The sudden new craze called "cat bearding" has made us realize that it's always futile to claim the Internet has hit a new low, because as soon as you make such a pronouncement, something like "cat bearding" comes along to remind you the Internet will always be more pointless and absurd and .... oh but that one cat is kind of cute, and so are some of these people, maybe, although who knows what kind of horror the cat beard is hiding.

So let's hear it for Cat Bearding. All you need is a cat and some kind of drugs to use on the cat, to make it more pliable—don't want to get a nasty scratch from your neighbor's nasty old cat!—and then just sit down and look at porn or your 401k or whatever until the cat comes along to check out that cat food you put on the keyboard. Easy!

Later, you can release the cat. Your neighbor will never know! Who can keep track of cats, anyway? They're always digging in the garbage or eating rats or having diseases or humping in the alley. Cat beards, everybody!

UPDATE: That disgusting obese cat in the lower right corner of the photo collage is, apparently, a dog.

[Pictures via Google Image Search thumbnails, oh my god there are already thousands of these things, stop it right now.]

Scientists have discovered the genetic trait that results in white tigers, something originally only explained by Just So Stories logic. The trait, which caused their fur to have white accents rather than orange ones, was long known to be a recessive trait. New research has isolated a change in a specific part of one gene that causes this mutation. Humans can have the same trait, as can some mice, horses, and fish.

In case you didn't know about them, white tigers are mythical looking—because of those dramatic black and brown stripes with the white fur instead of orange. Also, those really pretty blue eyes.

Probably because they are so entrancing, the last free-ranging white tiger was poached in 1958. Currently, these tigers are inbred and are frequently born with deformities or die prematurely. However, the scientists pose that the white-fur-causing mutation alone is not associated with these other harmful mutations.

[image via AP]

Certain nations in this world prosper by becoming "tax havens"— by pulling in money from people and entities seeking to avoid taxes in their home countries. They profit as the treasuries of other nations suffer. Now, even some non-utopians are predicting their end.

Following last month's leak of information about secret offshore accounts of the rich and famous, and this week's big ol' Congressional report on Apple's (typical, common) global tax avoidance scheme, it seems that the wild notion that companies and people should pay fair taxes is having a bit of a moment. The EU's top tax official tells the New York Times that "Bank secrecy is a relic of the past." A former top economic official in Luxembourg (a tax haven) says, “In five years, there will be no tax havens left on earth." (Corporations themselves, always ahead of the curve, have been disclosing less and less information about their offshore subsidiaries for several years now, to avoid scrutiny.) In Europe, nations are pledging to work together more closely and share more information in order to try to make it harder for companies to play various national tax laws off against one another. In the UK, they're calling companies out by name:

“I can’t be the only person here who feels disappointed that such a great company as Google, with such great founding principles, will be reduced to arguing that when it employs thousands of people in Britain, makes billions of pounds of revenue in Britain, it is fair that it should pay just a fraction of 1 percent of that in tax,” [Labor Party leader Ed] Miliband said, criticizing by name Google’s executive chairman, who was not in attendance. “It’s a shame Eric Schmidt isn’t here to hear me say this direct. When Google goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying its taxes, I say it’s wrong.”

It is remarkable that a sentiment that appeals so plainly to the public's sense of fairness is even up for debate. The fact that making companies pay taxes is difficult does not change the fact that huge corporations— which spend millions of dollars each year on PR and advertising designed to burnish their own reputations as good, solid, trustworthy operations— should pay their fair share of taxes. You, the consumer, do not have the power to make Apple or Google pay more taxes, but collectively you do have the power to ensure that the practice of systematically avoiding paying taxes damages their well-tended reputations. All of us little people pay taxes. The average working person pays more than his fair share of taxes. Companies (including Gawker Media) can pay their taxes, too.

It doubtful that tax havens will ever truly disappear. But the use of tax havens can certainly be made disreputable.

[Photo: AP]

Two monsters crashed a car into a soldier named Lee Rigby on Tuesday in southeast London, and then they hopped out and murdered him with meat cleavers and a machete. In the interminable lull before police arrived to shoot the men, they danced over Rigby's body and demanded passers-by take pictures and video. Here it is.

Here's a transcript of the killer's speech. He does seem lucid, and not obviously drugged out as some witnesses described:

The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers. And this British soldier is one. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. By Allah, we swear by the almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. So what if we want to live by the Shari'a in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists and kill us? Rather you lot are extreme. You are the ones that when you drop a bomb you think it hits one person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family? This is the reality. By Allah if I saw your mother today with a buggy I would help her up the stairs. This is my nature. But we are forced by the Qur'an, in Sura At-Tawba, through many ayah in the Qu'ran, we must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. I apologise that women had to witness this today but in our lands women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. You think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? You think politicians are going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy, like you and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so can all live in peace. So leave our lands and we can all live in peace. That’s all I have to say. [in Arabic:] Allah’s peace and blessings be upon you.

Welcome to the era of the supervillain demanding that witnesses document his intentionally shocking crime with your iPhone.

[Video via The Sun.]

An ironically named mother in North Carolina had her own teenage son arrested after he allegedly took her Pop-Tarts without permission.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers were called to the home of Latasha Renee Love earlier this week after the 37-year-old reported her $5 box of Pop-Tarts stolen.

When the cops arrived, Love "fingered her own son, who is a juvenile, as the culprit," according to a local NBC affiliate.

Though The Smoking Gun, which obtained the official police report, says the mother was attempting to teach the boy "some kind of lesson," a neighbor told WCNC he knew the kid, and he "is real respectful."

The unnamed kid's misdemeanor larceny case will be brought before a juvenile court judge at a date to be determined.

An attempt by the TV station to obtain a comment from the mother was met with obscenities.

[screengrab via WCNC]

Revolutionary street artist, self described "actor/Yale Doctoral candidate," and Vice-President of Being the Best Blogger James Franco has recently begun penning film reviews for Vice magazine. Vice has labeled this undertaking "A Few Impressions," probably because reviews serve a clear purpose and "impressions" are whatever you want them to be.

On Thursday, James Franco offered up his impressions of Leviathan, a documentary about the commercial fishing industry described by Gawker's Rich Juzwiak back in March as "a borderline-abstract stream of imagery." An accurate impression of Leviathan would probably entail making a lot of fish and boat sounds with your mouth. For reasons known only to James Franco, James Franco arrived at the 10 p.m. screening an hour early.

The following are his written impressions, abridged:

• "At some point, a huge crowd of Israeli women filed in and overpowered the Daft Punk emanating from my headphones. Must have been a special screening."
• "It was then I noticed a poster for the LA Jewish Film Festival depicting a bunch of directors’ chairs arranged like the Star of David. Underneath it read a different kind of star."
• "We entered the all-but-empty theater and sat in the back because I always sit in the back."
• "This is life. Man versus nature. Man’s machines. Man’s mastery of the planet. Man’s destruction of the planet. Man’s ushering in of the apocalypse. But it is also beautiful."
• "Dead fish. More romantic than dead cows. Is that because we’re more desensitized to seeing dead fish? Some restaurants serve them whole, and some “vegetarians” (pescetarians?) are OK with eating fish. Dead fish are somehow not as threatening or disgusting as other dead things that we eat; little swimming bundles of food plucked from the ocean, the unseen vastness."
• "I mean, WTF? How? How did the film’s makers achieve this poetry?"
• "Notice the cigarettes."
• "So many forms are consumed by the television these days, to see a bunch of truckers travel over ice-covered roads or a family of hunters doing their thing and being funny to boot is de rigeur on any given night."
• "Well, here it is: man, mastering the seas and the world, doing horrible things, brave things, impossible things. Because we are man. We need to survive. And conquer."

[Image via Getty]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

For decades, the Wall Street Journal has paid tribute to the wealthy and powerful with a little woodcut-style portrait on its pages. Today, perfection has been attained. Ronald McDonald, the costumed creep who has long terrorized children who only wanted some chicken-feet nuggets and a gun toy, got a WSJ "stipple."

Stipple is a word that means many things to many people. It is a common street drug term, and it serves as a kind of not-quite-illegal codeword when you want a certain sex act from a prostitute. But at the Wall Street Journal, it has always meant one thing and one thing only: A stipple is a vertical portrait thumbnail-sized pixelated black-and-white "hedcut" image that vaguely looks like that one Instagram filter.

Today, "Ronald McDonald" joins an elite crowd that includes Sarah Palin and the reggae artist Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr. Welcome, hamburger clown. Welcome.

[Images via Wall Street Journal, H/T: Elise Foley.]

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who smokes crack, has fired his chief of staff.

Today, at National Defense University, President Obama gave his big national security speech, the one in which he finally acknowledged that his administration has killed four American citizens with drone strikes in foreign lands before saying that it is unconstitutional to kill (most) Americans with drones without due process.

In the middle of the president's speech, Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the anti-war group CODEPINK, interrupted Obama with a shouty rejoinder. Rather than getting agitated, the president calmly listened to Benjamin for a brief period before she was escorted out. As Benjamin's voice faded, Obama went off script to address the heckling, saying, "The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to. Obviously I do not agree with much of what she said, and obviously she wasn't listening to me and much of what I said. But these are tough issues. And the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong."

If you can't view the video above, here's a rough transcription of Benjamin's philippic:

Can you tell the Muslim people their lives are as precious as our lives? Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA? Can you stop [unintelligible] of killing people on the basis of suspicious activity? Will you compensate the innocent family victims? That will make us safer here at home. I love my country. I love the rule of law. The drones are making us less safe and keeping people in indefinite detention in Guantanamo is making us less safe.

And a gif of a momentarily frustrated Obama, courtesy of BuzzFeed:

Pike Place Market butcher William Von Schneidau calls his latest creation the "pot pig."

And it's exactly what it sounds like: Von Schneidau, owner of BB Ranch Meats, has teamed up with local marijuana grower Top Shelf Organic to raise pigs fed on pot plants.

The so-called "pot-bellied porkers" are then turned into marijuana-infused bacon.

"It just got so popular we ran out of meat," von Schneidau recalled.

Though the weed does produce "redder and more savory" pigs, von Schneidau says the bacon itself won't get you high.

"I ate it and I don't feel a damn difference," von Schneidau told WLS-TV.

It's unclear if von Schneidau plans to make an additional batch of the "baked" bacon, but the man who once pumped a pig full of vodka says he's definitely not done experimenting.

"We're able to make anything you can imagine," he told KOMO News. "Somebody requests something and we make it, and make some extra of it, and see if people like it."

Recreational use of marijuana became legal in the state of Washington late last year.

[H/T: Uproxx, Planet Ivy]

In a speech interrupted by frequent heckling, President Obama today made a bold and daring call for America to try to adhere to age-old concepts of "law" and "basic human rights" in the amorphous and endless "war on terror." But might treating people "decently" threaten Our Freedoms?

We have been enthusiastic about pointing out how disappointing the Obama administration's conduct of the "war on terror" has been, from drone strikes to the black hole of Guantanamo Bay. The president of Hope and Change has largely, disappointingly, continued (and enlarged) the Bush administration's sprawling, unaccountable global security state, perpetuating many more of its outrages than might have been expected on election night of 2008. So let us give credit to Barack Obama: today, he said a lot of shit that really made sense.

He noted that terrorism after 9/11 is not really of a different nature from terrorism before 9/11. He included acts by non-Muslims (the Oklahoma City bombing, for example) in a list of terrorist acts. He acknowledged the self-defeating nature of a strategy of using violence to fight terrorism. He, in short, tried to bring a general sense of proportion to the generally insane "war on terror."

His specific recommendations included a new set of standards for drone strikes mandating that "before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured"— clearly a higher standard than the U.S. has been using up to now. Not as good as, you know, promising not to assassinate U.S. citizens without a trial, but a step in the right direction. He made vague references to "privacy protections to prevent abuse" when it comes to the NSA's monitoring of virtually all communications. Nice idea, but hard to find very reassuring. He called for a media shield law, to protect journalists from the predations of his own Justice Department. And, in a move both symbolic and significant, he vowed to "refine, and ultimately repeal" the Authorization to Use Military Force that was passed in the wake of 9/11, and which has undergirded the entire "war on terror" ever since.

Most meaningfully, Obama asked for the closure of Guanatanamo Bay, which should have happened a long time ago. From the transcript:

As President, I have tried to close GTMO. I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries, or imprisoning them in the United States. These restrictions make no sense. After all, under President Bush, some 530 detainees were transferred from GTMO with Congress’s support. When I ran for President the first time, John McCain supported closing GTMO. No person has ever escaped from one of our super-max or military prisons in the United States. Our courts have convicted hundreds of people for terrorism-related offenses, including some who are more dangerous than most GTMO detainees. Given my Administration’s relentless pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened...

I know the politics are hard. But history will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it. Imagine a future – ten years from now, or twenty years from now – when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not a part of our country. Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?

Yes: detaining people in a legal black hole indefinitely until they all try to starve themselves to death is bad. Guantanamo was a bad idea in the first place. At least we know that Obama has a conscience about these things.

But are America's normal fortress-like prisons ready to hold terrorists with their killer secret terror magic— in the same state where your children sleep? At night? Your Republican congressperson may not think so.

[Photo: AP]

OK, really, we get it, Anthony Weiner. You're running for Mayor of New York City. You think you should be given a second chance, and you won't give this shit a rest, even though you are, by all accounts, a pretty big dick with a curvy dick that you SEXTED TO RANDOMS while MARRIED TO HILLARY CLINTON'S HOMEGIRL (who was pregnant with your baby) and while HOLDING A CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE. You kind of seem like a giant fuckface.

But fine, OK, whatever, you're trying this Mayoral bid out, and in the event it fails, the Post has exhausted all its CUMback puns and you can run for something else and people will have moved on, yadda yadda yadda. Except that you keep screwing up really simple things! And they habitually involve .jpgs! What is your problem?

Your latest problem, as Capital New York points out, is that the image in AnthonyWeiner.com's header is not the New York City skyline, but the skyline of entirely different urban area in an entirely different state. And that cityscape is Pittsburgh.

Expand that image. Now, look. Is that an iconic New York City bridge in the forefront? No, it is not. It is the Roberto Clemente Bridge, also known as the Sixth Street Bridge, a structure that exists in Pittsburgh. Also, the building on the far left? That's not the Empire State Building, it's the U.S. Steel Tower. The tall construction above the WE of WEINER? That's the BNY Mellon Center.

None of these buildings are located in Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens or even Staten Island, those very famous five boroughs you would supposedly like to rule. They are all located in Pittsburgh.

Seriously, guy, remove the imaging software from all your devices immediately.

[Capital New York // photo of Anthony Weiner's Weiner via Opie and Anthony]

To contact the author of this post, email camille@gawker.com.

Don't you just hate it when that happens?

Anthony Hill and his wife Christina Salinas were enjoying a relaxing Sunday night at the Penn Valley Rodeo in Northern California when Hill decided to end the outing early and head home.

Salinas, wanting to stay and dance, wasn't quite ready to leave yet, and an argument ensued that lasted the entire ride back to Rough and Ready.

Once in their house, the couple continued their alcohol-infused fight, and Salinas eventually pulled two kitchen knives on Hill.

That's when Hill grabbed her four children and ran to the car, pursued by Salinas and Salinas' ex-husband, who for reasons unknown is currently living in the same residence.

Hill says Salinas attacked him and, while he and the ex-husband were attempting to hold her down, took a bite out of his genitals.

It is unclear if or why Hill's private parts were exposed at the time. The extent of the injury was also unclear, though Hill said he was still recovering.

Though he subsequently phoned 911 on Salinas, Hill says he now regrets it.

"I’ve assaulted her before in arguments," said Hill, who noted that their recent spat was preceded by "a series of stressful events."

According to Hill, the couple usually "work it out," but this time he "went beyond that."

[H/T: HyperVocal]

Scientists have measured all the light released in the universe since the Big Bang. Everyone take Monday off.

In anticipation of Sofia Coppola's upcoming movie The Bling Ring, Vice's Mitchell Sunderland sat down with Alexis Neiers to find out if she really did wear four-inch Bebe kitten heels to court. The interview is wonderful. Read it, you C-U-N-T.

In February, rap magazine The Source reported that 46-year-old Bronx rapper Tim Dog had died from "a seizure following a long bout with diabetes." But now a warrant for his arrest has been issued, following increasing evidence that Tim "Tim Dog" Blair faked his own death to escape thousands of dollars in debt.

Before maybe faking his own death, Balir was best known for his 1991 song "Fuck Compton," dissing the West Coast hip-hop scene. But since then he's been undertaking a series of cons, where he meets women on dating sites and swindles them out of money. So many that, according to VICE's Drew Millard, there is an "international network/support system of women who have had their lives ruined because they met Tim Dog on the internet."

According to VICE, Blair scammed one Dutch woman into investing in a fake European tour of black male strippers called the Chocolate Fantasy Tour. He convinced a Mississippi woman to invest $32,000 in a box CD set, which never came out. In 2011 was ordered by a judge to pay her $20,000, and that, says the woman, is why he faked his own death in February. A death certificate has yet to be produced, even though Tim Dog's family apparently held a funeral for Blair. The Mississippi prosecutor handling the case told the AP he wasn't able to find any proof of Blair's death, thus prompting the warrant.

You can tell it's summer, because we're getting into fake death season. First Andy Kaufman was spotted in New Mexico, now Tim Dog.

Memorial Day means many things to many people. It is almost summer, it is a time to drink, there are sales in the hellish big box stores, etc. But mostly, it is a time to solemnly remember military personnel who died while on active duty. Sorry, veterans!

Stop interviewing old veterans, lamestream media. It's not their day.

Here, we have a very nice story about America's oldest living veteran, who plans to "spend a quiet Memorial Day at home." That is good, because that's what all living veterans should do on Memorial Day. Unless you are currently in the ground, it's not for you. Celebrate, sure! Buy something, by all means! But please don't divert attention from the honored dead.

And if you survive to see another Veterans Day—wouldn't that be great, for you and your loved ones?—we'll be there on November 11, Veterans Day 2013, with flags waving! Hang in there. Even Santa Claus needs to keep a low profile in the summer.

Gawker's military affairs desk is angry because year after year, the lamestream media puts out a bunch of pictures of 100-year-old veterans having a BBQ or wearing their old war hats. This is not the reason for Memorial Day. Memorial Day is to remember the dead, and to open the swimming pools for the summer, and to get a new mattress if necessary.

How did Memorial Day start, you may wonder. I will tell you. Long ago, in the hollers and mountains and swamps of the Deep South, the same morbid southerners who gave us country music and blues music and William Faulkner gave us a tradition known as "Decoration Day."

The Civil War was horrific. No amount of Ken Burns atmospheric banjo plucking can begin to illustrate the gruesome four-year-long living nightmare of the War Between the States. No visit to a manicured cannonball lawn can return us to that time, and that's for the best. The whole country, from New England to California, was technically at war. But the battles were concentrated in the South, a place so hot and humid and malarial and miserable for much of the year that people didn't start living there in large numbers until the wide availability of air conditioning in the 1950s. (The first air conditioner was invented in Brooklyn in 1902, to keep factory workers from collapsing in the summer months. But it was another half century before the AC-equipped home made life in the South bearable for anybody who wasn't born there and didn't know better.)

Between 620,000 and 850,000 American and Confederate soldiers died, two-thirds of them from disease. The Southern economy, built on the backs of slaves, was obliterated. Tradition and gloomy tales told on broiling summer nights were about all the defeated Confederacy had left. Southerners are unparalleled practitioners of grief. Jazz funerals, three-day "wakes," a special menu of regional foods prepared especially for the wailing relations, burial with feet facing east for easy plucking on Judgment Day ... in a southern town, it can sometimes feel like nobody's really alive until somebody drops dead.

They invented Decoration Day, when the survivors and later the descendants of the war dead went to the family plot, adorned the gravestone with flowers, and had a "dinner on the ground" over the rotting remains of the Civil War soldiers.

Just as the nation eventually embraced such southern traditions as The Dukes of Hazzard and eating too much fried foods, the victorious United States also claimed Decoration Day as its own. It was not until after World War II that the Memorial Day celebrations became common and widespread, and not until 1967 that Memorial Day became a federal holiday—a year later, Memorial Day was legally set as a three-day weekend at the end of May, making it a convenient time for backyard parties and the purchase of furnishings and automobiles. Only then did it become truly American.

Still, it's Memorial Day, not Alive Veterans Day.

Unless the veterans profiled around this weekend's special advertising sections by America's Media are zombies, this practice is unpatriotic and morally wrong. It is Memorial Day.

Celebrate this day with the proper solemnity. It is "okay" to exclude living veterans from your parties and trips to Mattress Land.

[Photo from GettyPremium]

What a difference a coast can make — Mariah Carey's spotty performance on Good Morning America was scrubbed clean when the show aired on the West Coast. The first clip of the video above shows her struggling with adlibbing when her performance aired live; the second clip is the sanitized way it aired three hours later. They also, of course, removed was her S-bomb. So basically, they took out much of what made her appearance fun.

I'll take illusion-shattering errors over boring canned perfection any day.

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"A coroner said Friday that Christ died of a cocaine overdose."