Russell Brand's revolution may be taking a bit longer to get off the ground than the maverick comedian would like, but that doesn't mean he intends to stop stating his case at every available venue.

Brand spoke recently before a crowd of students at the Cambridge Union, and took the opportunity to reiterate his rallying cry for swift and sudden change.

"They're only in charge of us if we allow it," he told the audience. "Complete noncompliance, complete disobedience, then the alternatives will emerge. We need to create a paradigm that makes the old one obsolete. That's what we have to do."

Per Brand, nothing short of a full blown riot will bring about the sort of real difference that the world truly needs. Anything less will only result in more "drip-fed little measures" from politicians looking to keep their constituents tractable and complacent.

"Oh, well, we've given you recycling bins," Brand said, mocking the lawmakers. "Thanks! The planet's still fucked."

Brand went on to discuss the need to be nice to each other, saying that politics that are about "anything other than 'make sure everyone's getting looked after'" are about "furthering people that are already privileged. That's got to change."

He allowed that most voters are likely aware of the need for change, but noted that the situation was far too gone for simple measures.

His suggestion: Stop voting.

"It's meaningless, it's pointless," Brand said. "It makes no difference. Give us something to vote for, and then we'll vote for it."

The time for being polite is over, Brand told the students.

"There needs to be a defiant stance taken against corporations that, for their own ends, are desecrating our planet," he said. "Now the system in place, the little valves, neat little ejaculations of like apparent power, a little vote — I'm not interested in that. I want fucking bukkake in their faces."

[H/T: Mediaite]

Terrorists have detonated a low-yield nuclear warhead in your city. How long should you hide, and where, to avoid the worst effects of radioactive fallout? We talked to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory atmospheric scientist Michael Dillon to find out.

Yesterday Dillon published a paper on this topic in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. He's spent his career researching how the government should respond to disasters with an airborne component, whether that's a chemical accident, an epidemic, or nuclear fallout. After poring over dozens of studies on how fallout behaves, and analyzing as many factors as possible related to urban detonations, he's come up with a disaster plan that he hopes can be implemented by governments from the local to the federal level.

The best part of Dillon's fallout plan is that it's aimed at people like you and I, who won't have access to information about wind direction and blast magnitude. It's a plan that works even if all you know is that a nuclear bomb has gone off in your city.

This Is Not A Cold War Bomb

When I spoke to Dillon about his work, he was quick to point out that his disaster plan is still theoretical. Nobody has yet had a chance to study a low-yield nuclear blast in a real-world city — "thankfully, these are rare events," Dillon said. But as the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack grows more likely than a Cold War scenario, it's crucial for cities to have plans in place. And that means a major paradigm shift in how we think about nuclear attack.

The classic nuclear attack scenario that most of us imagine comes straight out of the Cold War — or movies like Terminator. Multiple megaton-class bombs go off all over the world. The results are catastrophic, with whole regions burned to a crisp, mass deaths, and a fallout plume that stretches hundreds of miles. But the scenario we're more likely to encounter today involves bombs that are anywhere from .1 kilotons to 10 kilotons. They're small compared to the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and infinitesimal compared to the warheads we had in our Cold War arsenals.

"These events are more like a Katrina-level disaster," Dillon said. "Your city has the potential to survive, and that's what we're planning for."

The chart below gives you a sense of the damage radius of the bombs that Dillon studies, as opposed to Cold War weapons. The worst damage occurs in the pink areas (psi stands for pounds-force per square inch, and is used to measure blast force). People inside the pink dotted line run the risk of getting pretty severe burns, and those outside are more at risk for doses of radiation and injury from fire or other blast damage. What's most important, though, is that you can see the range of radiation danger is much smaller with today's nuclear bomb threats. A 1 kiloton warhead will pose a radiation danger up to 2 kilometers away from ground zero. Compare that to a 10 megaton, Cold War bomb, which irradiates areas as much as 40 kilometers away.

So you can appreciate why a nuclear attack today doesn't have to mean instant death for everyone around — and could even be something that your city would recover from.

Taken from the Student Guide to Federal Nuclear Detonation Response Planning

What To Do When the Bomb Goes Off

If the bomb goes off and you are unhurt in the initial blast, you need to worry about protection from radioactive fallout. Because we're not in a Cold War world anymore, Dillon said, "You don't need a specific fallout shelter to get the protection you need." You just have to be aware of what kinds of buildings will provide adequate shelter and which won't.

Emergency responders measure the effectiveness of a fallout shelter on the "PF" scale (you can see a FEMA guide about that here), but Dillon is assuming you won't have PF numbers on all the buildings in your neighborhood. What you want to do is try to find what he calls "adequate shelter" in the first 30 minutes after the bomb goes off. What is adequate? Said Dillon:

Put as much mass and material weight between you and bomb as possible. Distance [from the blast] is good but weight — heavy things, concrete, large stacks of books, earth — those are good. Go underground, if you can get there. Again, you're looking for concrete roofs and walls. Even just deep inside big buildings. A basement is the classic spot.

Think about your city. Where is the nearest adequate shelter to your home and your work? Is it a subway station? A library with thick concrete walls lined with books? Your basement? A large building with lots of interior rooms that are shielded by many walls? Dillon warns that you want to try to reach this place in 30 minutes, but don't count on being able to drive there. Traffic may be at a standstill. Make plans that will allow you to walk or possibly bicycle to your adequate shelter.

Then the question becomes how long to wait in this shelter until it's safe to go outside. In the movies, of course, we see all kinds of ridiculous scenarios, from people going outside within minutes to whole civilizations remaining underground for centuries. None of those are really accurate, said Dillon.

Your best bet is to stay until emergency responders come. Given that we're talking about a low-yield bomb, which may have a blast radius of less than a mile, this isn't a disaster that has taken out the nation's power structure. Help will arrive soon. But let's say nobody does come. Dillon says his personal preference would be to wait about 12-24 hours before going outside. But, he emphasized, "wait for emergency responders because they'll help with an evacuation route." You don't want to jump out of your fallout shelter and walk right into the path of the radiation.

How Does Fallout Work?

My first reaction to Dillon's advice was disbelief. I could be relatively safe walking out of a fallout shelter less than a day after the blast? The answer is yes, because the most immediate danger is from what's called early fallout, which is comprised of radioactive particles that are heavy enough to fall within hours of the blast. They usually fall in zones fairly close to the blast, depending on wind direction and intensity.

Said Dillon, "It's going to be falling for hours after the blast. These large particles are the most dangerous and have the highest levels of radiation. This is the stuff that's going to make you physically sick immediately." He contrasts the radiation sickness you can get from this early fallout to other kinds of illnesses, like cancer, that you can get many years after radiation exposure. Sheltering from fallout may not prevent cancer in the future, but it will prevent you from dying immediately of radiation exposure.

The other thing to keep in mind is that fallout isn't a magical substance that floats everywhere and gets into everything. "There will exist a physical region that's contaminated with highly radioactive particles," he said. "After leaving the shelter, you want to exit that region." That's where emergency responders can help, of course — they'll be able to tell you how to avoid that zone, and how far away to go. Certainly there are lighter fallout particles that can stay airborne for much longer than the early fallout, but those particles are not going to cause immediate radiation sickness — which is what you're trying to avoid in the bomb's aftermath.

Dillon added that the early, dangerous fallout also "decays really fast." The "dangerous zone shrinks quickly, and it's a lot safer to be outside in 24 hours" than it is an hour after the blast.

Our pop culture is still straining to catch up with a world where nuclear blasts result in a scenario more like Katrina than On the Beach. We've been trained to think of nuclear attack as the end of the world, but it's like many other disasters: horrific, but something that we can survive. While we're waiting for a movie that realistically depicts a low-yield nuclear attack in the post-Cold War era, we can start planning our real-life escape routes and shelters in the citiscapes around us. One day, that big ugly building downtown with the thick concrete walls could save your life.

Read the full scientific study in Proceedings of the Royal Society A

Unless otherwise specified, all charts taken from the US national security staff publication Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation

In case you needed a reminder not to give money to someone you met on an online dating site, here's one: Last year, a woman was scammed out of more than $500,000 by a Nigerian scam artist that she met on ChristianMingle.com.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the con artist, posing as a British citizen working on a Scottish oil rig, persistently pursued the 66-year-old victim, repeatedly calling her at her San Jose, California home, and sending her texts and flowers. Eventually, he asked her for a loan for a non-existent business, even going so far as to make a fake website.

The woman, whose name was not released, agreed and gave him money from her retirement account, including one lump sum of $200,000 which she wired to a Turkish bank account last year. Shortly after that payment, she became concerned that she'd be scammed and alerted prosecutors in Santa Clara County, who contacted her bank.

Wisdom Onokpite, an aquaintence of the fraudster, was arrested by Turkish police when he attempted to withdraw the money and is being prosecuted with fraud.

The actual fraudster's identity is still unknown, though his Skype and email accounts were traced to Nigeria.

There's now a layer of corporate muscle standing between window-smashers and Google's soft, fleshy staffers: Reuters reports San Francisco's highly controversial campus shuttles are now being guarded.

On two successive days this week, a pair of young men stood on a San Francisco street waiting for the special "Gbus" that ferries Google staffers to the Internet company's Mountain View headquarters 34 miles to the South.

Dressed casually in jeans and wearing black ski hats or hoods, the two men did not stand out from the dozens of other young tech workers waiting for the Google bus. On close inspection, each sported the curly wire of an earpiece, and one occasionally jotted notes down on a yellow stick-it pad.

If Google would put face computers on these guys, it would really help quicken the inevitable descent into sci-fi movie turf, but no dice for now.

If you see some Silicon Valley sentinels, snap a pic and send it to me.

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Today, the New York Times published an article about Israeli journalist Itay Hod outing “an unnamed Republican congressman” in a Facebook post “that might be described as the world’s most obvious blind item.”

What Hod failed to do, reporter Jacob Bernstein notes, “is actually publish the congressman’s name.” Curiously, Bernstein doesn’t name the congressman either, despite having written an entire article about his dramatic outing. That’s because his employer suffers from a paralyzing anxiety about closeted gay people, and others’ stories about them. It is both entranced and repulsed by the politics of outing, and it can’t seem to stop writing about them in spite of its institutional disdain. It’s time for the Times to get over it.

The congressman in question is Rep. Aaron Schock of Illinois. But saying this plainly would violate the special Times protocol for discussing the existence of gay people who prefer not to say so—an opaque, coded system in which reporters use certain words, and emphasize otherwise benign biographical details, to signal a person’s homosexuality. Times reporters appear to be forbidden from saying “So-and-so is gay” unless so-and-so explicitly says they are. Even if the reporter knows they are!

So instead of stating that Schock is gay, or is commonly understood to be gay, Bernstein obliquely refers to “the congressman’s Instagram account, which included photos of him lifting weights at the gym and following the newly out diver Tom Daley.” Just as chief television critic Alessandra Stanley noted that Anderson Cooper refuses to “talk about his love life” despite “building a confessional talk show wrapped around his good looks, high spirits and glamorous adventures.” Just as political correspondent Mark Leibovich described Politico reporter Mike Allen as “a never-married 45-year-old grind known as Mikey.” (Leibovich’s column is often cited in political-media circles as an especially notorious example.)

Most recently, the Times has hint-hinted that future MSNBC host Ronan Farrow “prefers not to address rumors about whom he's dating,” “is guarded about his private life,” and that he shows up at a lot of parties with former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, who is gay. (The New York Post, by contrast, is now perfectly comfortable reporting that Farrow likes guys and girls—which hasn’t always been the case.) The entire topic of gayness seems to suspend the Gray Lady’s basic commitment to clarity.

At the same time, the Times has taken a heightened interest in outlets who report, whether in passing or in a standalone story, that a public figure is gay. After Gawker reported in October that Shepard Smith was dating, in public, a 26-year-old boyfriend who worked under him at Fox News, the Times printed three different columns about how we had “outed” him. Yet the paper’s panicked reaction—it’s not newsworthy! it is newsworthy! we’re not sure!—suggested that its coverage up until that point had been guided less by reason and more by visceral fascination.

Indeed, David Carr, who wrote the first column, confessed that he was “obsessing over someone obsessing over someone else’s sexuality.” Which was undeniably true. But the obsession is institutional. The Times seems to understands itself as a paternal guardian of closeted celebrities, both when it dances around their sexuality in its reporting and when it writes multiple stories about big, bad, unrespectable outlets like Gawker who name those celebrities’ boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s a really odd pose in either case. After all, the most effective way of protecting a celebrity's closeted life is to write nothing about him.

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

[Art by Jim Cooke]

Texting and driving is a really bad idea. But some people need to learn that lesson firsthand in order to fully comprehend it.

Michael James Woody Jr. of Fort Myers, Florida, is one of those people.

The 23-year-old was tailed by a Fort Myers PD cruiser earlier this month after he was spotted driving erratically.

Officer Ivan Moorer followed Woody's 2004 Pontiac Grand Am a short distance down Veronica Shoemaker Boulevard before Woody decided to make a turn onto Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

A fateful decision indeed, and the subsequent consequence was caught on Moorer's dash cam.

Luckily for Woody, he managed to walk away uninjured. Luckily for the officer, too.

[H/T: HyperVocal]

The new VP/ publisher of Sports Illustrated is Brendan Ripp—who happens to be the son of Joe Ripp, who is the CEO of Time Inc., the company that owns Sports Illustrated. Huh. Seems strange to see this sort of nepotism in the media world.

In response to the uproar over NSA spying allegations, President Obama called for modest reforms to federal data collection Friday in a long, complicated speech that tried to thread a difficult needle, appearing adequately patriotic and tough on terror while respecting Americans' civil liberties.

It was not clear that he succeeded. U.S. spooks "are not abusing authorities to read your private emails or listen to your phone calls," he said, but later added, "I believe critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards, this type of program could be used to yield more information about our private lives, and open the door to more intrusive, bulk collection programs."

Obama sounded every bit like a law professor at the rostrum, or an appellate attorney approaching the bench, discussing wonky complexities and subtleties with a gloss that lent itself to few bite-able moments… and few clear answers for everyday Americans.

Here were some of POTUS' specific recommendations:

• Keep the FBI's controversial "National Security Letters" program going, to subpoena data from the companies that collect it. But Obama assured listeners that he would make that and other intelligence processes more "transparent."
• End the metadata-collection program "as it currently exists." What's that mean? In part: "Effective immediately, we will only pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three."
• "I have directed that we take the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas." Those safeguards will be set by U.S. intelligence collectors and Attorney General Eric Holder.
• "Unless there is a compelling national security purpose – we will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies."
• Appoint a bunch of new senior officials in the State Department and White House to oversee privacy safeguards.
• Open a blue-ribbon panel "to lead a comprehensive review of big data and privacy."

Further threading the needle, Obama acknowledged in his speech that much of his knowledge about the extent of the NSA's collection methods had come from the leaks by Edward Snowden, while still coming short of thanking or pardoning him.

"Given the fact of an open investigation, I'm not going to dwell on Mr. Snowden's actions or motivations," Obama said:

I will say that our nation's defense depends in part on the fidelity of those entrusted with our nation's secrets. If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will never be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy.

[Photo credit: AP]

The Marine Corps Special Operations Command's official Twitter account urged its followers Friday morning not to be "lone shooters" over a weekend dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed by a lone rifleman. The Corps quickly and wisely deleted the tweet.

[Via Kelsey Atherton]

That California drought emergency we told you about yesterday is official now. Governor Jerry Brown officially declared it this morning in San Francisco. "We ought to be ready for a long, continued, persistent effort to restrain our water use," says Brown. If it's yellow, let it mellow, etc.

Last night, TV network EPIX was supposed to premiere Patton Oswalt's new comedy special online. But something went wrong and the special didn't air. Oswalt, as you might expect, was not pleased and took to Twitter to let EPIX know exactly how badly they fucked up. And then—to really rub it in—he tweeted some fake material from the show, including references to Judy Blume, Led Zeppelin, his own naked body, and Pulp Fiction.

Uh, yeah...sorry guys. @EpixHD fucked up. My special airs TOMORROW night, 10pm EST. NOT tonight. Watch @parksandrecnbc instead.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

Countdown clock: finished. Special: unavailable. This is fucking embarrassing. Sorry, everyone. Guess we'll try again tomorrow night.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

Hmm... The countdown clock was a failure. Just 'cause @EpixHD is completely incompetent, doesn't mean you, the customer, should suffer...

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

Right now, I'm going to Tweet as much of my first (and last) @EpixHD special as I can remember. Here goes...

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

Okay, so, Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" plays in its entirety (250K). Fog. During the closing riff, I rise from the floor, nude... #special

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

...except for a Milwaukee Brewers cap and a throat amulet with the word "STRYOFOAM" and one of those "slash/circle" symbols over it.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

Then I recite the 3rd chapter of @judyblume WIFEY while goose stepping through a tiny model of Bonn, Germany made of Legos.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

I then do twenty minutes of soap bubble sculptures while T'Pao's "Heart and Soul" plays on a loop (2K)...

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

...and I finish with an impression of Rhea Perlman doing Jule's speech from the end of PULP FICTION. More fog. Throw Brewers cap to crowd.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

It would've been glorious. Thanks for nothing, @EpixHD. Learn to run a fucking website. (Drops mic)

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

And now they just put it up on their fucking website. Seamless launch, @EpixHD. GODDAMIT: http://t.co/wZcuKDk2BT

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 17, 2014

[via Splitsider]

The Nybro Action Team consists of Hjalmar Sveinbjőrnsson and Alex Bejerstrand, two under-employed friends living in Nybro, a small industrial town in southern Sweden. Hjalmar is a chef; Alex takes woodworking courses. They will be recapping Season 3 of HBO's Girls.

Nybro action team reporting in ... a little late with episode two, as both episodes were aired in the same night. We have normally upheld great standards of journalistic excellency in our work, where the pain of the two outweighs the pain of the many, sacrificing ourselves like the brave war zone journalists, reporting in the midst of the horror that is often unfolding, often because certain parental figures cut their off-spring away from their money-squirting tits of Liberty.

VIVA REVOLUTION !

Also Gawker HQ left out the information that they were going to show two episodes the same night, and looks like they hired a man from 1996 to make the DVD menu with the copy of the first half of the season, terrible menu, same episode twice in the row, what is going on?

Gawker is clearly hiring people on drugs.

But let's get to the recap. Alex is not joining tonight as his internet connection is going to be installed in three days, he has seen it though and has send me his "pointers."

So let's get started, if someone cares to remember last episode then Jessa just got kicked out of rehab for totally "badass" reasons.

Having sex for acceptance and freeing a closeted lesbian just like a magician would with a black dove, or a white dove depending on where you stood on that white Santa, black Santa debate Fox news was hosting last Christmas.

Start with Hanna wakes up Adam, he falls naked out of bed like the "funny and sexy" character he is, he needs to rent a car, because she is not old enough, they are in the car together with Shoshanna, singing some terrible pop-song.

Adam as the representative of the male gender, he smashes the radio with his manly man hands and the group moves on to a conversation of the "models of female friendship" that I am probably not allowed to discuss because I was born with a dick and you are the internet.

Hanna starts out by pointing how much writing time she lost, she hopes Jessa will appreciate that, or at least some years later when she sees some of Hanna's work.

Adam is disagreeing with this whole thing, kind of surprising hearing it from him, but then his response to "female friendship" is not. If the guys here are wondering what it is, so am I, probably something wonderful and magical, filled with mysticism and cheerful laughter.

Not far from the erotica films of the '80s.

This conversation is all about male beasts and female beauties, the brute and the innocent "virgin."

Jessa meets up with her only rehab friend, some cheeky older English gentleman, they share a deep philosophical conversation in their English accents, the only way philosophy can be done right, about age and limitation of the mind.

The gang, or Hanna, Adam, and Shoshanna have stopped at a restaurant, Shoshanna asks Adam what is his favorite utensil but he has never thought of it but picks fork, she then blows his mind by suggesting "clouds" because they are fluffy … what about sporks?

Hanna is back at the table, but then proclaims she has to pee but actually just calling Marnie, that is at home with her mother, as they leave the restaurant, Dumdum or the new nickname fitting for the character Shoshanna is carrying a rocking chair—she has just bought a rocking chair for 15 bucks—to make her friend back home jealous, I am a bit jealous.

Hanna sitting in the backseat next to the chair and is complaining about how bored she is, Adam says something "new age and cynical" about boredom, Dumdum says something ignorant, in short; being bored is for losers and I love kittens.

The struggling writer hates the fact she can't write about this boring road trip, that it has no good metaphors, then she moves on complaining about how pointy the rocking chair is, then sticking her head between the rocking chair legs and proclaiming that she is stuck, is Adam the rocking chair?

(Mother fucking skrillex.)

They are in the hotel room, Adam is basically ordering everyone to bed, but the girls want to play a female friendship game called "truth or dare," of course Adam has never heard about it, not because he is a man, but because he is a "bad boy hipster," or bbipster, pronounced with ironical stammer, his first "dare" is to kiss Hanna, he does, they fuck.

Dumdum bails out of the room and ends up falling asleep on the hallway where Hanna finds her the next day, and does not give a flying fuck about where her friend slept, it might be because Dumdum view of the world is like of … a barbie girl?, made of plastic?, it's fantastic? And she actually hates her but the laws of "FEMALE FRIENDSHIP" prohibit her to expressing it directly.

But anyway they talk about Jessa, and share very different views of her, Hanna finds her to be a bottomless pit of drug-abusing depression but Dumdum just says she is just having fun and had anyway made some good "rich husband" investment and cashed in.

They are back on the road, heading to pick up Jessa. Hanna asks if they can stop because she is feeling nauseous, Adam stops, but he exits the car to go for a sarcastic hike, ends up leaving his girlfriend behind and is followed by Dumdum on his short journey of discovery, Hanna is shown with her butt out lying in the leaves while Dumdum tells him how giving he is as a boyfriend.

We are back at the rehab center, Jessa and the older junky friend are having a gossip pissing contest that ends up with him discussing when they would "properly fuck," Jessa is not on the same pages, as in "we are never going to fuck," old junky reminds her that they already gave each other the look, the look of "we are going to fuck," Jessa does not agree, the old guy backs down, eats some stashed Purps, Jessa looks on disapproving.

Hanna and Dumdum are waiting in the reception for her to be released, the head doctor of the rehab informs them that they don't think she is ready to be released but can't stop her, also that they could have driven her to the airport, but she refused because her friends were going to get her.

Hanna is mad, Adam is furious and storms out, Dumdum goes and bums a cigarette off the "shakers" (people fresh into rehab).

Jessa and Hanna are outside, alone having a conversation about how angry Hanna is at her, one unconvincing apology from Jessa and she has moved on to talk about her ego-destructive hairstyle, I basically have the same one, but I look fantastic, they make up.

We are back in the car, show is hopefully ending now, Adam offers to help her find a meeting, Jessa is like "maybe," to that he answers sarcastic, road-trippy exit music plays.

THE END

There is like nothing happening in this show, AGAIN, somehow slower then the first episode of the season.

Maybe we are building to some amazing plot twists!

But this is Hjalmar and the Nybro Action Team, recapping Girls a.k.a "the worst people in your friend group."

In the "golden days" of this great nation, families would join together in their SUVs and journey to glorious "Big Box" stores, where they would wander for hours, lost, accumulating crap. Is America in danger of losing this hallowed socioeconomic tradition?

Mom and dad are divorced. The SUV was carjacked by one of the unemployed young fellas who lurk just outside the Wendy's drive-thru lane. Even worse, people these days increasingly insist upon doing their shopping on the internet, leaving our nation's grand Big Box stores as large, empty warehouses, whose depressing qualities become more and more pronounced the fewer customers they have. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is more than just an anecdote that grandpa's been muttering ever since they mentioned it on 60 Minutes; it's all too real, and it's happening with terrifying speed.

Retailers got only about half the holiday traffic in 2013 as they did just three years earlier...

Online sales increased by more than double the rate of brick-and-mortar sales this holiday season. Shoppers don't seem to be using physical stores to browse as much, either. Instead, they seem to be figuring out what they want online then making targeted trips to pick it up from retailers that offer the best price. While shoppers visited an average five stores per mall trip in 2007, today they only visit three, ShopperTrak's data shows.

Malls are dying. Amazon is booming. People are too lazy even to make their way to vending machines. Could this be the end of our hero, The Good Old American Big Box Store?

We as a nation have never been that lucky, I'm afraid. Once the Russian computer hackers drain all of our bank accounts, we'll be right back in Target, buying Cheetos with spare change.

[Photo: Flickr]

TLC's Here Comes Honey Boo Boo returned for a third season last night. Where does the time go? It seems like only yesterday that concerned TV viewers were losing their shit over these people who can't seem to keep theirs (or anything else up their asses) in. Now, the Honey Boo Boo family seems just kind of...normal.

Or maybe it's that we've seen the extent of what they have to offer at this point. This fumbling discussion about sex that Mama June had with her children during the second of the back-to-back premiere episodes was predictably goofy and unhelpful. It included established terms from the clan's lexicon like "vajiggle jaggle." It was full of food analogies to the extent that Jessica commented, "It just kinda made me hungry," upon reflection. That's a good punchline, as was the close-up of the sole Fruit Loop on the family's carpet ("Fruit Loop" is another euphemism for vagina that Mama June employed).

More than ever, this family exists on camera as a comedy troupe. They've always gotten a kick out of themselves and putting on a show, and their ability to do so allows for plenty of sitting-around-the-house moments that don't have the high-concept, contrived plot lines that plague other reality shows as they run through seasons, the novelty wears off, and it gets harder to justify their continued existence. I think these people are good at what they do—this is a funny vignette. But the self-consciousness is by now unmistakable.

Self-loathing New York Times thought-leader David Brooks has an admonition for everyone today: You do not understand this "income inequality" you are all talking about. People assume that just because the very richest people have ever more money, and the much greater numbers of poor people have less money, this constitutes a systemic problem:

If you have a primitive zero-sum mentality then you assume growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor, but, in reality, the two sets of problems are different, and it does no good to lump them together and call them "inequality."

Rich people's claim on an unequal share of the money is so unrelated to poor people's unequal share of the money, in fact, that after this paragraph, Brooks never mentions the rich-people part again. Some sets of problems just aren't worth trying to do anything about.

But the poor! Afflicted as they are by "high dropout rates, the disappearance of low-skill jobs, breakdown in family structures and so on"—what shall we do about them?

If you think the problem is "income inequality," then the natural response is to increase incomes at the bottom, by raising the minimum wage.

Or, perhaps, incomes at the bottom could be increased by taking a greater share of money from the rich and giving it to the poor, directly, through progressive taxation and welfare? But that would imply that the rich and the poor are part of the same system, which we have already established they are not. The people who derive abundant profit from current economic conditions and the people who are unable to find jobs in the current economic conditions—what do they have in common? Nothing that David Brooks can see.

No, the problems of the poor are that they are trapped by "complex social, cultural, behavioral and economic problems," by which Brooks mostly means bad behavior: "single motherhood...high school dropout rates...the fraying of social fabric...behaviors that damage their long-term earning prospects." These are "complex" (again!) "and morally fraught" issues.

The "fraught" part is that small-minded liberals still get mad when you blame poor people for ruining their own lives by being morally defective. This prevents everyone from being able to implement policies that truly help the poor:

Democrats often see low wages as both a human capital problem and a problem caused by unequal economic power. Republicans are more likely to see them just as a human capital problem. If we're going to pass bipartisan legislation, we're going to have to start with the human capital piece, where there is some agreement, not the class conflict piece, where there is none.

(Since Brooks has taken a passing interest in the question of smarm, let's note that arguing that reasonable bipartisan legislation should start with one party's agenda topmost is definitive political smarm.)

"Human capital" is the thought-leader way to talk about moral inferiority without seeming to scold. The problem with the poor is that they just aren't valuable enough. They make poor decisions, like dropping out of school or being born to single mothers, which prevent them from being the kind of workers our society needs.

Oh, another problem is that there are "no jobs for young men." Brooks mentions this fact throughout his column—"de-industrialization," "they are not working full-time or at all"—yet never names a single policy that would directly address it, as part of his "policy revolution." The alternative to primitive economic thinking, it seems, is magical thinking.

I understand why Town & Country shoehorned three techies into their "Sexiest Bachelors 2014" list. If coders are the new bankers, and bankers were the new imperial vassal lords (or something), it fits. To a regressive glossy, powerful parvenues are the best bachelors—but try not picking the creepiest in Startupland.

Numbers 32, 33, and 34—a techie tool-bag trifecta—are Jack Dorsey, Joe Lonsdale, and Evan Spiegel.

Jack Dorsey is known for betraying everyone close to him, writing bad poetry, and taking terrifying stoic serial selfies. Town & Country notes "The SF-based Twitter co-founder became a billionaire last year but still rides the bus." The bus? Laa-aaadies! I'm also pretty sure he's not a bachelor, but whatever.

Next up is Joe Lonsdale, who T&C notes is a "protégé," of arch-villain technolibertarian Peter Thiel, and can boast co-founder status at Palantir—easily one of the most unsettlingly sinister private companies in existence. Make sure you keep a password on your phone around this stud!

Finally, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, who also made headlines for betraying a best friend, and then turning down an unfathomably large amount of money. "Patience or hubris?," Town & Country asks. Most recently he spurned his reality television train wreck girlfriend in a failed attempt to fuck Taylor Swift.

Why not pick Eric Schmidt, or Dave Morin? At least they'll show you a good time

But these are our new captains of industry, our new sex symbols, our newly desirous. It takes a lot to make a bachelor list jerkoff like this guy seem relatively benign.

One-armed, no-legged teenager Nick Santonastasso loves the Walking Dead. He's also made a name for himself on the internet pulling zombie pranks on unsuspecting victims. So it made sense for Walking Dead producers to fly him to Tokyo—where the cast and crew was gathered for a press junket—so he could pull an excellent prank on Norman Reedus, aka Daryl Dixon on the show.

With the help of the show's award-winning makeup team and star Andrew Lincoln, he pulls it off. Even better: the stunt was part of an on-going campaign to get Santonastasso a role on the show.

[via Uproxx]

Despite years of negative publicity over Florida's "Stand Your Ground" self-defense law, lawmakers are close to expanding it to protect gunmen who fire warning shots or wave weapons in a threatening manner—and they're doing it with a bill written by a top NRA lobbyist, Gawker has learned.

The bill is sponsored chiefly by two National Rifle Association members, Republicans Sen. Greg Evers and Rep. Neil Combee, with a longstanding history of support for the gun lobby. But they did not write the bill, one of the legislators told Gawker in an interview: That honor fell to former NRA president and current gun lobbyist Marion Hammer.

That revelation is just the latest chapter in Hammer's nearly four-decade NRA career, marked by ever-expanding pro-gun laws in Florida that become model legislation for other states. She was instrumental in the state becoming the first to issue across-the-board concealed weapons permits to residents in the '80s, and she almost singlehandedly created Stand Your Ground in 2005 in similar fashion, feeding language for the bill to its two sponsors—one of whom was Evers' immediate predecessor in the Senate.

Now, she's put her imprint on a bill that would allow Floridians to openly brandish guns for the first time, and could lead to more permissive open-carry laws or lighter requirements for licensing in the future.

The current bill would amend the state's expansive Stand Your Ground law—which permits residents to use deadly force in numerous circumstances—so that it also allows the nebulous "threatened use of force." In effect, it means that gun owners could walk free for brandishing their gun in a threatening manner or firing a shot indiscriminately to "warn" a potential assailant.

That also means gun owners would get blanket immunity from the state's "10-20-life" law, which mandates an automatic 10-year sentence for anyone accused of flashing or using a gun in the commission of a felony. Numerous Florida politicians, including Jeb Bush, have long credited that measure with significantly decreasing the state's gun crimes.

Ironically, the NRA originally lobbied in favor of those mandatory sentencing minimums for gun-brandishing Floridians. In 1999, Hammer stood beside then-Gov. Jeb Bush as he signed "10-20-life" into law. That was part of the pro-gun lobby's longstanding dictum that "we don't need new gun laws, we need to enforce the ones that are already on the books." But in this case, the NRA wants to do away with a gun law that's been on the books for nearly 15 years—a law that it helped pass.

Evers proved eager to work with the NRA on the current warning shot bill. "This was an issue that I had been looking at for a while," Evers said, when Hammer "called me up and told me that she was working on a draft of some language that Rep. Combee was bringing to the floor of the House. I told her that I would take care of it." After Combee filed his bill last autumn, Evers said, "I just used the same language as he had."

If the NRA was looking for an ally in the legislature, it couldn't have done better than Evers, a lifetime member of the organization. When he was looking to make the jump up from a House seat to the Senate in 2009, the gun group put up 32 "membership drive" billboards in Evers' district featuring his face. The company that leased those billboards to the NRA, at a six-figure discount, had just received a sweetheart deal from then-Rep. Evers—an arrangement that resulted in a grand jury investigation for Evers and Hammer, which "concluded laws were broken, but charges were never filed because the illegal acts could not be pinned on any one person," according to the Florida Times/Union.

"A person with a firearm is a citizen," Evers said in a recent committee hearing defending the warning shot bill. "A person without a firearm is a victim."

Rep. Combee, who did not respond to requests for comment in time for this story, also is an NRA member and is endorsed by the group's "Political Victory Fund."

Combee had unexpected backup when he introduced the warning shot bill in the state House. It came from a freshman Democratic representative who hails from the bluest, most pro-gun-control part of the state, Rep. Katie Edwards of Broward County.

When she ran for office in 2012, her challenger in the Democratic primary asked why Edwards, a self-styled South Florida progressive, had an "A" rating from the NRA. Edwards reassured voters in the left-leaning district that she had disagreements with the gun lobby and saw her NRA endorsement as a distraction from other issues, like jobs, education, and finance. "This is political posturing," she said. "Of all the issues we are facing, this is not in the forefront of the voters' minds."

Yet when she became the warning shot bill's "prime co-sponsor" last fall—in effect, a wingman for Combee and a provider of bipartisan cover in the Legislature—pro-gun legislation suddenly became very important to her. "The people I represent, the people we represent, need not be required, or have imposed upon them, a duty to retreat," Edwards said. "I won't turn my back on responsible self-defense laws."

After learning of the subject of this story this week, Edwards canceled a scheduled interview with Gawker.

So far, the warning shot bill appears destined for passage. It has sailed through every committee that's reviewed it in the largely Republican-led Legislature, gaining 42 House co-sponsors, including 11 Democrats.

Bizarrely, Evers, the bill's key Senate sponsor, told Gawker that he doesn't believe in firing warning shots. When asked whether the practice was contrary to common gun-safety protocols, he said: "Does it run counter to my beliefs? Yes. You don't pull the gun unless you're willing to use it, and I don't mean [for] warning shots."

Nevertheless, he said, the right to fire wide was a "constitutional right" that "should be left up to the individual."

Few graphic-design institutions are (or were) as highly regarded as Hoefler & Frere-Jones, a small New York City type foundry whose perfectly crafted typefaces—including Gotham, Whitney, and Champion—saturate media, advertising, entertainment, and politics. Obama tapped the company to create a custom font for his second presidential campaign. Now the two sides of the ampersand are at war over who actually owns the company.

Tobias Frere-Jones quit earlier this month, and yesterday filed a lengthy complaint against his now-former colleague Jonathan Hoefler. The document alleges that when Hoefler recruited Frere-Jones—and his existing “dowry fonts”—to join what was then (and remains, legally) the Hoefler Type Foundry, Hoefler orally promised Frere-Jones a 50 percent stake in the company. After supposedly delaying for several years, by Frere-Jones’s account, Hoefler reneged in October 2013 and transferred the stake to his own wife.

The complaint was set in Arial, a universally despised ripoff of Helvetica.

Frere-Jones’s filing starts right off by calling Hoefler’s conduct “the most profound treachery” and goes on to paint himself as a trusting design genius wronged by his vulgar and untalented associate: “Hoefler’s principal role was to run the business side of the company and use his ‘client-hustling skills’ to sell Frere-Jones’s work.”

Hoefler responded to the complaint today through a statement from the company’s general counsel, which reads, in part:

Following his departure, Tobias filed a claim against company founder Jonathan Hoefler. Its allegations are not the facts, and they profoundly misrepresent Tobias's relationship with both the company and Jonathan. [...] It goes without saying that all of us are disappointed by Tobias's actions. The company will vigorously defend itself against these allegations, which are false and without legal merit.

The statement was set in Mercury, a typeface Hoefler created in 1996 for Esquire.

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

[Photo credit: Associated Press]