said she had a bruise on her arm. I mean, to me, if you’re going to get squeezed, wouldn’t you think that she would have yelled out a scream or something if she has bruises on her arm? Take a look at her facial expression. Her facial expression doesn’t even change. So you say bruises on her arm—how did they get there? Who put them there? I don’t know that he put them there.” - 3/29
“She wasn’t yanked down. She was hardly even touched. You look at her face, her face isn’t that of a woman screaming in pain.” - Good Morning America 3/30
“She didn’t even change the expression on her face. Look at her face. During this whole incident. If somebody whacks you or somebody gives either of you a shot, you’re gonna be, ‘Wow!’ Your mouth is going to open, you’re going to be screaming a little bit. She didn’t even change expression on her face. I don’t buy it at all.” - Today Show 3/30
Step Three: Minimize, Minimize, Minimize
Photo: GMA
“This is something that was so minor. Who would ever think a thing like this could happen? She grabs my arm, he probably pushes her off a little bit, almost not even knowingly. It’s almost like a reflex. But she wasn’t yanked to the ground or anything, and to think that that led to criminal...” - Fox News 3/30
“She’s grabbing at me. So probably, even unknowingly, it’s like a reflex. And he didn’t do anything hard. But if you listen to her, she was forcefully thrown to the ground.” - Fox News 3/30
“This thing is so minor, it’s so incidental. The lawyer can’t even believe charges were brought on this very minor... think of it. In the world we have people’s heads being cut off, we have people drowning.” - Fox News 3/30
“I think it’s a disgrace. In a world where they’re chopping off heads, where they’re drowning people in cages. Everybody that’s seen this tape that I know, and you look at Twitter, people think it’s a total disgrace that she actually filed charges for this.” - Good Morning America 3/30
“When you look at what happened, it was so minor that he might not have even thought about it. Because to be honest with you, when you look at this, it was so minor. People are calling saying, ‘What is this all about? We have people in the Middle East chopping off heads and drowning people in cages and he brushes her?’ And he brushed her to get—probably—probably—to get her hand off my arm. It was so minor he might not have even realized it took place. And then he was informed later on that it took place, and he may not have even known, frankly, what happened.” - Today Show 3/30
“I guarantee you [the Secret Service] probably did stuff that was more physical than this. More physical, because this is not even physical.” - Fox News 3/30
Step Four: Blame the Victim
“She was grabbing me. And just so you understand, she was off base because she went through the Secret Service. She had a pen in her hand, which Secret Service is not liking because they don’t know what it is, whether it’s a little bomb.” - 3/29
“She broke through Secret Service, she’s asking questions. She’s not even supposed to be asking questions. But she grabs my arm and you see me trying to push her hand off my arm. She’s got a pen in her arm, which she’s not supposed to have. And it shows that she’s a very aggressive person who is grabbing at me and touching me. Maybe I should file charges against her. Maybe I should say my arm has never been the same.” - Fox News, 3/30
“She was asking me questions. She wasn’t supposed to, because the press conference had ended and we were leaving going outside.” - Today Show 3/30
“Practically nothing occurred. It looks like he’s trying to push her hand off my arm. She shouldn’t have been grabbing me. When you say it’s okay for her to touch me but somebody else can’t touch her, you think that’s ok? I don’t think so. She also had a pen in her hand, and that could have been a knife, that could have been even a pen—it’s dangerous. Secret Service doesn’t want people running up to me and grabbing me with a pen in her hand.” - Good Morning America 3/30
“She touched me. She grabbed me by the arm at least twice. Screaming questions.” - Today Show 3/30
“She has no right, in my opinion, to file a case on something like this.” - Good Morning America 3/30
Step Five: Praise Your Employee, Whose Four Fantastic Children Live in New Hampshire
“You’re going to destroy a man’s life over what happened?” - Today Show 3/30
“He’s a good person. He’s a good human being. I don’t want to destroy a human being’s life. He’s got four children. He’s got a wonderful wife. He lives in New Hampshire. I don’t feel like destroying his life.” - Fox News 3/30
“He’s a fine person. He’s a very good person. And I don’t want to destroy a man. If you let him go, you would destroy a man, destroy a family. He’s got four fantastic children—a wife and four fantastic children living in New Hampshire. And what, I’m going to fire him because he may have brushed her?” - Good Morning America 3/30
Remember that Texas police officer who was caught on video spraying pepper spray into the road as motorcyclists passed by? He now admits he did it, but claims it was because he could not safely approach the truck he’d just pulled over.
Local Dallas news station NBCDFW obtained the official documents from the investigation into Officer W. Figueroa regarding the incident, which occurred on the 287 North near Rosedale Street, in Fort Worth, Texas.
The report contained the officer’s reasoning for his actions:
“...multiple motorcycles would not vacate the lane closest to my marked patrol car. I deployed my pepper spray into the lane closest to me, at which point approaching motorcycles began to vacate the lane, allowing me to conduct a traffic stop.”
In a message to other officers nearby, Officer Figueroa went on to say:
“287 NB is shut down by a bunch of delinquents.”
He also claimed the reason he pulled the truck over was because it was driving slowly in the center lane, and had two men in the back who were filming the motorcyclists. He also stated:
“The motorcyclists were driving on one wheel and weaving in and out of traffic not allowing motorists to pass.”
The woman driving the truck Officer Figueroa pulled over said she could see the pepper spray wafting intro traffic and that it then hit them and she started choking. Five people were treated for exposure to the spray and one man was taken to the hospital for minor injuries from the incident.
I’m at a loss for words, and don’t really know who to hate more.
As a motorcyclist, my initial reaction was to place the fault, or at least find the fault more egregious, with the police officer, because you’re all special little humans until proven otherwise in my eyes. And because I’ve been in cars where it wasn’t safe to get out of, and where I managed to wait until it was safe rather than try and assault passing traffic. Why couldn’t he have just done that, or used a baton or some other device to wave to the riders to give him room, rather than spray them and risk a crash?
But.
BUT.
After watching this video many more times than I’d like to admit, I noticed several things. Like how, even though the video is taken from behind the bars of cruiser, it starts with the familiar sound of sportbikes being revved too high.
Or how it actually looks like the rider in front of the guy wearing the camera is wheelie-ing. Or how there are guys in the bed of the truck. Or how the riders behind the bike, when the camera turns to face the cop, are sportbikes and dual sports. These guys weren’t just out for a mellow cruise.
Not that it makes the cop’s tactics justified by any means, but these guys were in fact riding like assholes (something that went unnoticed during the initial watch.) The cop didn’t react well, but it makes a little more sense why he perceived an aggressive attitude from the riders.
However, my team teaching students with emotional disorders taught me that public service professionals are the ones who are supposed to de-escalate the situation, regardless of how they feel about it. He should have known better.
Now everyone go to your room and think about what you’ve done and how you can get along better next time.
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Full disclosure, I don’t know if these thingsactually do anything useful. I use one occasionally after exercising, and I think it helps reduce muscle pain, and at the very least it feels neat, but it could be a placebo effect. In any event, this is not a medical endorsement, simply a deal post, and these are indeed very strong discounts.
We occasionally see cheaper TENS massagers, but none that include rechargeable batteries, 20 strength settings, or a massage belts and sandals (combo kit only). Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out.
When it comes to smartphone dash mounts, magnetic solutions have dominated the sales charts over the last year or so. But if you don’t want to obstruct a vent, or use a case with your phone, a these deals might bring you back into the suction cup camp.
First up, iOttie’s One Touch 2 universal dash mount is marked down to $13, matching an all-time low. The original One Touch won a Kinja Co-op a few years back, and the sequel added a longer telescoping arm, as well as a bigger cradle for today’s skateboard-sized phones.
And if you’ve got $40 to spare, and hate plugging and unplugging a power cord every time you get in the car, the iOttie One Touch Wireless is also marked down to an all-time low price today. This thing is basically just a One Touch 2, but with a Qi charger built right in for hassle-free charging. That’s no use for iPhone owners, but if you own a modern Android phone, I’d say it’s well worth the price premium.
It wasn’t long ago that portable, USB-powered external hard drives maxed out at 2TB, but Seagate’s new Backup Plus manages to double that, and you can pick one up for an all-time low $110 today, in red. That price even includes 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive storage for two years, which is a $96 value on its own.
We’re not sure how long this deal will last, so if you need to keep a lot of storage in your travel bag, or plugged into your Xbox One, I’d grab this quickly.
If you hurry over to Monoprice, you can save 20% on a $50 PSN gift card. PSN is rarely the cheapest place to buy full retail games, but this is a great deal if you like to buy DLC and small, downloadable titles.
Sure, you could use just about any liquid vessel as a makeshift milk frothing pitcher, but if you want the best (or at least Amazon’s best selling) option available, this attractive, 12 ounce stainless steel pitcher is marked down to just $5 right now.
For a limited time, you can save $50 on an Xbox One choose your game bundle, and get a bonus controller tossed in for free. I’ve long said that extra controllers represent the best value in value-added toss-ins, because unlike games, they don’t really depreciate over time.
The choose your game bundle gives you a free download of one of four titles:
If you don’t own a pressure cooker, today’s a great day to fix that. Newegg’s eBay storefront has knocked this 5L Tayama down to $50, one of the best prices we’ve ever seen on any electric pressure cooker.
Rowenta’s Focus steam iron is one of the most popular irons on the market, and Amazon’s taking an extra $5 off today via a coupon. Sporting a whopping 1750 watts of power, over 400 micro steam holes, and a self-cleanings system, it’s no wonder this model has a 4.5 star review average.
Note: Be sure to clip the $5 coupon, and remember that you won’t see the discount until checkout.
Assuming your computer can output 4K, Monoprice will sell your their popular 28" 4K display for an all-time low $330 today, one of the best prices we’ve seen on any 60Hz 4K monitor. Just be sure to use promo code BUY20 at checkout to save an extra $20.
We’ve seen deals on advanced desk lamps with adjustable color temperatures, USB ports, and even built-in batteries, but if you just need a basic reading light with no frills, $14 is about as cheap as they ever get.
You’ve probably never been to Thailand or Asia in general, and at $699 including air and a 4-star hotel, this deal from the folks at TravelZoo is too good to ignore. Don’t forget promo code TZBKVC150.
As far as we and TravelZoo know, this is the best price on this particular trip ever, but there’s a lot to consider before booking. As TravelZoo notes, seven nights is a lot of time to spend in one city, and this is a long flight. You should prepare for and research booking excursions, extending the trip, and flying to other parts of Thailand to get the most return for your money and your time in the air.
This deal is available for another nine days assuming the promotion doesn’t get extended. Departure dates run through December. I’ll be doing my research tonight!
If you’ve got a yard to take care of, battery operated trimmers and blowers are worth their weight in gold, and you can get a combo kit with both for just $85 right now from Worx’s official eBay storefront. The catch is that they’re refurbished, but at that price, we can’t really complain.
Like the idea of a Belkin WeMo Switch, but not willing to spend $40-$50 to try one out. This TP-Link alternative has a nearly identical feature set for half the price.
Just like a WeMo switch, TP-Link’s Smart Plug will let you turn appliances on and off from your smartphone, and set schedules to toggle them automatically. The only major feature it’s lacking is IFTTT support, but it will integrate with an Amazon Echo for voice control.
If you don’t care about smartphone control, this three-pack of outlet switches will perform the same function with an included remote; you’ll just have to be nearby for it to work.
Blacklight flashlights are great if you want to spot hidden stains on train seats, hotel sheets, or (gasp) even in your own house...if that’s something you want to do.
It may seem silly, but if you find even one stain in a hotel room and complain to management, I guarantee that this thing will pay for itself several times over.
Each Dorco Pace 7 unit includes one handle and two cartridges.
Today only, if you add one unit to your cart, you’ll get an extra for free (automatically added to your cart).
If you add two to your cart, you’ll cross the $10 free shipping threshold, and get two units for free.
If you use promo code F63R98C9Y, you’ll save an extra 20%.
Update: Dorco is now only including one free razor per order, rather than for each one you buy.
Add all of this together, and you can get four handles and eight cartridges (comprised of 56 individual blades) for just $13. Just add two units to your cart, and use code F63R98C9Y at checkout.
A few days ago, we found six LED lightbulbs for $20 (which is still available), but like most cheap LEDs, they weren’t dimmable. If that scared you off, here’s a four-pack for $19, which is one of the best deals we’ve ever seen on dimmable LEDs.
Need a little push to get off the couch? The Fitbit Charge HR is the best fitness tracker for most people, and you can get one for just $100 today, which is a match for the best deal we’ve seen on the heart rate-tracking model.
It might not be mission-critical equipment for your home, but a good label maker is a nice gadget to keep around, and Amazon’s top seller is back down to $10 today, if you missed out on the same (short-lived) discount earlier this month
If you remember the old label makers that literally pressed the letters into a piece of tape, this is a bit more advanced than what you’re picturing. The Dymo LabelManager 160 can print in eight fonts at six sizes, along with clipart and special characters, and you can even preview the entire label on its LCD screen before you print. Every time we post this deal, it sells out quickly, so you’ll want to grab yours fast.
You’ve got two choices when it comes to checking on the progress of your dinner in the oven. You could poke at it with a kitchen thermometer until you think it’s done, or you could sit on the couch and wait for your phone to tell you when it’s ready.
The highly-rated iDevices iGrill Mini Thermometer uses a leave-in probe to monitor the progress of your meal on the grill, on the stovetop, or even in the oven, and connects to your iPhone or Android device over Bluetooth to alert you as soon as it reaches the proper temperature. I actually gave a slightly different iDevices thermometer to my dad for his birthday a few years ago, and it worked as advertised. Today’s $24 price tag is an all-time low, so be sure to grab yours before this deal overcooks.
Your favorite USB car charger just happens to be the smallest one you can buy, and you can grab it on Amazon for just $6 right now price today. Yeah, you’ll find similar looking ones for sale on the counter at your nearest gas station, but trust me, those don’t have the ability to feed two phones or tablets 2.4 amps simultaneously.
If you’ve ever spent more than 5 seconds sorting through your mismatched food containers to find the right lid, it’s time to throw them all out and upgrade to this 42-piece Rubbermaid system.
The set comes with 21 containers in six different sizes, and yet you only have to deal with three different sizes of lids, making it much easier to find the right one. Personally, I prefer glass storage sets like this one from Pyrex, but if you want to maximize the number of containers you get for your money, this is your best bet.
Like most Razer keyboards, you get Razer’s custom key switches, programmable macros, 10 key rollover, and everything one could expect from a top-tier gaming keyboard. This particular model though is notable for its key-by-key customizable backlighting. That means you can choose from a 16.8M color gamut for every single key, sync your choices with the rest of your Razer gear, set up different options for different games, and more.
If you still haven’t picked up a PS4, Newegg (via eBay) will sell you a console plus three games for $369. True, that’s $20 more than the normal price of the Uncharted bundle, but if you care for Star Wars Battlefront or MLB The Show 16 (a PlayStation exclusive), the price premium is well worth it.
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Earlier today, the official twitter account for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs offered a bit of advice to ugly Americans looking for sex overseas: There’s a reason all the locals keep buying you drinks—and it’s not because they find you attractive. (You’re not.)
Apparently, the now deleted tweet was all part of a (poorly conceived) “#springbreakingbadly” campaign.
The Bureau, whose “highest priority is to protect the lives and interests of [ugly] U.S. citizens overseas,” didn’t seem to see a problem with reminding all of its 500,000 repulsive followers that there’s no way in hell anyone would actually want to sleep with them.
On a related note, the State Department would also like all you less-than-appealing ladies out there to know that you’re probably being catfished.
And that when you do inevitably get scammed after briefly letting yourself buy into the (absurd) fantasy that some other human in this world might finally want to connect with you, the State Department will still be there for you.
Because god knows no one else will.
Update 6:30 p.m.
The State Department would like to apologize for the fact that you can’t handle the truth.
Although it quickly deleted the second part of its apology.
That’s the last time John Kerry gets the Twitter password.
With the utter breakdown of the public defender system in Louisiana showing no sign of abating, the New Orleans Times-Picayune has published a profile of an average public defense attorney who has remained loyal to the cause despite having every conceivable reason to find a new job. In a detail that English teachers in Louisiana would no doubt describe as the perfect example of irony if Louisiana education budgets weren’t sitting on the chopping block alongside the public defender system, the article notes that the defender’s office is so broke it can’t even afford a lawyer for itself.
A quick refresher if you haven’t been following the story: Louisiana is in the midst of a devastating budget crisis, largely thanks to former governor Bobby Jindal’s support of the biggest tax cut in the history of the state and his stubborn refusal to consider new sources of revenue. Every state institution is feeling the pain—the current governor has even threatened to cancel LSU football—but none more acutely than public defender offices, and nowhere more acutely than in New Orleans. For several months, the office there has been turning clients away, because it is so short-staffed it cannot handle their cases. People are sitting in jail without having been given a lawyer, unsure if they’ll ever get one.
In January, after the New Orleans Public Defender Board stopped giving representation to certain felony defendants, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against it. The board, after just having announced it could no longer afford to provide attorneys to people who have been accused of attempted murder or armed robbery, responded by saying that it didn’t have enough money to represent itself in court, either. From today’s Times-Picayune piece:
The American Civil Liberties Union responded to Bunton’s announcement by suing his office, alleging that the lack of legal representation violated indigent defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights. Bunton said the Orleans Public Defender cannot afford to represent itself in the suit. Mark Surprenant of the Adams and Reese law firm has agreed to represent it for free.
The profile focuses on Lauren Anderson, a three-year public defense attorney, and also highlights another, less obvious facet of the havoc in New Orleans’s criminal justice system. Since last year, hundreds of detainees from the city have been moved to jails as far as 300 miles away, due to a shortage of beds in local facilities. (Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the entire world.) Even if Anderson is able to represent a client, her work may be limited by the four-hour drive each she must take to consult with them before trial.
Public defenders in several other Louisiana parishes have also turned away clients, and the situation may get worse before it gets better. The state legislature is currently working on solutions to the budget crisis, and according to the Times-Picayune, those solutions may involve more cuts to the state public defender board.
This week, NFL lawyers sent a letter to The New York Times demanding that the Times’s recent investigation into the league’s bogus concussion studies be retracted. It was so limp that it demanded a proper takedown. Thankfully, the Times was happy to oblige, via a response letter from their own lawyers.
As you know, The Times has a policy of correcting factual errors as promptly as possible. I have reviewed your letter with our editors and reporters, and nowhere does your letter identify any factual error that we have made in our reporting on the ties between the NFL and the tobacco industry. The crux of the letter is the NFL’s complaint that the connections identified by the Article between the NFL and the tobacco industry were not “meaningful.” Obviously, that is an opinion, not a fact.
We’re off to a good start. The “Ummmmmm, do you even know the difference between a fact and an opinion???” burn has ended many message-board beefs, and it’s a good, solid opening salvo. Moving on:
As for the Articles’ reporting on the concussion studies, the letter confirms the overarching point that the Article made: The league’s research was deeply flawed and incomplete. The letter bizarrely quibbles not over whether the research was valid (we all agree that it was not) or whether the NFL defended the research for years (we all agree that it did) but whether the NFL continued to “stand by” the research.
Translation: “Lol, good job owning yourself while trying to own us.” That’s a good one, but let’s see if the Times can kick it up a notch:
Little needs to be said about the letter’s second criticism of the reporting on the data. The criticism is premised on a falsehood: that the Article alleged that the NFL “intentionally concealed concussion data.” It said nothing of the sort.
The NFL’s on the ropes! Go for the knockout:
While your earlier letter to The Times called the tobacco industry “perhaps the most odious industry in America history,” you somehow fail to mention in either letter that it was your firm that represented Phillip Morris in that RICO case.
Aside from an investigation that could further endanger his status as governor, there is also still a bunch of gossip shaking loose from the capitol now that the alleged affair has been all but confirmed. For instance: This weekend, the local blog Yellowhammer News, which has been all over the Bentley story for months, posted even more leaked audio of Bentley and Mason secretly discussing their affection for each other. The video is 24 minutes long if that’s your thing!
Bentley: I did. I did. It’s good. They came this morning, fact. See, I thought I was gon’ stay here this afternoon and wait on them. But they came this morning. Bless his heart, this little boy from (Elrod?)
Mason: (Inaudible)
Bentley: Yea, I know. He came this morning before I had my clothes on.
Mason: (Inaudible)
Bentley: He just got to see my boxer shorts. No. Hey, you’ve seen those. Listen, he didn’t see my boxer shorts. I did actually put my pants on before I went to the door.
:-/
Also per Yellowhammer, Bentley and Mason share a safe deposit box in Montgomery that was opened in January of this year:
The names on the box are Robert J. Bentley and Rebekah A. Mason, who alone share access to the box’s contents. The addresses on the box are the Governor’s Mansion in Montgomery, and Mrs. Mason’s private residence in Tuscaloosa. The box was initially opened on Tuesday, January 5th of this year, and remains open as of this week.
Proof of the box’s existence, which has not been known to the public until now, was provided to Yellowhammer by a confidential source, who shared the indisputable evidence on condition of anonymity.
“While church discipline is a church family matter, both Governor Robert Bentley and Mrs. Rebekah Mason are no longer members of First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa. I continue to pray for each of them,” Senior Pastor Gil McKee told Christian News Network on Friday.
Great news: A study published Wednesday suggests that the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is larger than Mexico, might begin disintegrating much earlier than expected, possibly raising the sea level across the entire ocean as much as three feet by 2100. (Levels in other areas might rise twice as much.)
This is alarming not just on its face but because this model offers a far more catastrophic understanding of climate change’s imminent effects than previously anticipated. The New York Times reports:
That is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst-case scenario by a United Nations panel just three years ago, and so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.
The situation would grow far worse beyond 2100, the researchers found, with the rise of the sea exceeding a pace of a foot per decade by the middle of the 22nd century. Scientists had documented such rates of increase in the geologic past, when far larger ice sheets were collapsing, but most of them had long assumed it would be impossible to reach rates so extreme with the smaller ice sheets of today.
If the results are anywhere near correct, and if emissions continue at a high level through the rest of this century, the long-term effect would likely be to drown the world’s coastlines, including many of its great cities.
New York City is nearly 400 years old; in the worst-case scenario conjured by the research, its chances of surviving another 400 years in anything like its present form would appear to be remote. Miami, New Orleans, London, Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia, are all near sea level and just as vulnerable as New York, or more so.
“We are not saying this is definitely going to happen,” said Pennsylvania State’s David Pollard, one of the paper’s co-authors. “But I think we are pointing out that there’s a danger, and it should receive a lot more attention.” Haha. Great.
Rapp laid the blame on those harassing her, saying that the people attacking her for months online had been hounding Nintendo to get her fired, as we reported earlier this month.
She’s been a target at least since last fall, receiving so much online venom that she published a round-up. People had been calling her “cancerous” and a “feminazi face piercings bitch.” They dug through her online wish-lists to shame her, seeking anything to ruin her rep.
Rapp had been on the bad end of cannon shots in gaming’s culture war for many months. She was labelled a social justice warrior and blamed for what appeared to be Nintendo’s efforts to tone down sexualized elements in Western versions of games Nintendo had already published in Japan.
For years, she had worked within Nintendo’s Treehouse division, which directly translated the company’s Japanese games, but she didn’t work in translation or localization. She was part of marketing. That didn’t spare her.
The Japanese gaming giant has faced increased scrutiny late last year when a number of recent Nintendo games, including Xenoblade Chronicles X and Fire Emblem Fates, had been altered during the localization process. These content edits largely centered on the sexualization of young girls and appeared to be altered out of an assumption by Nintendo that Western audiences would be less tolerant of teenagers being presented as sex objects.
Nintendo never did much to explain why it was making these changes, and critics looked for a boogeyman, finding one in Rapp who had a long Twitter history of supporting feminist issues (and an equally long one of seeming to be a huge Nintendo fan long before she worked for the company).
Among the changes Nintendo made in their games for America was the removal of an option to change a female character’s breast size. “The reality is, I actually had no involvement with localized content changes of any kind,” Rapp said today, as she’d told us in December. “Come on, I *wanted* the XCX [Xenoblade Chronicles X] boob slider!”
Rapp regularly discussed her harassment on Twitter and seemed to be managing her way through it, but, when Fire Emblem Fates was released in February with a flirtatious face-touching mini-game removed, things took another turn. Someone found a 2011 college essay of hers, in which Rapp explored Japan’s relationship with child porn laws and, ironically, seemed to fall more in line with a Japanese cultural viewpoint about the sexualization of teens. It was a complicated, messy essay that often argued for Japan to keep its cultural values intact—the very thing many of her harassers were supposedly arguing for—but was spun by some as defending pedophilia.
The idea that Rapp was pro-pedophile became the new line of attack, and an anti-sex trafficking group was even convinced to condemn Rapp. The attacks pushed the idea that kid-friendly Nintendo shouldn’t stand by her.
“Over the last few wks [weeks], I’ve had to talk safety measures w/my family - including talks w/police to warn them of possible suspicious activity,” she said. “Throughout this, GG has been digging up all kinds of things about my personal life and contacting Nintendo about them.”
Rapp specifically mentioned GamerGate today as being agents of her harassment, but it was never clear whether one particular group was after her. My reporting suggested some people had taken tactics used by harassers during GamerGate and applied them here.
Image Credit: Jim Cooke
A commenter on the Neo Nazi and white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, for example, published an extensive list of contact information for different Nintendo executives, encouraging people to report Rapp and ask for her firing.
It might have worked.
Beyond saying she’s been “terminated,” Rapp couldn’t (or wouldn’t) say much more.
“Obviously this is a lot to sift through and some of it’s highly confidential, so apologies that I can’t go into tons of details,” she said on Twitter. She did not respond to a request to comment.
And despite what happened, she was still thankful for her time at Nintendo.
“I do want to also say that I had some truly incredible coworkers at Nintendo,” she said, “and I’d love it if you continued to support them.”
We don’t know the full details of what happened, or what the conversations were like between Rapp and Nintendo. It’s possible that Nintendo truly was uncomfortable with Rapp’s college essay, despite it being publicly linked on her Linkedin page, and decided to part ways with her.
But we do know this: Nintendo was publicly silent while one of their employees was harassed and smeared online over something she did not do. That’s a fact. It’s not in dispute. Nintendo watched Rapp become the center of a witch hunt and did nothing publicly to defend her. Despite my requests for comment, the company said nothing. As it turns out, maybe that silence said everything.
The response to Rapp’s firing has been swift, vocal, and mostly negative, even in places normally hostile to outspoken individuals like Rapp. “Nintendo is in the wrong for firing her,” said a poster on the GG-friendly subreddit Kotaku in Action. “Good job guys you fired a person who literally did nothing wrong,” said another on 4chan. (Other posters in both threads celebrated Rapp’s firing, of course.) The Nintendo of America Twitter feed is being deluged with people protesting and condemning the decision, and one indie developer even says he cancelled a game planned for Wii U.
Whether any of this prompts Nintendo to respond is unclear. For now, the silence continues.
For starters, the high-end HF3520 is down to $104, which is within a few bucks of the best price we’ve ever seen. The HF3520 features five different wake-up sounds, an FM radio, the ability to set two different alarms, and a color-shifting light that accurately mimics a sunrise.
Update: Amazon has sold out of both models, but a third party seller has the HF3505 available for a similar price right now.
If you don’t want to spend quite that much, the HF3505 is also marked down to $65. While it lacks its big brother’s color-shifting light and a few wake-up sounds, it does still include a radio, and its yellow light will still get your body ready for the morning. I have the similar HF3500, and I don’t know how I’d function without it.
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In America, we have created a system in which most workers receive necessary benefits like health insurance through their employers. That system is falling apart, and we should all be alarmed.
The fabled “gig economy,” which supporters (who are usually people who are already wealthy, rather than active participants in the gig economy) envision as a society in which most people are free agents, freelancers, free to work for many different places, all enabled by technology, is becoming a reality. Not just in trend stories about teachers who are paid so little they have to drive for Uber on the side, but in cold hard statistics about the nature of our entire work force. A new study out from Princeton economists shows the enormous growth in the part-time workforce over the past decade. Neil Irwin reports:
Most remarkably, the number of Americans using these alternate [temporary or on-call] work arrangements rose 9.4 million from 2005 to 2015. That was greater than the rise in overall employment, meaning there was a small net decline in the number of workers with conventional jobs...
The labor economists Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton found that the percentage of workers in “alternative work arrangements” — including working for temporary help agencies, as independent contractors, for contract firms or on-call — was 15.8 percent in the fall of 2015, up from 10.1 percent a decade earlier. (Only 0.5 percent of all workers did so through “online intermediaries,” and most of those appear to have been Uber drivers.)
That’s more than a 50% increase in the past decade. This is a bona fide economic trend. Employers, of course, are generally happy to have fewer full-time employees, because it enables them to lower costs. For workers though, this trend can lead to disaster. If we allow companies to increasingly push employees into part-time status, we have to strengthen our nation’s public social safety net correspondingly to replace the things that are being lost with the loss of full-time employment. That means a strong public health care system, a strong Social Security system, and widely available social services for all.
Otherwise, you’re not just pushing workers off the books. You’re pushing them off a cliff.
Chris Christie, who acted wickedly in a past life and must now mortify himself as Donald Trump’s personal jester, has debased himself once more, having been seen inexplicably pouring a bag of M&Ms into a box of M&Ms. Instead of shrugging off this scandal on account of being A) an adult, B) a U.S. governor, or C) a man with self-respect, he called into a New Jersey talk radio show.
Explaining why you might combine two different containers of M&Ms candies is infinitely more embarrassing than being caught in the act of combining to different containers of M&Ms.
Host: Why would you go bag-to-box? Just eat ‘em out of the bag!
Christie: You know why? Because it’s easier to hold the box than to hold the bag.
Host: So you’re saying a bag of M&Ms is in an M&M bag inside a box of M&Ms? Got it, that’s an interesting maneuver.
Host: So it was not to get a bag of mms into... it was jsut transferring the mms from a soft paper into a box?
Christie: You get the box, you ope the box, there’s a bag inside the box, why they do it that way I have no idea, but you open the up the bag, you pour the bag into the box so it’s easier to hold.
Host: Why not just sell it in the box?
Christie: Listen, I run New Jersey, not M&M Mars. I have no idea.
Host: But M&M Mars is in New Jersey.
Christie: It is, of course it is, and it’s a wonderful corporate citizen.
Host: Shut ‘em down!
Christie: We love ‘em. The 75th anniversary of M&Ms, we’re thrilled.
[...]
Christie: Even if i was bag-to-bag, how that’s a story, I have no idea.
Left unexplained is why a box is “easier” to hold than a bag, or how Chris Christie can look at himself in a mirror without sobbing.
