Florida State has started a mandatory leadership class for freshman athletes, and it includes discussion about rape. And the person serving as the guest instructor for that class, the Tampa Bay Times reported Friday, is FSU Police Chief David Perry. You might remember him as the guy who was accused of giving his university and Winston an 11-month head start on the sexual assault allegations, before prosecutors officially got the file from police.
Perry’s department did not conduct the Winston investigation, but he was involved. From Kinsman’s lawsuit (Baker refers to Times reporter Matt Baker, who was checking with police on a tip that Winston was under investigation):
Instead of sending the reports to Baker, the Tallahassee Police instructed its records chief, Michael Courtemanche (“Courtemanche”), to send the records to FSU—specifically to FSU Police Chief Perry—despite the absence of any law enforcement purpose for doing so.
Chief Perry received the Winston reports with an email about Baker at 3:41 p.m. on Friday, November 8, 2013. Chief Perry asked Courtemanche for Baker’s background.
At 8:53 p.m. that day, Chief Perry forwarded the investigation reports and information about Baker to Bonasorte.
The next morning, Saturday, November 9, 2013, more emails were sent from the Tallahassee Police to FSU Police Chief Perry and forwarded to Bonasorte in the FSU Athletics Department. Bonasorte asked his Sports Information Director to research Baker’s background.
At 11:34 a.m. that Saturday, Bonasorte emailed Chief Perry “I will talk to Jimbo,” referring to head FSU football coach James “Jimbo” Fisher.
Shortly thereafter, those same police reports provided to Bonasorte were provided to Winston’s criminal defense lawyer, Jansen.
Jansen used his head-start on the State Attorney’s Office to coordinate Winston’s teammates – Casher and Darby – as eye witnesses before prosecutors even learned there was an investigation.
... Only after the FSU Police, FSU Athletics Department, FSU Administration, and Jansen had received their copies of the police reports did Tallahassee Police Sgt. Joanna Baldwin authorize the release of the Winston file to the State Attorney’s Office, which occurred at 3:30 p.m. on November 12, 2013.
[Ashton] said under oath that Perry called the dean of students’ office angrily after learning that Winston was being investigated by the school in a code of conduct complaint.
He was upset, she said, that Kinsman was told another student had accused Winston of assault, information that led Kinsman to move forward with her complaint.
After Perry contacted the dean, the school stopped pursuing the case against Winston, and on Nov. 12, 2013, the dean emailed Perry to let him know.
The next day, Nov. 13, Perry joked in an email about designing a new university police badge: “Cool—I really want to work on a National Championship Police Badge!!”
So what did Perry tell FSU athletes in his lecture about rape and sexual assault? Through a spokesman, he declined the Times’s request to watch the class. When the newspaper filed a public records request for any course material from that day, all they got were items on “social media use and financial literacy.”
Perry later told the newspaper that he spoke off the cuff for 45 minutes, without notes or handouts or worksheets, about “responsibility.” He gave examples like reminding them that women have the right to say no and they have to respect that; telling them that “alcohol is not an excuse”; and advice on what to do if they saw a woman hitting someone.
He said he advised the athletes to be careful not to leave bruises on a woman, lest they be charged with assault.
“Say a 6-foot-5 athlete is now being hit by his girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, who’s crazy and who’s harassing him, and she won’t stop. What would you do?” Perry said he posed to the room.
“I’d probably grab her and hold her,” one of the athletes responded.
“I told him, ‘You’re a big guy. If you hold her and you have to use force, you’re likely to what?’ He said, ‘You’re right, I’d likely leave marks and bruises.’”
As for what, if anything, he said about the Jameis Winston case, the Times story notes that “Perry became angry this week when asked about his credentials to teach the class. He was furious at the mention of Winston.”
It’s well known that police officers who commit violent crimes while on the job are rarely convicted, charged, or even disciplined by their own department. Sometimes one will get a slap on the wrist for a less serious infringement.
On Monday, the New York Daily Newsreported that the NYPD disciplined one of its own, officer Daniel Pantaleo, for “a bogus stop, question and frisk.”
Pantaleo was docked two vacation days for the infraction.
You may remember Pantaleo as the cop whom citizen-journalist Ramsey Orta caught on camera in July 2014 placing Eric Garner in a chokehold, killing him. Garner, who was asthmatic, can be heard on the tape repeatedly pleading with the officers that he can’t breath, to no response. Garner had initially been stopped in Staten Island on suspicions that he was selling loose cigarettes.
The powerful, visual evidence of Garner’s cruel treatment at the hands of the NYPD inspired protests nationwide.
Federal prosecutors may still choose to open a civil rights case against Pantaleo.
The interaction for which Pantaleo was actually disciplined took place in June 2012, two years before the death of Eric Garner.
Typically, the NYPD posts its decisions to penalize officers for the media to review within several weeks of the case being adjudicated. But in this instance, the Daily News reports, the NYPD waited almost a year to do so. It’s not clear why.
The NYPD told the Daily News that Pantaleo was guilty of conducting an unnecessary frisk, but that the stop itself was justified.
This week, California and New York passed landmark bills that would increase the states’ minimum wages to $15 an hour. Hillary Clinton joined New York governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday to celebrate the win—despite advocating for only a $12 minimum wage since at least October.
Speaking to the bill’s supporters, Clinton said, “It’s a result of what is best about New York and what is best about America. And I know that it’s going to sweep our country.” This is curious, considering the fact that Clinton previously refused to endorse a national minimum wage of $15, something the Democratic party leadership did in August. Last summer, she told Buzzfeed:
I think part of the reason that the Congress and very strong Democratic supporters of increasing the minimum wage are trying to debate and determine what’s the national floor is because there are different economic environments. And what you can do in L.A. or in New York may not work in other places.
More curious still is the former Secretary of State’s work on minimum wages in other countries. In 2009, Haiti wanted to increase the minimum wages at its textile factories to $5 per day. After American manufacturers protested, the State Department intervened, as The Nationpoints out:
Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”
The unemployed and underpaid masses are precisely who a $15 minimum wage would help and, at least today, it looks like Hillary Clinton is finally on their side.
Nothing is more antithetical to the aesthetic of a French new wave film than a packet of cigarettes labeled with grotesque images of rotting body parts. Except, perhaps, a pack of cigarettes with no branding on it at all.
The French Health Ministry announced at the end of March that smoke shops throughout France will have to vend cigarettes in plain packaging, free of logos. It’s a lot to ask of the country that gave us Gauloises, Gitanes, and a rich cinematic history of chain smokers with flawless skin.
Cigarette vendors must make the switch by the end of this year, in accordance with a law passed at the end of 2015.
According to the World Health Organization, 32 percent of men and 26 percent of women in France smoke, giving the country among the highest rates of smoking in Europe.
Like many countries that have tried to regulate their cigarette packaging, France is getting legal pushback from tobacco companies. Japan Tobacco International—which owns Camel and Winston, among others—is contesting the law in court.
The restrictions in France are but one facet of the mounting international criticism of tobacco companies. Countries have been more willing as of late to take substantial action, forcing tobacco companies to adopt creative advertising strategies. In an article published Monday on The Verge about the new French laws, Amar Toor writes,
“Tobacco companies have faced increasingly tight restrictions on branding in recent decades, with some or all forms of advertising banned in many countries. Their logos have also had to compete with ever-larger health warnings on cigarette packs, forcing some to develop more creative packaging. Benson and Hedges has created a side-opening pack that has allowed it to minimize the health warnings, while brands like Vogue have long used slim “lipstick” packs to the same effect.”’
And tobacco companies should be scared—studies show that logo-free cigarette packaging lowers smoking rates, mostly by discouraging non-smokers from taking up the habit.
In spite of the research, France is only the second country to mandate neutral cigarette packaging. Making it not quite as chic as Australia.
As international conflict reaches dizzying levels of violence and complexity, countries around the world are spending an unprecedented amount on their militaries.
Global military spending rose to $1.7 trillion in 2015, the first worldwide increase since 2011, the Associated Press reports. The United States, of course, spent the most on defense—$596 billion, to be exact. (That’s nearly three times the amount paid by the next biggest spender, China.)
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which conducted the study, attributes the risings costs to several global conflicts including the Saudi-led war in Yemen, battles against the Islamic state, and regional fears about Iran.
When you think of protests in the United States, you probably imagine militarized cops in SWAT gear, pepper spray, shootings, and billy club beatdowns. In Iceland, they’re hurling yogurt.
Thousands of protestors staked out Iceland’s Parliament building today, after the country’s Prime Minister’s shady ties were revealed in yesterday’s Panama Papers leak. In other words: yogurt time.
According to Iceland Monitor, at least one protestor “approached the main building of the Icelandic Parliament (‘Alþingi’) and threw a number of tubs of Iceland’s famous skyr at the walls and windows.
The building has since been cleaned, but the flavor of the offending yogurt remains unknown.
Now, I can’t claim to have ever tasted skyr, but I have had the equally Icelandic siggi’s. That said, I’m confident in stating that Icelandic yogurt as a whole is disgusting. It’s thick, sour, and not at all unlike what I imagine eating a large tub of chilled Gyrfalcon feces might be like, as Google tells me that the Gyrfalcon is Iceland’s national bird.
In which case, there is no patriotic protest more ideal or damaging than yogurt hurling. A hearty congratulations to Iceland and its terrible yogurt.
You can see some more photos of the protest below.
In March, thousands of voters in Arizona reported waiting in hours-long lines to cast their vote in the state’s Democratic primary. Over 100,000 people have signed a petition demanding a revote in the state and now, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has officially opened an investigation to uncover what exactly happened during last month’s primary.
In a letter to the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, the Justice Department said it was looking to find out if the county followed federal elections law during the March 22nd primary. Many voters reported still being in line as the media announced that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the primary.
Those results were formally certified on Monday, the Associated Press reports, and according to the Arizona secretary of state, anyone wishing to challenge now has five days to file in court.
According to Buzzfeed, Maricopa County in Arizona is home to 1 million eligible voters for whom just 60 polling locations were available on the day of the primary. In 2012, there were 200 such locations.
County Recorder Helen Purcell told the Arizona Republic, “We made some horrendous mistakes, and I feel horrible about that.”
What do heads of state, FIFA execs, billionaires, celebrities, and hundreds of their rich and powerful friends have in common? Quite a few things, I’d wager, but here’s something specific: They’ve all been named in the “Panama Papers,” the trove of 11.5 million records that give insight into how the rich and powerful hide their money abroad.
On Sunday, a consortium of newspapers broke the news about the documents and records, apparently leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in setting up offshore shell companies for its clients.
How it all happened:
The German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained the documents, which reportedly include e-mails, PDFs, photos, and “excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database,” dating from the 1970s up to this spring.
The paper says the encrypted files came from an “anonymous source,” who apparently “wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return, apart from a few security measures” for what came out to 2.6 terabytes of data: the biggest leak of this kind of all time.
In a feat of impressive collaboration, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), 100 news outlets publishing in 25 languages analyzed the records for a year before publication.
What’s in the documents:
The documents analyzed so far largely relate to off-shore bank accounts established by Mossack Fonseca on behalf of its clients, which are said to include politicians, celebrities, a ton of very wealthy people, and quite a few criminals—both alleged and convicted.
There’s nothing illegal, per se, about opening a shell company or using bearer bonds, and there are plenty of legitimate business reasons to do so. But their use can also suggest the owner is trying to hide funds or disguise the terms of a transaction like a divorce or real estate acquisition.
And indeed, that appears to be the case for a large number of Mossack Fonseca’s clients. ReportsSüddeutsche Zeitung:
Clients can buy an anonymous company for as little as USD 1,000. However, at this price it is just an empty shell. For an extra fee, Mossack Fonseca provides a sham director and, if desired, conceals the company’s true shareholder. The result is an offshore company whose true purpose and ownership structure is indecipherable from the outside. Mossack Fonseca has founded, sold, and managed thousands of companies. The documents provide a detailed view of how Mossack Fonseca routinely accepts to engage in business activities that potentially violate sanctions, in addition to aiding and abetting tax evasion and money laundering.
According to the ICIJ, some of the documents show that the banks, law firms and middlemen involved “often failed to follow legal requirements that they make sure their clients are not involved in criminal enterprises, tax dodging or political corruption.” Other documents examined by the ICIJ reportedly show offshore middlemen concealed suspect transactions.
According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, concealing the client’s identity constituted the primary goal in “the vast majority” of cases. Which makes sense—that’s why they go to Mossack Fonseca, which, according to a 2015 audit, knew the true owners of just 204 of 14,086 companies it had incorporated in the Seychelles. According to the ICIJ, the company once went so far as to remove paper records from its Nevada offices to protect its clients from discovery.
The end result? A lot of money no one knows about.
The firm is denying everything: Mossack Fonseca co-founder Ramon Fonseca Mora tells CNN the reports are false and claims several of the parties named in the leak “are not and have never been clients of Mossack Fonseca.”
“Our services are regulated on multiple levels, often by overlapping agencies, and we have a strong compliance record,” the firm said.
“In addition, we have always complied with international protocols” to assure “that the companies we incorporate are not being used for tax evasion, money laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes,” it added.
Oh, and this meme:
Only a small percentage of the outlets given access to the documents were American. Plus some reports indicate major papers like the New York Times were intentionally left out of the loop.
This is largely a European issue anyway: Despite indications that further revelations may implicate Americans, American corporate law makes it largely unnecessary for citizens to open shell companies abroad. According to Fusion, only 200 or so companies were registered to Americans.
Who’s been implicated, so far:
It’s not clear that the ton of bold-faced, high-profile names reported as of today—at least 12 current or former heads of state, plus hundreds of their wealthy friends, family, and countrymen—have done anything illegal. But they also include at least 33 individuals and companies blacklisted by the U.S. because of their business dealings with entities like Hezbollah, North Korea, and Iran. According to the ICIJ, one of those companies has been accused of giving the Syrian government fuel to use to bomb and kill its own citizens.
It’s going to take a while to parse out who owns what and whether those transactions were legal or illegal, and more names are expected to be made public in the weeks to come. According to the ICIJ, the still-largely-anonymous client list contains a bevy of prominent and powerful people that include “politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars.”
All per the ICIJ, here’s who we know about so far:
Vladmir Putin
At least two of Putin’s closest friends are named in the documents, which describe what appears to be a billion-dollar money laundering ring.
Those two men are said to be concert cellist Sergei Roldugin, a childhood friend of Putin’s and godfather to Putin’s daughter, and Yuri V. Kovalchuk, the majority shareholder of Bank Rossiya, referred to by some as a “cashier” for Russian officials.
The Papers indicate Mossack Fonseca created a “complex, deliberately convoluted network of offshore companies” for the men to funnel close to two billion dollars through. Documents also show Roldugin’s involvement with other companies—including the advertising firm founded by Mikhail Lesin—who was found beaten to death in a Washington D.C. hotel.
Kovalchuk specifically denied the allegations to the New York Times, saying, “I’ve got an apartment, a car and a dacha... I don’t have millions.”
The Kremlin has so far, and will undoubtedly continue to, dismiss the papers as a smear campaign. Via CNN:
The Kremlin spokesman said it was clear the main target of the reports was Mr Putin, as well as Russia’s political stability ahead of parliamentary elections.
Dmitry Peskov dismissed the investigation as insinuation and speculation, and suggested many of the team of journalists behind it were actually former US state department and CIA officials.
According to the ICIJ, documents also show Putin associates “disguised payments, backdated documents and gained hidden influence within the country’s media and automotive industries.”
Petro O. Poroshenko
Documents in the trove also indicate Petro O. Poroshenko, the reformer president of Ukraine since 2014, lied about divesting his assets before the election.
Mr. Poroshenko, a tycoon with assets in television and a chocolatier before his entrance into politics, pledged to divest himself of his holdings but instead moved the assets into an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands, according to the consortium’s reporting. It said that Mr. Poroshenko, who has received political support from the United States, had not disclosed the arrangement.
His financial advisors tell the ICIJ he did not disclose the firm because it had no assets. Even so, evidence indicates he was “scrambling” to find a copy of his utility bill for the paperwork as Russia began its bloody invasion of the country in 2014.
Icelandic Prime Minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugson
The documents indicate Iceland’s Prime Minister, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugson, bought an offshore company called Wintris with his wife in 2007 which held millions of dollars in Icelandic bank bonds while the country was in a financial crisis. Just a day before he would have had to declare his 50% interest as a prerequisite of entering parliament, he sold it to his wife—for the price of $1.
The company held bonds originally worth millions of dollars in three giant Icelandic banks that failed during the 2008 global financial crash, making it a creditor in their bankruptcies. Gunnlaugsson’s government negotiated a deal with creditors last year without disclosing his family’s financial stake in the outcome.
He walked out of an interview yesterday when someone brought it up.
Documents show Juan Pedro Damiani, a member of the FIFA ethics committee, had business dealings with at least three men implicated in the FIFA scandal last summer. FIFA’s ethics panel has since launched an investigation.
Lionel Messi
The papers show the soccer player—who is currently under investigation for tax evasion in Spain—owns at least one Panama company called Mega Star Enterprises Inc.
Marianna Olszewski
Finally—an American.
One wealthy client, US millionaire and life coach Marianna Olszewski, was offered fake ownership records to hide money from the authorities. This is in direct breach of international regulations designed to stop money-laundering and tax evasion.
An email from a Mossack executive to Ms Olszewski in January 2009 explains how she could deceive the bank: “We may use a natural person who will act as the beneficial owner… and therefore his name will be disclosed to the bank. Since this is a very sensitive matter, fees are quite high.”
Jackie Chan
Documents show Jackie Chan owns at least six companies established by the firm.
Hosni Mubarak
Documents show Mossack Fonseca was fined $37,500 for money laundering after it set up a company for Mubarak’s son but “failed to identify the connection” even after the former Egyptian president and his son were both charged with corruption.
At the time, an internal review reportedly concluded, “our risk assessment formula is seriously flawed.”
Muammar Gaddafi
Details surrounding Gaddafi’s involvement are scant, but the BBC reports family members or associates held secret offshore accounts created by Mossack Fonseca.
President Bashar al-Assad
Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of al-Assad—described by the U.S. as a “poster boy for corruption”—was implicated in the papers, the Guardian reports, and while al-Assad is not specifically mentioned, the documents reveal “any foreign company seeking to do business in Syria had to be cleared by Rami.”
According to the Guardian’s analysis, Mossack Fonseca helped the Makhlouf family register its Syrian companies in the British Virgin Islands, and kept him as a client despite sanctions imposed against him by the United States and his involvement in the Syrian civil war.
The documents show, however, that the Panamanian firm continued to work with the Makhloufs, and in January 2011 it rejected the advice of its own compliance team to cut ties with the family as the crisis in Syria began to unfold.
Documents show a Mossack Fonseca compliance officer wrote: “I believe if an individual is found on a sanction list then this is a serious red flag and we should make every effort to disassociate ourselves from them.”
Though Mossack Fonseca was not legally bound to comply with US sanctions, it had an obligation to react to EU measures imposed in May 2011 and extended to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) in June of that year. It took until September 2011 before the partners finally agreed to resign from Makhlouf’s companies.
Mauricio Macri
Argentina’s current president was reportedly a director and vice president of an offshore company managed by Mossack Fonseca at the same time he served as mayor of Buenos Aires. Documents appear to show he did not disclose these assets. A spokesperson tells the ICIJ he never personally owned shares of the firm.
Nawaz Sharif
Documents show the firm established companies that hid real estate holdings of Sharif’s children.
Ilham Aliyev
The firm established Panamanian foundations and shell companies for the family of Azerbaijan’s president to hide their ownership in gold mines and London real estate.
Xi Jinping
The family of Chinese president Xi Jinping—who rails against the “armies of corruption”—obtained offshore companies through Mossack Fonseca. The documents also indicate offshore holdings of the families of at least seven other members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee.
David Cameron
According to the Guardian, Cameron is now facing scrutiny over an offshore fund established by his late father, Ian, which avoided ever paying taxes in the UK. Cameron denies receiving any benefits from the offshore account.
“In terms of my own financial affairs, I own no shares. I have a salary as prime minister and I have some savings, which I get some interest from and I have a house, which we used to live in, which we now let out while we are living in Downing Street and that’s all I have.”
That’s it?
This list is sure to grow. We’ll keep you updated as it does.
A new Gallup poll of US college students is out, commissioned purely with the intent of catching college kids in some sort of stupid beliefs and then allowing media remoras such as ourselves to mercilessly mock them for it, because deep down we are jealous of the fact that they still get “spring break.” The good news, I guess, is that this poll does not contain any beliefs so insane that you would be surprised that college students held them. But on the topic of freedom of the press, their support is... shall we say... shaky. Nearly half of those surveyed said that the following things are legitimate reasons for students to prevent the press from covering an on-campus protest:
The people at the protest or public gathering believe reporters will be biased (49%); the people at the protest say they have a right to be left alone (48%); and the people at the protest want to tell their own story on the Internet and social media (44%).
No.
Later on we find that “The majority of college students, 59%, have little or no trust in the press to report the news accurately and fairly.” Okay—fuck you too. Oh, wait... 20% of college students say that if they’re looking for good information about the world, they “would go to newer, digital-only news sources such as BuzzFeed, Mic or Huffington Post.” And Gawker? Was Gawker included in this list? No? Okay, fuck you.
[Do you think we want to cover your stupid protests? No. Our editor is making us do this. We want to cover high-priced concerts and sporting events. Okay? We’re not getting rich here: AP]
Photo: Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson’s Facebook page.
Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson will step down today in the wake of revelations in the “Panama Papers” linking him and his wife to an offshore company that may have presented a conflict of interest.
In 2004, the nation of Iceland voted Gunnlaugsson, a man who at one point maintained a diet exclusively of Icelandic foods, its third-sexiest man. Our belated congratulations to former Prime Minister Gunnlaugsson.
Update – 8:35 pm
In an email to foreign journalists sent on Tuesday evening, The Intercept reports, the Icelandic government’s press secretary, Sigurður Már Jónsson, wrote that Gunnlaugsson “has not resigned,” but rather “suggested” that the fisheries minister, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannesson, “take over the office of Prime Minister for an unspecified amount of time.”
We know that Donald Trump voters don’t care about this stuff, but we feel compelled to briefly point out the fact that Donald Trump’s big debt reduction plan for our country is complete fiction that will not come true and also he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
In his recent interview with the Washington Post, Trump had a few things to say about the old GLOBAL ECONOMY. Perhaps the most meaningful thing he said (besides that this is a “terrible time to invest” in the stock market, and please remember that eight years from now) was this:
DONALD TRUMP: We’ve got to get rid of — I talked about bubble. We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.
WaPo: How long would that take?
DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers . . . .
WaPo: What’s fairly quickly?
DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years. And I’ll tell you why.
WaPo: Would you ever be open to tax increases as part of that, to solve the problem?
DT: I don’t think I’ll need to. The power is trade. Our deals are so bad.
Donald Trump says that he can “get rid of” $19 trillion in debt in a period of eight years, using the magical “power of trade.” Can he? Yes—the vast majority of his supporters have no idea what is and is not true, so he can just say he did it, and then it might as well be done.
If you require a more technical answer, you may be interested in this Marketplace story, in which Trump’s debt plan was put to several prominent, respected economic experts. They called it, among other things, “nuts,” “absurd,” “crazy,” and “mathematically impossible.” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler noted that even if Trump “eliminated every government function except for paying out Social Security and Medicare bills, it wouldn’t get him very far, he’d still have $16 trillion worth of debt to eliminate.”
In putting forth pure fantasy as economic policy, Trump is in good company in the Republican Party. Still, it is incumbent upon us to note that Donald Trump is full of shit and the things he says are demonstrably lies. This will not stop his supporters from supporting him, because, well.
It’s been a banner week for Mississippi, where white people are currently celebrating the Confederacy and, as of today, all business owners—public and private—can refuse service to gay people by claiming it’s against their religion.
Mississippi governor Phil Bryant—the brilliant mind that brought his constituents a Confederacy Heritage Month proclamation that did not once mention slavery—signed Mississippi House Bill 1523, or the “Religious Liberties Accommodations Act,” into law today, ensuring Mississippians can immediately begin to discriminate against gay, transgendered, and even unmarried cohabitating people without legal consequence.
Via CBS, the bill’s language seeks to protect the state’s most closed-minded bigots from having to to treat all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people as people.
The measure’s stated intention is to protect those who believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman, that sexual relations should only take place inside such marriages, and that male and female genders are unchangeable.
Bryant, bless his heart, says on Twitter the bill was designed in the “most targeted manner to prevent government interference in the lives of the people from which all the power to the state is derived,” (as long as they’re not gay.)
A woman who told a Rolling Stone reporter she’d been gang raped at a frat party at the University of Virginia, only to see the story fall apart after publication, will be compelled to testify this week as part of a lawsuit filed against the magazine.
The 2014 article, “A Rape on Campus” was authored by the award-winning freelance journalist Sabrina Erdely and appeared in the November 19 issue of Rolling Stone. At first glance, it appeared to document the horrifying story of a student who was gang raped on campus by a group of fraternity brothers who were never brought to justice. But the story quickly fell apart.
The woman, who was identified in the article only by the name “Jackie,” has so far resisted publicly speaking about the allegations, which were later discredited by her friends, who say they think she made the whole thing up to get attention from a student she had a crush on. Police say they found no evidence the attack ever occurred, and a 12,000-word Columbia School of Journalism report revealed editorial mistakes so sweeping that the magazine was forced to issue a retraction.
Now, thanks to a lawsuit filed by Nicole Eramo, a University of Virginia administrator mentioned in the article, “Jackie” will have to testify, under oath, in a deposition Thursday. Her lawyers originally sought to exclude her from testifying, arguing it would be too traumatic for her to revisit the attack. But her testimony, at least for now, will stay private—the judge on the case reportedly ordered all records and transcripts sealed.
When people think of someone with an “addictive personality,” the image typically isn’t a pretty one. “When is an addict lying?” goes a joke told by addiction counselors: the snide answer is “when his lips are moving.” Media portrayals of addiction tend to depict people with addictions as “fiends” or “demons” whose debauchery is driven by a ravenous hedonism, not a human or understandable search for safety and comfort. Consequently, the “addictive personality” is seen as a bad one: weak, unreliable, selfish, and out of control.
The temperament from which addiction springs is also seen as defective, unable to resist temptation. Even when we laugh about having an addictive personality it’s usually to justify an indulgence or to signal our guilt about pleasure, even if only ironically.
However, the idea that people with addiction are all alike in these extremely negative ways is inaccurate— based more on the racist history of American drug policy and the criminalization of certain drugs than it is on science. Although addiction was originally framed by both Alcoholics Anonymous and psychiatry as a form of antisocial personality or “character” disorder, research did not confirm this idea. Despite decades of attempts, no single addictive personality common to everyone with addictions has ever been found.
If you have come to believe that you yourself or an addicted loved one, by nature of having addiction, has a defective or selfish personality, you have been misled. As George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me when I interviewed him for Nature, “What we’re finding is that the addictive personality, if you will, is multifaceted,” says Koob. “It doesn’t really exist as an entity of its own.”
Basically, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. Research finds no universal character traits that are common to all addicted people. Only half have more than one addiction (not including cigarettes)—and many can control their engagement with some addictive substances or activities, but not others. If there were an addictive personality, this shouldn’t be possible.
Some are shy; some are bold. Some are fundamentally kind and caring; some are cruel. Some tend toward honesty; others not so much. The whole range of human character can be found among people with addictions, despite the cruel stereotypes that are typically presented.
Only 18% of addicts, for example, have a personality disorder characterized by lying, stealing, lack of conscience, and manipulative antisocial behavior. This is more than four times the rate seen in typical people, but it still means that 82% of us don’t fit that particular caricature of addiction.
Although people with addictions or potential addicts cannot be identified by a specific collection of personality traits, however, it is often possible to tell quite early on which children are at high risk. Children who ultimately develop addictions tend to be outliers in a number of measurable ways. Yes, some stand out because they are antisocial and callous—but others stand out because they are overly moralistic and sensitive.
While those who are the most impulsive and eager to try new things are at highest risk, the odds of addiction are also elevated in those who are compulsive and fear novelty. It is extremes of personality and temperament—some of which are associated with talents, not deficits—that elevates risk. Giftedness and high IQ, for instance, are linked with higher rates of illegal drug use than having average intelligence.
Whether these extreme traits lead to addictions, other compulsive behaviors, developmental differences, mental illnesses, or some mixture depends not just on genetics, but also on the environment, people’s own reactions to it, and those of others to them. Addictions and other neurodevelopmental disorders rely not just on our actual experience but on how we interpret it and how our parents and friends respond to and label the way we behave. They develop in brains designed to change with experience—and that leaves us vulnerable to learning things that create damaging patterns, not just useful habits.
The impact of all these factors together can be seen most clearly in studies that follow participants from infancy into adulthood (which are rare because they take so long to conduct and are thus very expensive). In these types of data, some strong patterns emerge. One of the earliest and best known longitudinal studies related to drug use followed 101 children—mainly middle class, two-thirds white—raised in Berkeley in the 1970s.
Conducted by psychologists Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block, then at the University of California, the research was published in 1990 and its main finding generated much controversy. The authors discovered that the most mentally and psychologically healthy teens were not those who abstained entirely from alcohol and other drugs, but rather the kids who experimented with weed and drinking, but didn’t overdo it. In this study, occasional teen drinking and marijuana use was normal adolescent behavior. However, while it was common, it was typically not problematic.
Unsurprisingly the teens who became frequent users and drinkers had the problems you might expect like depression, anxiety, and delinquent behavior. Then again, many of the same psychiatric problems were also seen in the adolescents who rejected the idea of drinking and drugs entirely.
That’s probably because, in order to avoid any experimentation as a kid growing up around the Berkeley campus in the ’70s (when nearly two thirds of high school seniors nationally reported at least trying marijuana), you’d have to be either a loner with few friends or a person who was unusually fearful and/or resistant to peer pressure. Not using drugs may well have been a wise choice for these youth—but good decisions aren’t always made for healthy reasons.
And indeed, that’s exactly what the study found. The youth who abstained did not tend to do so because they rationally recognized the risks. Instead, they were overly anxious, uptight, and lacking in social skills; some may not have had to say no because they didn’t even get the chance to say yes. Similar data have been published on teen drinking as well. Moderate drinkers—not nondrinkers—are the most well adjusted, at least in countries where drinking is a social norm. The healthiest patterns are found in the middle of the curve, not at the extremes.
To understand how having these outlying traits increases risk for addiction, we have to look at how they affect development. Critically, in Shedler and Block’s data, the traits that marked both abstainers and heavy users could be seen long before drug use began. After all, the authors had started following these children in preschool. Once they knew how the participants behaved in adolescence, they could look back and see what early traits were linked to particular problems.
Longitudinal studies looking at addiction risk like Shedler and Block’s have found three major pathways to it that involve temperamental traits, all of which can be seen in nascent form in young children. The first, which is more common in males, involves impulsivity, boldness, and a desire for new experience; it can lead to addiction because it makes it hard for people to control their own behavior. Preschoolers who were more impulsive than others the same age tended to stay that way, putting them at risk.
The second path, which tends to be seen more in women, involves being sad, inhibited, and/or anxious. While these negative emotions can also deter experimentation, when they do not do so, people may find themselves on a “self-medicating” path to addiction, where drugs are used to cope with painful feelings. People in this group who were shy, withdrawn preschoolers tended to drink or take other drugs “to fit in” and then stuck with them.
Being bold and adventurous and being sad and cautious seem like opposite personality types. However, these two paths to addiction are actually not mutually exclusive. The third way involves having both kinds of traits, where people alternatively fear and desire novelty and behavior swings from being impulsive and rash to being compulsive, fear driven, and stuck in rigid patterns.
This is where some of the contradictions that have long confounded the study of addiction come into play—namely, some aspects seem precisely planned out, while others are obviously related to lack of restraint. My own story spirals around this paradoxical situation: I was driven enough to excel academically and fundamentally scared of change and of other people—yet I was also reckless enough to sell cocaine and shoot heroin.
If we look more closely, however, the paradoxes disappear. All three pathways really involve the same fundamental problem: a difficulty with self-regulation. This may appear predominantly as an inability to inhibit strong impulses, it may be largely an impairment in modulating negative emotions like anxiety, or it may have elements of both. In any case, difficulties with self-regulation lay the groundwork for learning addiction and for creating a condition that is hard to understand. The brain regions that allow self-regulation need experience and practice in order to develop. If that experience is aberrant or if those brain regions are wired unusually, they may not learn to work properly.
A problem with self-regulation, however, is not a personality disorder. If we want better ways to manage addiction, we have to recognize that the “addictive personality” is a harmful stereotype— not a useful concept to guide treatment or prevention.
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has a long list of enemies. Near the top is the Chicago Teachers Union, with which he’s feuded for his entire tenure as mayor. This past Friday, the union staged a one-day strike, closing schools across the city in order to draw attention to their latest round of negotiations with the city, which wants the teachers to accept cuts to pay, staffing, and budgets.
Emanuel, who has barely survived the backlash stemming from what most Chicagoans see as his office’s attempt to cover up the police murder of Laquan McDonald, was intimately involved in the most recent strike. Because schools across Chicago were forced to close, the city opened more than 100 “contingency sites” to care for children who couldn’t stay at home. Emanuel showed up at one location, according to the Chicago Tribune, telling attendant press, “I don’t think the kids should pay the price for a political message.”
But the many pressing issues facing the Windy City didn’t stop Emanuel from immediately jetting off to take in the best the Big Apple has to offer: “Hamilton,” the smash-hit Broadway musical. Above is a photo, taken by PhD student Brenden Beck, of Emanuel at Saturday’s 8 p.m. showing of the play that is changing lives.
Given that “Hamilton”has been acclaimed by good liberals everywhere, you have to imagine Emanuel enjoyed the performance. And perhaps he even could relate to the inspiring story of a politician who did not betray his morals, despite agonizing over how he will be remembered by history. Rahm Emanuel, who is probably the least-liked Chicago mayor in modern history, is, no matter the consequences, determined to be true to himself: an amoral corporatist stooge.
The New Republic, a 102-year-old American magazine of current events reporting and commentary, today wrote “fuck me daddy” to Donald J. Trump, the businessman and current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, on the social networking platform Twitter. Then they deleted it.
The magazine, recently purchased by publisher and political activist Win McCormack, had handed its Twitter account over to the poet Patricia Lockwood, who contributed a (very good) story on Trump to a recent issue.
Reached for comment, Lockwood said: “ehehehehe.”
The deleted tweet was the first ever Good Tweet by a Brand.
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. But now, we’re back sucking up all the articles Wikipedia doesn’t see fit to print, giving you the very best of what the site’s weirdest and worst. Enjoy.
Stump is the drinking game that Bob the Builder would play if he were a drunk. This is because, as this video can attest, Bob the Builder is likely a paranoid schizophrenic who, if he were drunk, would almost certainly turn on the inanimate objects that so readily plague his day with inadequate craftsmanship.
To play Stump, one needs a hammer, nails, beer, and of course, a stump. With the nails lightly jammed into the stump, the players stand behind their own respective nails, toss the hammer back and forth, and attempt to pound other players’ nails immediately upon catching the hammer. Whoever’s nail has been attacked then drinks an amount proportionate to the damage inflicted on their nail. If that doesn’t totally make sense, here is a video of some nice gentlemen playing Stump:
Best line:
The exact place of origin is vague, but evidence suggests it was likely invented somewhere in Bavaria, possibly hundreds of years ago.
I would love to know what hundreds-of-years-old evidence points to Bavaria as this game’s place of origin.
Why it got deleted:
Ostensibly because the game lacks any sort of notoriety, but more likely because these guys are insufferable:
Unknown Caller is a short horror film that is probably committing a fair number of copyright violations.
Best line:
Olivia is home alone for the evening when her friend Drew prank dials her to give her a little scare. Silly Drew. Then!
Unknowingly to Olivia, a hooded figure holding a baseball bat sneaks up behind her and enters her house. She receives another unknown call, and her suspicion is raised when the man on the other end said he wasn’t Drew, but rather the last person she’ll ever see alive. Paranoid and afraid, Olivia runs back into her house.
Several issues are immediately apparent here. First, why do Drew and the killer have exactly the same voice? It’s not just Olivia being an idiot; watch above and listen for yourself. Drew is the murderer. Mystery solved.
The larger issue, though, is that “her suspicion is raised when the man on the other end said he wasn’t Drew, but rather the last person she’ll ever see alive.” Her suspicion is “raised.” Someone explicitly tells Olivia that they are about to murder her, and she just starts to think that maybe something is awry. A declaration of intent to murder should be an immediate red flag.
I hate to say it, but Olivia deserves to die.
Why it got deleted:
Apparently, this film’s entry along with several others were all created by the “director” himself, which is explicitly against Wikipedia’s rules. Also, Olivia deserves to die.
Why it shouldn’t have been:
We should all be allowed to learn from Olivia’s mistakes.
Apparently, there used to be some other sort of content here, and Bangladesh Air Force Shaheen College Dhaka does, in fact, exist. However, an image of a beautiful green thumb alone apparently isn’t enough for the plant-hating editors over at Wikipedia.
Why it shouldn’t have been:
Deleting this page is racist against people with green thumbs.
The first non-cooperation movement was held in 1814 at Palna (Bihar). The officials ordered lashings and came down heavy on the people. When they felt that the people could not be tamed by physical force and they started the method of ‘divide and rule’. The government enhanced the salary of higher officials like dewan, etc., and asked them to show loyalty to the British government.
The author should be applauded for exercising unconventional narrative methods rather than rote compliance to such outdated rules as “grammar” or “general readability” or “facts.”
Mellables Iron is an Israeli “rock singer.” According to the author of the article who was almost certainly Mellabes himself, Mellabes has “worked with the biggest bands,artists [sic] in Israel.” Congratulations to Mellabes.
Best line:
The best line is not so much a line as it is this photo:
There is essentially no real information about Mellabes anywhere else on the internet, whether in Hebrew or otherwise—though he does somehow have several music videos. His songs are also terrible.
Oppzo is an online home improvement store operating from Silicon Valley, California. It was created in 2014. The business site has been proven reliable and safe.
The business site has been proven reliable and safe.
Using Oppzo’s logic, it’s advisable to go up to police officers at random and declare, “Hello, Officer. I have definitely not committed any murders today. Nothing to see here, and good day.” It’s so they know you’ve been proven reliable and safe.
Why it got deleted:
No one has ever heard of Oppzo before and likely never will.
Last month, Donald Trump fired the head of his data operation and replaced him with an underling with zero (0) years of work experience. Clearly, strategy is really starting to jell and morale is at a high for the Trump campaign, Corey Lewandowski—the campaign manager who was arrested for manhandling a female reporter—explained only semi-believably to Politico.
Trump has predicated the strength of his platform on his ability to hire “the best,” seems to rely on some combination of his imagination and his advisors to routinely fill in the oft-craterous gaps in his knowledge.
So one might be forgiven for assuming he had some grand plan in mind when he fired his data guy and promoted two employees in his stead: Witold Chrabaszcz, a data engineer “with little prior high-level political strategy experience,” and Ashton Adams, a 2015 college graduate.
(According to Adams’ LinkedIn, her previous job experience is comprised of one internship with the company Colgate Palmolive. No word on what clubs she belonged to, or how much dorm pride she had while attending the University of Arkansas at Fayettville, from which she graduated.)
Which is all to say, it doesn’t seem like the Trump campaign has much of a plan here. Reports Politico:
[Matt] Braynard, the former Republican National Committee strategist Trump had hired to run his campaign’s data team, was let go by the campaign a couple weeks ago, multiple sources also told POLITICO.
Neither Braynard nor Lewandowski commented when asked whether Braynard left of his own accord or was fired. Sources say his top lieutenant in the campaign’s data shop, a former RNC data engineer named Witold Chrabaszcz, was elevated at least temporarily to run the team. Chrabaszcz, who goes by “Vito,” declined to comment. While he is regarded as a savvy manipulator of data, he’s largely unknown in the tight-knit world of GOP data strategists. He seldom worked on political strategy at the RNC and mostly interacted with the party’s other data engineers, a group known as the “basement dwellers.”
According to Politico, some of the campaign’s data is currently “inaccessible,” if you can believe it.
Despite the fact that game-maker Navid Khonsari is suspected of spying by the Iranian government, the primary takeaway from playing 1979 Revolution is a feeling of complicated affection, not angry bitterness. There’s another side to what we in the West know about Iran, and playing this game is a good way to start learning about it.
Video games have been playing with history and politics for decades now. But big-budget games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty that have used Middle East wars and insurgencies as the backdrop have come across like money-grubbing tourists who exploit real-world tension for potential sales. In games like these, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries are just exoticized pit stops.
To many in the West, Iran is an indistinct enemy power that seems perpetually embroiled in internal conflict, a country currently led by a volatile leadership with dangerous nuclear ambitions. Outside of unlikely successes like Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, the personal and historical perspective of actual Iranians doesn’t get a lot play in Western mainstream media. With the majority of headlines focused on top-down oppression, Iran looks like a mess from the outside looking in. But it’s also home to millions of people, many of whom have lived through political crucibles that American, British and French citizens could never imagine. 1979 Revolution’s mission is to shed light on what it means to bleed and suffer for freedom in one’s home country.
The game opens in 1980 with lead character Reza developing pictures of protests taken in the streets of his homeland. The majority of the game happens in flashback, showing Reza getting pulled into a multi-faction insurgency movement after coming back home from his studies in Germany. The late 1970s saw Iran boil over with near-universal dissatisfaction with Shah Reza Pahlavi, the monarch backed by America and other Western powers. As 1979 Revolution goes on, Reza finds himself entangled in the idealism, suspicion and heartbreak of an underground political protest movement.
Photography is Reza’s superpower. His passion for taking pictures becomes a powerful weapon to help alert the world to oppressive state violence. During certain sequences, players will walk around the environment and take pictures in specific spots. Those shots get collected in a journal where real-world photographs sit next to their in-game recreations. One of 1979’s bigger successes comes from reconstituting the dangerous context of what it meant to take those photographs. Reza gets battered by police and erstwhile allies alike for the simple act of snapping his lens at what’s happening around him.
1979 Revolution feels clunky and rough-hewn at times, and it isn’t a graphical stunner by any means. But the music and voice acting are done well enough to pull players into the drama of the movement trying to unseat the corrupt government of Iran. 1979 drives home the human cost of regime change and does a great job of showing what was at stake for the people protesting in the streets of Iran. The game is built on a dialogue choice template that also folds in a few quick-reaction action sequences. It’ll feel very familiar to anyone who’s played a Telltale game in recent years. The drama here comes from Reza’s personal connections across the disparate sections of the political landscape.
His childhood friend Babak introduces him to the protest movement, and his brother Hossein is a police officer carrying out orders to suppress dissent. Reza’s cousin Ali is a mujahideen soldier who feels that nonviolent demonstrations won’t bring about the change Iran needs. Along the way, Reza’s connections to each of these men shift as he says certain things to them. Players’ choices feel consequential here, impacting the cohesion of both family units and the rank and file of rebellion. Allies and family members get disavowed, go missing or, in one case, get tortured right in front of Reza’s eyes.
I got confused trying to keep track of which faction espoused what belief while playing 1979. That philosophical dizziness feels intentional, meant to replicate the rush of ideas and political messaging swirling around the common Iranian citizen of that era. It’s one thing to know that the regime in power is wrong but it’s another to know which faction should be the one to rule in its stead. 1979’s creators don’t offer up comforting platitudes or a heartwarming feel-good ending, choosing instead to lean hard on ambiguity and the grim truth of real world facts.
Most importantly, 1979 Revolution doesn’t feel like a corny edutainment game that you’re going to get quizzed on for midterms. It comes across as a political melodrama, grounded with real-world details. Like Never Alone and Papo & Yo, this is video game creation driven by the desire to use the medium to break down cultural barriers. The research and intent poured into 1979 Revolution is palpable. The bits of Farsi sprinkled into the dialogue, insight into the country’s pervasive anti-Americanism and moments where you hear both the dangerous zealotry and peaceful comfort to be found in Islam make the characters and milieu feel three-dimensional. This is a game that can broaden an individual person’s horizons and that of the entire medium, as well. It’s definitely worth your time.
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