Ayo Kimathi works as a small business specialist for the Department of Homeland Security. After work, he reportedly runs a website called War on the Horizon, which features your standard federal employee opinions, like describing President Obama as "a treasonous mulatto scum dweller … who will fight against reparations for Black people in amerikkka, but in favor of fag rights for freaks in amerikkka and Afrika."
A 3-month-old Indian baby has burst into flames at least four times without any obvious external cause, leading doctors to investigate the possibility that the infant suffers from spontaneous human combustion.
San Diego Mayor Bob Filner, who has been accused of sexual harassment by 18 women, including a great-grandmother and a disabled Iraq war veteran's nurse, reached a settlement with city leaders on Wednesday. The deal will remain confidential until Friday, when it will be presented to the San Diego City Council.
Once in a while an attempted robbery will fail so spectacularly that it becomes necessary to thank the would-be robber for attempting the crime in the first place, thereby allowing the world to witness such astounding defeat.
A recent armed assault on the Mercadinho Cafe in Brazil started off simple enough, with one robber entering the establishment while a getaway driver awaited his assured success on a motorcycle outside.
It might suffice it to say that things didn't quite go as planned if this video weren't an absolute must-watch.
[H/T: Guyism]
Celine Dion is now on Twitter. Now let's see just how amazing she really is.
Authorities in Wisconsin say a driver who was too busy texting to pay attention to the road ended up slamming his rented convertible into the back of a farm tractor hauling a trailer full of liquid manure.
Matthew Bruhn was reportedly texting and talking on his cellphone "when he looked up just in time to see the tractor seconds before the crash," according to KCCI.
The crash caused a manure spill on U.S. 151 near Southwest Road, and totaled Bruhn's Avis-owned 2014 Ford Mustang.
Bruhn was taken to Southwest Health Center in Platteville where he was treated for a broken finger.
The driver of the tractor, Matthew Miller, was uninjured.
[image via Back to the Future]
Americans love to move to shitholes
Just recently in Dyersburg, Tennessee, a number of custom-made purple signs materialized around the 17,000-person town, alerting local drinkers they were unwitting pawns of the Devil. Strategically placed across from alcohol purveyors, the banners proffered these admonishments:
"Satan couldn't be everywhere so he created liquor stores, nightclubs and beer joints. 'And be not drunk with wine, ... but be filled with the spirit' — Ephesians 5:18"
and
"Boozers are losers! Guns don't kill people - Drunks do! 12,100 deaths from guns. 75,000 deaths from alcohol. Do the Math!"
For what it's worth, the "boozers are losers" slogan is ripped off departed country songwriter Hoyt Axton.
Stan Marsh, a local businessman who enjoys a pop now and again, was not happy with the prospect of leaving his local bar and having to face that condemnation. "It's discrimination against people who drink," he told the Dyersburg State Gazette. So Marsh not only complained to the city, but also tracked down the signmaker's cell-phone number and gave the man, who hasn't publicly been identified, a call:
"He just kept saying Dyersburg needs to be taught a lesson," said Marsh who said the caller hung up on him.
Marsh was never sure what that lesson was. He says the man claimed to be putting the signs up on his own.
Another recollection of the conversation, from the Dyersburg State Gazette:
He quickly found himself in a heated discussion.
"I told him, 'I've been drunk twice this month and I haven't killed anyone yet,'" said Marsh.
Once more, for emphasis: "I've been drunk twice this month and I haven't killed anyone yet,'" said Marsh.
The signs have since been removed.
[WMC-TV / image via Dyersburg State Gazette]
To contact the author of this post, email camille@gawker.com.
America's opportunistic race-hustlers, unsatisfied by their victory in the Trayvon Martin case, won't stop looking for reasons to rile up white people. So now the latest yapping point in our national conversation about race is the murder of Christopher Lane, the white Australian student allegedly killed for kicks by two black teenagers, with a white teenager as their accomplice in the shooting.
In the world of white victimology, this proves that there is a media conspiracy to underplay crime against whites. Where is the outrage over Christopher Lane's killing? Where is it? The outrage? Huh? WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?
If you are one of the angry white dummies asking this question, try a different one: What is the outrage?
Guess what? There isn't any. In this case, as in every other case that the white racial-grievance industry has tried to latch onto after the Martin killing, there is nothing to be scandalized about.
Here's what happened in Oklahoma: a young man was shot to death. The police investigated it as a crime, arrested suspects, and charged them with murder.
No one is on the other side of this case. No one is disputing the principle that people who murder other people should be arrested and tried for it. There may eventually be some disagreement about the application of adult law to juveniles—a genuine point of disagreement in this country at this time—but everyone agrees that the killing of Christopher Lane was a terrible crime and that the perpetrators should be punished.
The reason the killing of Trayvon Martin became a national scandal was that even though an unarmed young man was shot to death, the local authorities decided not to treat it as a crime. That was why it was a major news story. It was not the fact that a person of one particular race killed a person of another particular race; it was how the police and the justice system decided to handle that killing after it happened.
Afterward, when George Zimmerman was finally arrested and put on trial, the white victimology professionals took the opportunity to dust off their old arguments about black-on-black crime and black-on-white crime and why racial profiling is worthwhile. But all of this was in service of making the case that Trayvon Martin deserved to have been shot.
This seems to be confusing people, so let's repeat it: No one is making the case that Christopher Lane deserved to be shot! There is no meaningful analogy to be made to the Martin case, or at least none that is flattering to white people's fear or self-pity. Murder (of white people) remains illegal in America, and it will be punished.
Yet the noise has reached all the way up to Time magazine now. "Don't Ignore Race in Christopher Lane's Murder," writes John McWhorter, who has made a nice career as a writer noticing the things about race that white people want noticed.
But what are white people trying to accomplish, by calling our attention to race here? What does a discussion of supposed black criminality, in general, have to do with the specifics of this case? The individuals who allegedly killed Lane have all been arrested. Should the police in Oklahoma have arrested additional black people (or, you know, black and white people in a 2-to-1 ratio), on principle? It's almost as if the people who want to talk about black criminality don't care about facts.
This just in: Man says something stupid about women.
While discussing the resignation of San Diego mayor Bob Filner
He brings up a great point, oh wait, no he doesn't. If Ryan Gosling were a serial sex-harassing creep, he'd be less cute. And if he were the charming gentleman he's frequently made out to be (including in Kavinoky's hypothesis), he wouldn't have to grab anybody's hands for they'd already be putty in his.
Also, Filner is not Gosling, so moot point.
Lemon and Jenkins both adequately smacked him down, and the imbalance of the universe was restored.
An off-season meeting of the Colorado legislature's Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force erupted in "audible gasps" yesterday after Republican state senator Vicki Marble stunned her colleagues by tying the increased rate of poverty among blacks to their penchant for fried chicken and BBQ.
"When you look at life expectancy, there are problems in the black race," Marble told the committee. "Sickle cell is something that comes up. Diabetes is something that is prevalent in the genetic makeup. Although I gotta say, I've never had better BBQ and better chicken and ate better in my life then when you go down south, I mean, I love it. Everybody loves it."
Marble went on to comment that Mexican are "much thinner" than Mexican-Americans because the former eat "fresh vegetables" while the latter "changed their diet" after coming to the States.
"I've read studies on that," she said.
In fact, a recent UN study showed Mexico was the only country in the world fatter than the United States
Committee member Rep. Rhonda Fields (D) fired back at Marble, calling her remarks "racist."
"I will not engage in a dialog where I am in the company you are using these stereotype references about African Americans and chicken and food," she said. "This is not what this committee is all about. What we are trying to do is come up with meaningful solutions. It’s not about chicken."
Sen. John Kefalas (D), the committee chairman, stepped in and temporarily adjourned the session "so we can all take a deep breath."
Fields was forced to leave to attend a scheduled event, and the issue was not reopened when the committee reconvened later in the day.
In a statement released last night, Marble said her comments "were not meant to be disparaging to any community," and she was "saddened they were taken in that regard." She insisted she took her responsibility seriously and hopes "our work on this committee will offer real solutions to the health and financial challenges of our vulnerable populations."
[screengrab via 9News]
Here is a sentence, in Playboy magazine: “Michiko Kakutani from The New York Times, a reviewer notorious for going completely relentless bitch on many a good book, has always gushed over Díaz’s writing.”
(H/T The Atlantic Wire)
Today, a Tennesseean five-year-old brought a gun to school in his backpack. While the kindergarten student waited for the morning bell in the Westside Elementary cafeteria, the pistol fired one round. Via WMC-TV, the Shelby County Schools' statement:
There is no evidence at this time of harmful intent; however, weapons of any kind are prohibited on campuses, and this student will be disciplined in accordance with the state's zero tolerance policy. The safety of our students and staff is of the utmost importance. Staff is trained to handle emergency situations, and all students were kept safe and calm while this matter was handled.
Unlike this time
[via NY Daily News / photo via Shutterstock]
To contact the author of this post, email camille@gawker.com.
How much would you pay Aziz Ansari to write you a book about modern love and the woes of seeing your crush post a photo of their snacks on Instagram rather than reply to your texts? $3.5 million ($3,500,000)? Sounds about right!
Brooklyn Is Everywhere, And Everywhere Is Brooklyn:
Brooklyn Bowl, a staple of the chic and completely fictional "Wythe Avenue hub," is opening a 78,ooo-square-foot club in Las Vegas, that will be located in an open-air shopping mall on the Vegas strip, at the base of one the world's tallest Ferris Wheels.
“It will feel like you are in Brooklyn," said Peter Shapiro, one of the partners.
Oh, how true.
Since it was uploaded to YouTube three days ago, Georgia Tech sophomore Nick Selby's "epic welcome speech" at this year's Freshman Convocation has gone on to rack up over 1 million views, and score rave reviews on many major news networks and websites including Gawker
But, as with all good things, this too must come with a catch.
It seems Selby's over-the-top oratory to incoming students was lifted almost wholesale from a speech given by Arizona State University debate team champ Andy Stone in 2008 (skip to the 8:40 mark in the video above, and compare with the video below).
Some Internet sleuthing reveals that, back in 2006, Stone became Assistant Coach of the Speech, Theater and Debate Company at Desert Vista High School, which just so happened to count Selby as a member until his graduation last year.
Did Selby straight-up rip off a speech given by his former debate coach, and pass it off as his own? It would seem so.
An unverified Reddit account claiming to belong to the "Georgia Tech Social Media team" confirmed in a Georgia Tech subreddit thread questioning Selby's originality that the speech was indeed "inspired" by Stone, but insists that Selby "made no secret" of the source.
The Georgia Tech account goes on to claims that Selby even went so far as to call Stone and ask him for permission to use his speech.
Some Redditors were willing to cut Selby some slack either way, saying he probably didn't set out to go viral, but at least one noted that this revelation means that the speech is now "a slightly bit less epic."
UPDATE: A George Tech media relations rep just tweeted at me to reiterate the claim that Selby asked permission from Stone before helping himself to the speech. According to the rep, Selby will come clean in a Fox News interview this afternoon.
UPDATE 2: Selby addressed the "inspiration" for his speech on his personal Facebook page.
Marisha Pessl's new 600-page thriller Night Film centers on a fictional recluse named Stanislas Cordova, who made films so horrifically, soul-destroyingly evil they were effectively banned in the U.S. When his beautiful young daughter mysteriously dies, an investigative journalist becomes infected with the need to pursue the truth behind this seemingly sinister family.
Night Film, released Monday, includes an accompanying smart-phone app, which at first seems like a desperate effort to make books "relevant." The application is called "the Night Film Decoder." The Decoder can be used to scan the page whenever the graffiti tag signifying Cordova's cult fan base appears. The decoder then reveals extra features—faux news clips, mocked-up movie posters, and trailers for nonexistent films—called Easter eggs, that act as secondary sources, establishing a reality eternal to the physical text.
They're all awfully acted and designed. A doctor recounting a patient's escape emphasizes words like "confessed" with a Lifetime network flourish. The movie posters boast all the awfulness of 70s cult horror posters, but none of the intriguing weirdness. The one interesting "extra" is a very De-Palma's-Body-Double-ish trailer for Cordova's Lovechild. (Unsurprisingly, Night Film was optioned months before the book came out.)
This interactive app distracts from the written story, and it's not the only element of Night Film that does so. There are photographs of the main characters scattered throughout. "Found footage"—security camera films and man-on-the-street interviews of people waxing about the fictional filmmaker—has been posted to the book's website. It's littered throughout with mocked-up clips from Rolling Stone, Time, Vulture, and Vanity Fair.
This concerted and overwhelming effort to make the Cordova world "realistic" is depressingly evocative of watching a movie made of your favorite book. One of the great satisfactions of reading is the movement between the arbitrary, non-representative symbols on the page and the fleshed-out understanding a reader carries in her head: How each character sounds, what the settings look like, the palpability of interactions. The extras Night Film is eagerly presents limits the reader's abilities and bounds her imaginative space.
Consequently the book is at its best when it emulates a great psychological thriller, where the protagonist's fear is more powerful and scary than the actual threat. The most terrifying villain is the one you don't see, all shadows. Here is one of Pessl's fantastic, pulpishly dramatic paragraphs, where she obeys this rule:
"To watch the film once was to be lost in so many graphic, edge-of-your-seat scenes that when it was over, I remembered feeling vaguely astounded that I'd returned to the real world. Something about the film's darkness made me wonder if I would—as if in witnessing such things I was irrevocably breaking myself in (or just breaking myself), arriving at an understanding about humanity so dark, so deep down inside my own soul, I could never go back to the way I was before."
But Pessl is overeager and over-explains. When the investigative journalist uncovers a new clue, there are sentences like "Of course" or "It had all come together." Pessl's labored sentences too often rely on italics to signal weight and importance to the reader. The book's references are like bumps down the stairs—kalunk Hitchcock, kalunk Woodward and Bernstein, kalunk Pauline Kael. There seems to be a distrust of the reader's ability to make connections, so the basic themes are clearly repeated, dozens of times throughout the 600 pages.
But the ideas of Night Film remain compelling. One fascinating part of the book is about "infected stories." As the investigative journalist hunts down this mysterious filmmaker, people warn him that there are some stories that simply un-chaseable. When the writer meets with one of Cordova's former ingenues, she describes it:
"Surely you've noticed that the space around Cordova distorts. The close you get to him, the speed of light slackens, information gets scrambled, rational minds grow illogical, hysterical. It's warped space-time, like the mass of a giant sun bending the area surrounding it. You reach out to seize something so close to find it was never actually there."
Pessl might have taken a cue from masters of horror, even one of her own creation, and given her book a little more room to breathe.
Goldman Sachs banker Jason Lee was arrested earlier this week after a 20 year old woman accused him of raping her at a rental house in East Hampton, Long Island. According to the New York Times, several East Hampton Town Police officers discovered the victim while responding to an unspecified disturbance at the house Lee was renting with his wife. Lee, speaking through his lawyer, denies everything.
It is unclear how Mr. Lee knew the woman he is accused of assaulting. The police declined to discuss who else was present at the home.
Edward Burke Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Lee, said his client “adamantly denies the allegations levied against him.”
“We look forward to clearing his name in a court of law,” Mr. Burke said.
An online Milken Institute biography from 2009 identifies a Goldman Sachs employee named Jason Lee as a managing director at the bank’s private equity division, where “he has led many of the firm's most complicated financing and risk-management transactions for corporate clients.” (The Times says the Jason Lee arrested in East Hampton is also a managing director in private equity; however, a Goldman receptionist told a local reporter on Wednesday that two employees named Jason Lee work at the bank.)
In court, Lee and his lawyer deliberately avoided discussing Lee’s employer, the East Hampton Star notes:
“He adamantly denies these allegations,” Edward Burke Jr., his attorney, told Justice Cahill. Mr. Burke did not identify the defendant’s employer, saying only that he worked “at 200 West Street” in Manhattan. That address is better known as the Goldman Sachs Tower.
Lee’s bail, set at $25,000, was paid immediately. He is scheduled to appear in East Hampton Justice Court on September 19.
Lee isn’t the first Goldman Sachs employee to be accused of a sex offense: In 2009, Todd Genger, a Goldman attorney, was arrested for soliciting an undercover cop
(Gawker has filed a request for the police report pertaining to Lee’s arrest, and will update when we receive it.)
[Image via AP]
Here are some photos of stars in the Orion nebula. They are the sharpest photos ever taken of the night sky. Ever in human history. Heck, that's something to be proud of. Take a minute out of your busy day to contemplate them. [University of Arizona]
