The Town Manager of Provincetown is looking into an incident involving its police chief, who became very upset when the bar he was drinking in began to play N.W.A.'s protest anthem "Fuck tha Police."

The bar, The Squealing Pig, was hosting an election victory party that the police chief, Jeff Jaran, attended. After the end of the event, Jaran stuck around to have a drink with a few friends, when the offending song came on.

The Cape Cod Times reports:

A song by N.W.A. began to play. Jaran said he was not familiar with the song, but as he listened he became uncomfortable and offended. He said he told a restaurant employee to shut the song off and added that the person should be ashamed. Jaran said he and his friend regularly go to The Squealing Pig and he called the owner the next day and the issue was resolved.

The playing of the song might not have been just a coincidence, however. The victory party that the bar was hosting was for a local politician named Thomas Donegan. Donegan has been critical of the police department, and believes that the heavy presence of the police on the street and amount spent on the department must be reduced.

But Donegan denies he had anything to do with it. "It was only a coincidence that it happened there," he said.

The Town Manager, Sharon Lynn, will get to the bottom of this whole affair.

"I have been speaking to all parties involved to ascertain if there was any inappropriate behavior involving those present," Lynn said in an email to the Cape Cod Times.

Checking the original testimony in the court case of N.W.A v. Police Department (Judge Dre residing), it did seem like MC Ren, Ice Cube, and Eazy Mothafuckin' E make some cogent points about the police. Essentially, they argue, fuck 'em.

[Cape Cod Times]

The Secret Service will reportedly be dressing up as farmers during the G8 summit, which begins tomorrow. The summit, scheduled to take place at the Lough Erne, a five-star lakeside resort in Northern Ireland, will last two days.

The Secret Service has also reportedly purchased a fleet of tractors for their surveillance, but locals say it will be easy to spot them, since they're all brand new. More than 200 agents and special forces Seals units will patrol the area and protect the president during the trip.

[via, photo via Shutterstock]

Two more anti-polio workers were shot to death in Pakistan on Sunday, just weeks after another high-profile fatal shooting. The death toll in the past year for anti-polio health workers in Pakistan now stands at nearly 20.

Three weeks after the Boy Scouts of America voted to continue its ban on gay scout leaders, two Utah scout leaders were warned by council members of the BSA that they face potential banishment from the organization for their participation in a Utah Pride Parade earlier this month.

Boy Scout troop leaders Peter Brownstein and Neil Whitaker marched in the June 2 parade, with Whitaker in uniform, despite warnings from the organization that such a move would violate the group's policy against promoting political agendas.

"We were very disappointed that you used Scouting to advance the gay agenda at the Utah Pride Parade," council leaders wrote to Brownstein. "You and others are welcome to participate in the parade as supportive citizens but not as uniformed members of the BSA."

Whitaker disagreed with the leaders' opinion, telling The Salt Lake Tribune, "We weren’t rallying for a politician or political event."

"To me” he added, “it was being supportive of my fellow human beings."

Whitaker and his Scouts wore their uniforms during the march, but Brownstein did not, which apparently confused BSA council members, who thought that he had.

Both Whitaker and Brownstein refused to sign a letter apologizing for their actions; the letter also warned that another offense could lead to the revocation of their Scouting membership.

[Associated Press/ABC News/Image via AP]

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

New York Senator Chuck Schumer thinks there's an Adderall problem on college campuses. Instead of amphetamine-based “academic doping,” Schumer has a few other suggestions for pulling all-nighters: “There's coffee, there's things like NoDoz."

@guardian Can't help but wonder abt the interpersonal repercussions of your decision. What msg would you send your girlfriend? #AskSnowden

— Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) June 17, 2013

Remember back in 2010 when 33 Chilean miners spent 69 days trapped just a few yards above Hell in a caved-in desert mine, sacrificing their health and sanity so that the world might have hilarious topical Halloween costumes? What's the first thing you think of when you think of that incident? JLo? That's the first thing JLo thinks of too.

The Hollywood Reporter has just confirmed that Jennifer Lopez will star alongside Antonio Banderas in an upcoming dramatic adaptation of the miners' ordeal, titled The 33. The film will be produced by Black Swan producer Mike Medavoy.

Banderas will star as miner Mario Sepulveda, nicknamed "Super Mario" for his energetic demeanor in video journals the men sent to the surface to let everyone know they were alive and still capable of generating unique, marketable content. There's no word yet on JLo's role. Maybe she'll get a stylish bob haircut and play one of the miners. Maybe she'll rim her eyes with the blackest kohl and play the mine. Maybe she thought it was a movie about some "Chilean minors," and as she separated her hair into two thick pigtails, and contorted her face in the mirror so that the faint parentheses around her lips went taut, she mumbled confidently, "I can still play 17, right?"

Last time the world checked in on the miners, most of them weren't doing so hot, though they were excited about this movie. That was back in 2011, before JLo had even committed. Imagine how excited they are now.

[Image via Getty]

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

During last night's Miss USA competition, eventual first runner-up Miss Alabama Mary Margaret McCord was asked to weigh in on the NSA's PRISM scandal that "has been in the news lately."

"Is this an invasion of privacy, or necessary to keep our country safe, why or why not?" asked judge (and Just Shoot Me! star) Wendie Malick.

While McCord's familiarity with the works of George Orwell remains unclear, she still managed to deliver a beautifully Orwellian response to her question:

I think the society that we live in today, it's sad that if go to the movie, or to the airport, or even to the mall that we have to worry about our safety, so I would rather someone track my telephone messages and feel safe wherever I go than feel like they're, um, encroaching on my privacy.

In McCord's defense, her incoherent doublespeak is practically a MacArthur Genius Grant essay compared to the responses of others.

[H/T: Fark, video via YouTube]

NSA leaker Edward Snowden, still hidden somewhere in Hong Kong, emerged briefly for a live Guardian chat today, accusing tech companies of issuing "misleading" statements and re-asserting previous claims about warrantless wiretapping. He also burned Dick Cheney.

Snowden, who revealed himself a little over a week ago as the source of NSA documents leaked to The Guardian and The Washington Post, took questions from Guardian journalists, commenters, and Twitter users for a few hours this morning, maintaining his trademark dramatic flair: "All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me," he wrote in his first answer. "Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

We may have to wait a little while, though. There wasn't much new information in the chat, which focused instead on clarifications of previous statements and reporting. Asked about initial reports that he had been making $200,000 while employed at the government contractor Booz Allen, Snowden explained that the figure was his "career high" salary, not his specific pay at Booz Allen. He also explained why he chose Hong Kong over Iceland:

Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.

And laughed off the accusation that he had cut a deal with Chinese authorities:

In other answers, Snowden was less forthcoming. Asked about the phrase "direct access"—The Guardian reported that the NSA was given "direct access" to large tech companies' servers; subsequent reporting has disputed this—he seemed to give an indirect answer, while promising "more detail":

More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

He wrote that he stands by his claim that he "had the authority to wiretap anyone... even the president," but made it clear that the statement is only true if you also accept that "policy protection is no protection":

Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with.

More fundamentally, the "US Persons" protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it's only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal."

Snowden turned some ire to the tech companies whose collaboration with the NSA he exposed with his leaks—"Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies."—but saved his best stuff for Dick Cheney—returning to one answer to add an extra paragraph burning the former Vice President:

We get tips. Lots of them. Sometimes Gawker deputy editor Tom Scocca responds to them. These conversations are memorialized here in an occasional feature we call Tom Tips Back.

Tony Caputo <xxxxxx@comcast.net>

To: tips@gawker.com

Subject: TIME FOR AFFERMATIVE ACTION FOR WHITE AMERICA!

WELL, IT HAS BEEN OVER 50 YEARS SINCE JFK PUT AFFERMATIVE ACTION IN TO LAW……….THE BLACKS HAVE HAD EVERYTHING HANDED TO THEM FOR OVER 50 YEARS……..IT IS MORE THAN PAST TIME THAT THE “BLACK” ALLEGED PRESIDENT ENDED AFFERMATIVE ACTION……

WHEN DOES “WEHITE” AMERICA HAVE “WHITE AFFERMATIVE ACTION?

Tom Scocca <scocca@gawker.com>

To: xxxxxx@comcast.net

Cc: tips@gawker.com

Re: TIME FOR AFFERMATIVE ACTION FOR WHITE AMERICA!

That's not how you spell "affirmative."

Tony Caputo <xxxxxx@comcast.net>

To: scocca@gawker.com

Subject: TIME FOR AFFERMATIVE ACTION FOR WHITE AMERICA!

EAT SHIT AND DIE!

Tom Scocca <scocca@gawker.com>

To: xxxxxx@comcast.net

Cc: tips@gawker.com

Re: TIME FOR AFFERMATIVE ACTION FOR WHITE AMERICA!

Not good with English, can't control the temper—this is why the Anglo-Saxons always thought the Italians were an inferior race.

This has been Tom Tips Back.

Familiar political tools like petitions, fundraisers, mass letter-writing, call-in campaigns now have online equivalents. But what about protest tactics like street marches, picket lines, sit-ins, and occupations? Where is the room on the internet for civil disobedience?

But today, civil disobedience often looks very different. Networked technologies mean our opportunities for effective political activism have increased exponentially. Where activists once put their physical bodies on the line to fight for their causes, online activists can engage in digitally-based acts of civl disobedience from their keyboards. There are three major lines along which digitally-based civil disobedience is developing: disruption, information distribution, and infrastructure. Each has its own particular challenges and benefits.

Disruption

Disruptive tactics like distributed denial of service (DDOS) actions and website defacements have a fairly long history in internet terms. Activists groups like the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Strano Network, pro-Palestinian groups, and many others used DDOS and website defacements in their campaigns as early as the mid-1990s. These tactics aim to upset the status quo by disrupting the normal flow of information, thereby attracting attention to their cause and message.

Disruptive tactics are focused on the public: they aim to deliver their message to as many people as possible, either through exposing them to the disruption and dissent, recruiting them to take part, or both. To be effective, this type of civil disobedience needs to attract the attention of masses of people, typically through the mainstream media. If the media doesn't recognize or cover the actions as acts of protest, then the activist message will fall flat. (If an activist defaces a corporate website, and no one sees it, does it have political impact? Probably not.)

Information Distribution

Information distribution-based tactics are built around the acquisition and release of hidden or secret informatin. In the past three years, we've seen this kind of protest take the form of whistleblowing, information exfiltration, doxxing (posting the names and personal information of targets online), and crowd-sourced vigilante investigations. These tactics are used by groups like Wikileaks and Anonymous. The idea is to move information from states of low visibility to high visibility, putting injustices in the public eye when traditional law enforcement avenues seem to have failed.

Anonymous has been developing crowd-sourced vigilante investigations in the US and Canada with Steubenville, #JusticeforReteah, and other ops. "Human flesh search" message boards are already popular in China, giving netizens the chance to bring formerly untouchable corrupt officials to justice. The FindtheBostonBombers subreddit was a home-grown example of this kind of crowd-sourced vigilante investigation. The goal of this class of tactics is to empower people to take action by adding to the information landscape.

Whistleblowers and leakers rely on the cooperation of the mainstream media to publicize, contextualize, and analyze the information they release. However, this may become easier as more news organization recognize open paths for whistleblowers and leakers. Wikileaks' five media partners for the Cablegate documents, the New Yorker's Strongbox program, and the Guardian's extensive work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden are all examples of how cooperation between whistleblowers and news organizations is growing.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure-based activism involves the creation of alternate systems to replace those that have been compromised by state or corporate information-gathering schemes. In other words, if the government is snooping on the internet, activists build a tool to make it harder for them to see everything. Tor, Diaspora, and indenti.ca are some examples of these projects, as are the guerrilla VPNs and network connections that often spring up to serve embattled areas, provided by activists in other countries.

Similar to living off the grid, these projects provide people with options beyond the default. Open source or FLOSS software and Creative Commons use a similar tactic: when the system stops working, create a new system. The challenge is to bring these new systems into widespread use without allowing them to be compromised, either politically or technically. However, these new systems often have to fight network effects as they struggle to attract users away from dominant systems. Diaspora faced this issue with Facebook. Without being able to disrupt dominant systems, user migration is often slow and piecemeal, lacking the impact activists hope for.

Illustration by Osmont2

Disruption, information distribution, and infrastructure tactics and strategies are often practiced by separate groups working independently on different issues. Sometimes disparate group interests will overlap, as when Anonymous launched the disruptive Operation Payback in support of Wikileaks during Cablegate, but there is little inter-group organization.

As the practice of civil disobedience develops online, those who favor different styles of activism but who are united in a common cause may begin organizing themselves into affinity group-style coalitions, building alliances for more effective activism. Effective digitally-based civil disobedience needs a diverse, integrated repertoire of contention to draw from. A disruptive action targeting Facebook could drive users towards alternate, more open, social networking services. A leak detailing government intelligence abuses could spur disruptive protests, consumer flight to uncompromised services, or further leaks.

On the street, activists at major events like political conventions or meetings of groups like the WTO or G8 often use a variety of tactics to provide support within affinity groups, and to make it harder for protest to be neutralized by law enforcement. Street marches are counter balanced by occupations and lock-ins. Posters and pamphlets will be augmented by street art, puppets, and ad hoc street theater. Jail solidarity actions are helped by speeches on the courthouse steps. Though one action may get shut down, others can still make an impact. Digital activists will want to emulate this coalition-building in online spaces too.

As digital activism develops, civil disobedience will continue to a be vital tool for expressing dissent. The internet could be the tomorrow's best zone for free speech and activism, a place where protesters can challenge structures of power that threaten human rights and freedoms. The future of digital civil disobedience will grow out of new online tactics, augmented by the internet's ability to bring people together across geographical boundaries.

Protest in the information age may not look exactly like Rosa Parks on that bus half a century ago. But it will still carry on our ongoing struggle to change the world for the better, and to bring justice to the oppressed.

Molly Sauter just finished her masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and will soon be moving to Montreal to start her PhD in Communication Studies at McGill. She can be found tweeting @oddletters and blogging at oddletters.com

As you may have read, Gawker recently raised $184,689.81 from readers (that's $200,000, less fees extracted by Indiegogo and Paypal) in an effort to purchase and publish a video of Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine. As you may have also read, the people we were in touch with who had custody of the video have gone to ground. We still hold out hope that a copy or copies of the video exist and, that someone who has access to one of those copies likes money enough to share it with us. But time marches on.

While we're not exactly closing up shop yet here on the Crackstarter, it is time to make preparations for the likelihood that the video eludes our grasp. When we launched the campaign, we acknowledged that possibility and pledged to "donate every penny we receive to a Canadian non-profit that helps people suffering from addiction and its consequences." Several people have sent us their preferred candidates—the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the Toronto Harm Reduction Task Force are the early favorites.

But now is you opportunity to offer your recommendations in the comments. For the sake of simplicity and elegance, our preference is to select a single beneficiary, so please limit your candidates to organizations substantial enough to absorb a donation of the size we are contemplating. And please don't muck up the discussion with arguments about the propriety of the Crackstarter or what assholes we are. What's done is done. Now you have an opportunity to help select the beneficiary of the extraordinary good will of the Crackstarter contributors. Have at it.

(Oh. There is the matter of "perks." People who purchased the Little Book of Rob Ford from House of Anansi Press should be receiving them imminently; we've already forwarded the fulfillment information. Several dozen people also selected a "public thanks" from the Gawker Twitter account; we'll do that soon as well. The other perks were contingent upon us getting the video. Hopefully we'll be able to fulfill those, too.)

[Image of Canadian flag defiled by crack pipe by Jim Cooke]

"Don't blame me," most people say. "I'm just a squirrel trying to get a nut." If you were a squirrel trying to get a nut, why not go for the Cadillac of nuts? The macadamia nut. It comes from Hawai'i.

In a land of islands and trees grows a nut so tasty they had to give it a name that sounds like the name of real nice car you might buy if you were well off. "Hello sir, are you driving a Cadillac Macadamia? Such nice walnut paneling on the interiors."

That's where you're wrong— it's macadamia nut paneling.

Macadamia nuts are pretty and smooth on the outside, unlike some other nuts, which will not be named here, which, let's face it, look like brains. I don't know about you but I don't like eating brains. Nuts, yes; brains, no. Nuts that look like brains? How about we just eat macadamia nuts, and we don't have to address these... uncomfortable issues? Stop beating around the bush and let's talk about taste. Imagine one of each kind of nut, laid out on a table. And you're eating each nut, one by one. All the way down the line, starting with the worst-tasting nut (poop nut) and working your way up. Nut after nut after nut. And you get to the very end— the very pinnacle, of nuts— and what nut do you see? The macadamia nut. It tastes the best. If you envisioned a different kind of nut being the nut at the end of that line, as the best tasting nut, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. It's the macadamia nut.

Some people thought this series of nut rankings should end with some sort of "surprise." Or some sort of "clever wordplay." Or even with some sort of "off-color" joke of the sort that I refuse to dignify with further discussion. Those people miss the point. This isn't about a "surprise." This isn't about "showing off" and being clever. This is about ranking nuts, in order of taste. The macadamia nut tastes the best. Therefore we have ranked it first.

From Hawai'i to Mesopotamia

It seems we're consumed with a mania

What flavor is making us zany, huh?

The sweet meat of yon macadamias.

From Honolulu to Albania

We're craving a smoother, non-grainier

Taste that's... abrasive? Outrageous, sir.

Give me all your macadamias.

From Waikiki to Romania

They're driving them ladies so crazy, bruh

The favoritest dating icebreaker, duh?

A bowl of untouched macadamias.

From Mauna Loa to Tasmania

We'll steal them away from a baby, sure.

The victims on the Lusitania

Died happy, dreaming: macadamia.

Previously

Pistachios Are the Fifth-Best Nut

Almonds Are the Fourth-Best Nut

Pecans Are the Third-Best Nut

Cashews Are the Second-Best Nut

[Photo: Jessica Merz/ Flickr]

As far as yearbook typos go, we've certainly seen worse.

What makes this one noteworthy is the distinct possibility that it's not a typo at all.

That is to say, either this young lady is casually boasting about her conquests among the school's staff members, or some snot-nosed punk yearbook editor intentionally dropped the D from her quote for giggles.

Either way, high school sucks.

[H/T: Reddit]

The little 7o-year-old house at 353 Carmelita Drive is about as unspectacular as American real estate gets: two bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a modest 960 square feet. Elsewhere in the country (or at least the state) you could probably snatch it up for around a quarter million, tops: but in Google's back yard, it's four times that.

There's a redone kitchen and some nice bamboo floors, but really, what you're paying here is the privilege of living in Mountain View, which like many Silicon Valley regions, has seen its property values explode alongside stock prices and IPOs.

A value estimate from the real estate site Zillow paints it pretty clearly: everything is getting more expensive, including this tiny dull house.

There are more new money millionaires ride-sharing across California than ever before. They pay cash. They move fast. They might dig the modesty of quiet residential plot. They might want Zuckerberg-chic, not ostentation. This isn't a problem if you're a well-to-do software engineer, but for the rest of humanity, you're suddenly priced out—because when everyone's making money changing the world, even "cottages" are for millionaires. Just wait for an app to find the rest of California an affordable home, I guess.

[Trulia via Ashlee Vance]

We were all excited for the season finale of HBO's VICE on Friday, since we were promised it contained a rare exclusive interview with North Korea's reclusive Boy King, Kim Jong Un. At least that's what VICE's Shane Smith told Charlie Rose last month.

The clip is above, via Daily Caller contributor Charles Johnson. Here's the relevant transcript:

CHARLIE ROSE: How close did you come to getting an interview with him?

SHANE SMITH: Well we have the interview.

CHARLIE ROSE: You have the interview.

SHANE SMITH: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

SHANE SMITH: We show him in the documentary.

CHARLIE ROSE: So I haven't seen the documentary.

SHANE SMITH: No.

CHARLIE ROSE: It was just edited today.

SHANE SMITH: I just finished it today and I'd love for you to come see it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Oh man I'd love to.... I mean, I knew Dennis talked to him and sat with him and all that.

SHANE SMITH: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: You know, and had this — whatever kind of relationship, but I didn't realize you guys had an interview of some substance.

SHANE SMITH: Yes we, we talked to him.

"Yes, we talked to him." Anyway, as you may have surmised, there was no "interview of some substance" with Kim Jong Un in the VICE season finale. Kim Jong Un does not speak in the VICE season finale. There is a segment in the VICE season finale in which, after being stripped of their cameras and recording equipment, correspondent Ryan Duffy and his crew are invited to a dinner party that Kim Jong Un attended. What did Kim Jung Un say when VICE "talked to him" at that dinner party? Apparently nothing of note, since correspondent Ryan Duffy didn't relay any comments from him.

I can only conclude that VICE is saving this world-historical interview for its second season.

Footage of an incredibly inept cargo loader at China's Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport haphazardly hurling boxes onto a conveyor belt suddenly took off today, almost exactly a year after it was first uploaded to YouTube.

Why today of all days? Because this shiftless individual is the Monday morning of air-freight handlers.

Writes Mark Bridgman, the man who witnessed and recorded this awe-inspiring stretch of carelessness:

This was amazing to watch. I think I was the only one noticing what was happening outside the window of the plane, and this time I captured it. On a previous occasion I saw a load of Japanese sewing machines with 'this way up' and 'fragile, handle with care' stickers over the boxes also being thrown on to the conveyor.

Great. Not only have we lost all our jobs to China, but now we've lost half-assing the job as well. We are well and truly screwed.

[H/T: The Daily Dot]

Proving once and for all that people who pray for Boy Meets World sequels pray harder than people who pray for an end to world hunger, God has answered the cry of His most highly favored children: the Disney channel announced Monday that it had ordered a full series of Girl Meets World, the much-hyped follow-up to its 1990s TGIF bildungsroman.

Unlike the original series, set in a bland tree-filled suburb called "Philadelphia," the new show will take place in New York City. Cory Matthews is now a 7th grade history teacher. HIS DAUGHTER'S 7th grade history teacher. (Embarrassing! But maybe sometimes a source of comfort. We'll have to watch and see.) Topanga owns what is described in a press release as "a trendy afterschool hangout that specializes in pudding." Remember when Topanga was accepted to Yale? Now she runs a pudding store for tweens. She used to be an impassioned child activist and now she slings pudding while the sons and daughters of wealthy Manhattanites suffocate one another with sticky vanilla kisses. It's funny where we end up sometimes, wanderin' down this road that we call life, isn't it Topanga?

It was previously confirmed that Cory's sage old stalker, Mr. Feeny, would appear in the show as well.

Girl Meets World will debut on the Disney Channel in 2014.

[Image by Eric McCandless/Disney]

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

Yesterday, the front page of the New York Times brought joyous news: "Even Pessimists Feel Optimistic About the American Economy." Indeed, some of our most prominent economic pundits are telling us that everything is different now. BEWARE.

"Indeed," the NYT says, "a number of forecasters are now predicting that the [economic] expansion, which began in 2009 and has remained subpar ever since, might prove to be far more durable than the typical five-to-six-year growth cycle, in part because of the absence of the traditional boom, then bust pattern." The traditional boom-and-bust pattern is gone?? Does this mean...

"The four most dangerous words in investing may be 'This time, it’s different,'” James Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker last month. "But this time it is different."

Everything is different now! The positive case for the stock market "now seems to hinge on the new paradigm thinking" that the future will not resemble the past, says the WSJ. It's a new paradigm! Even with less money from the Fed, stocks are likely to rise, according to Bloomberg.

The pessimists are positive!

This time is different!

It's a new paradigm!

The stock market is on a permanent upwards trajectory!

You do not have to know anything at all about economics to know that this is when everything gets dangerous. Up! Up! And awayyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

"[Our] aim is to clear the air that somehow the United States is different," wrote the economists who wrote the book This Time Is Different, in a paper last fall. "The latest US financial crisis, yet again, proved it is not."

[Photo: AP]

A man who caused a scare on a flight from Hong Kong today was taken into FBI custody after telling fellow passengers "he was poisoned, had secrets from the CIA and mentioned Edward Snowden's name a number of times." The CDC found no evidence of poison on the plane.