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Silicon Valley Legend Compares Techie Backlash to Nazi Rampage

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Silicon Valley Legend Compares Techie Backlash to Nazi Rampage

Silicon Valley has never been known for its appreciation of subtleties. Case in point: eminent venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who co-founded mega-firm Perkins Caufield & Byers, just wrote the most disgustingly tone deaf op-eds on class tensions we've ever seen.

Titled "Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?," the brief letter in the Wall Street Journal accomplishes nothing more than a series of horrible attempts at analogy:

I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

In short, criticizing the techno-affluent, and their at times unwanted transformation of San Francisco, is tantamount to one of the most horrific events in Western history. A critique of hubristic, tech-enabled culture shift is put on the same moral grounds as an nightmarish assault against Jews and Jewish-owned property:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay.

[...]

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

A rock through the window of a private Google shuttle, the precursor to the Holocaust—close enough. It'd be one thing if this were just another San Francisco wackjob on Medium—but this is a pioneering voice in the history of venture capital, in the very history of Silicon Valley. And this is how he thinks.

Photo: Getty/Hulton


Three people were killed this morning when someone opened fire at Columbia Mall in Maryland, adding

Act Like A Child, For Fitness

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Act Like A Child, For Fitness

Gawker's longtime disdain for SoulCycle's fiendish intensity, and all the evil that stationary biking harbors, may finally be coming to a triumphant end. A new fitness trend among urbane New Yorkers with golden-lined pockets, as the NY Times reports, is acting like you are a wittle, wittle baby. Classes have popped up among the pricier zip codes of Manhattan and Brooklyn to encourage the health-conscious to have a little juvenile fun while they sweat, using the long-dormant concept of "recess" as their marketing pillar.

Reporter Julia Lawlor explored the Freudian travails of exercise classes geared toward fully grown adults with mirthful inner beings at the Upper West Side's Reebok Sports Club/NY. Predictably, she was disappointed at the lack of hide-and-seek:

We formed a big circle, and she asked us to call out our names and our favorite childhood games: Hopscotch, dodge ball, volleyball, kickball and hide-and-seek were mentioned, though to what end, I'm not sure. (We never got around to playing any of them.)

The class began to lighten up—and intensify—when participants were asked to imitate different animals.

For the "gorilla," we moved across the floor in a squat, reaching with both hands to the side to touch the floor, then shuffling our feet laterally to keep up with our hands. For the "inchworm," we bent forward with legs straight, then walked our hands out until we were in plank position. Once there, keeping our legs straight, we walked our feet up to our hands again, and advanced — oh so slowly — across the floor. For the "crabwalk," we sat with bent knees with our palms behind us on the floor, then raised our hips and crawled sideways.

Despite how tantalizingly fun this all sounds, Lawlor was unimpressed. In a Lord of the Flies-esque twist, she spitefully exposes her "help-up" partner as the weaker playground mate:

Ms. Karole made me feel better by confessing that she couldn't do a wheelbarrow push-up, either.

The class ends with Lawlor expressing her renewed "energy" and Karole's desire for a Jacuzzi and an Advil. The cost for Benjamin Buttoning yourself into Adonis shape starts at $35, and peaks at $50. But shilling out the dough might be worth it: the charge for visiting a NYC playground unaccompanied by a minor can come with a $1,000 fine, or 90 days in jail.

When reached for comment, one unnamed third-grader threw back a snifter of Evan Williams, saying he was "too busy with filing my taxes for this cockamamie bullshit."

[Image via Shuttershock]

3 Dead After Shooting at Maryland Mall

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3 Dead After Shooting at Maryland Mall

Today at 11:15 a.m., someone opened fire inside the Mall in Columbia, in Columbia, Maryland, leaving three people dead including the person believed to be the shooter.

One of the three bodies was found beside a gun and ammunition, which is what has lead the Howard County Police Department to assume that person was the shooter. They have not yet said if the shooter took his own life or was shot by someone else, or if the two victims were targeted.

Already this week, one person was killed on the campus of South Carolina State University and another at Purdue University. Shots were reportedly fired at the University of Oklahoma on Wednesday, and earlier in the week a BART officer in San Francisco accidentally shot one of his colleagues dead.

[photo via @KellyfromABC2]

French President Françoise Hollande Bids Adieu to First Lady

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French President Françoise Hollande Bids Adieu to First Lady

As was speculated in Sky News two weeks ago, French president Françoise Hollande has ended his relationship with political journalist and first lady Valérie Trieweiler, according to a statement he made to Agence France Presse. The news comes after French tabloid Closer published several pages of photos of the president leaving the house of his supposed mistress, actress Julie Gayet.

Closer committed to removing the photos from their site and pulling print copies from newsstands, but apparently the damage had already been done. As Hollande told AFP, "I make it known that I have put an end" to his relationship with Trieweiler, who spent a week in the hospital following the scandal's exposure.

The citizens of France were reportedly blithe regarding the affair, while Hollande spoke out against the tabloid, stating that he "profoundly deplores the violations of the respect of private life, to which he has the right, like any citizen." From a country whose language deals in words like "blasé" and "ennui" we're sure that this recent development won't shake France too deeply.

[Image via AP]

Don't Worry About Bringing Weed To Aspen's Airport

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Don't Worry About Bringing Weed To Aspen's Airport

When Colorado legalized pot, millions of people in other states fantasized about buying a bunch of weed and bringing it back home. One guy apparently tried just that recently, and though he got caught nothing really happened to him

Earlier this week, TSA officials at Aspen-Pitkin Country Airport in Aspen confiscated 36 ounces of "marijuana-infused edibles" (the possibilities!) from a traveler's luggage. The TSA turned the case over to the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, who was basically like ".....eh?" According to the sheriff's office, they declined to prosecute because the man wasn't violating state law by possessing the weedfood.

The office's spokesperson said that once a passenger boards a plane and gets in the air he or she is then subject to federal laws, but if the TSA doesn't confiscate your pot then what's going to happen once you're in the air? The case highlights what is new territory for federal, state, and local officials collaborating together in post-legalization Colorado.

The AP talked to a Colorado attorney named Lauren Maytin who consults with dispensaries, and she said that it appears as if federal agencies are not interested in prosecuting people attempting to transport "personal" amounts of pot, especially in edible form. Instead, they're turning people over to local authorities who have so far decided to cut the "offenders" loose.

What a civilized world!

[image via Getty]

Teenage Dominos: Suicide, Mimicry, and The Internet

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Teenage Dominos: Suicide, Mimicry, and The Internet

Some people peak in high school. I wasn’t so lucky. I lost a lot of sleep as a teenager, lying in bed with my eyes glued to the stick-on glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, trying to figure out a way to dodge the assaults from older girls that plagued me each day at John Jay High School in Westchester, New York.

“Bully” wasn’t a buzzword back then. I came of age when the internet was but an adolescent: before YouTube, before FaceBook, back when LiveJournal was the only thing out there and the only person I was able to meet on that site was a 30-something-year-old man with multiple sclerosis—but that’s a story for another time.

Unaware that finding answers or other humans on the internet would ever be a possibility, all I could do after a day of bullying was stare anxiously into a sea of artificial stars.

Nowadays, I still have insomnia but it rarely centers on people’s perception of me, and generally has to do with making rent and other fun young adult problem. Now, when insomnia strikes, the internet is my new distraction. Sometimes I get caught up in Victorian Post Mortems, other times I see what the still-living are up to.

One sleepless night, I discovered a viral video of a teenage girl holding up signs about how she’d been bullied for being a slut. I’m deliberately not linking to it, which I’ll explain later, but her story can be synopsized in a sentence: Kids at her school found out she’d sexted a popular boy, and then they circulated those pictures and she was labeled a slut and terrorized even when her parents helped her to change schools.

Teens in my day couldn’t send sexts—the photographs would’ve been so pixelated that you wouldn’t have even been able to make out a nipple. However, if I’d had the means, I would’ve been snapchatting my barely B-cup boobies to the better looking senior boys.

Yet lack of photographic evidence of my promiscuity or sexuality, depending on how you look at it, did not keep me from being tormented by that evil four-letter word “slut.”

In addition to that nickname, I earned the moniker “rake job” after making the mistake of using my teeth when I gave my boyfriend-cum-ex-boyfriend head for the first time. To this day, I maintain that I read in Cosmopolitan that you were supposed to “tickle the penis with your teeth.” Now that I know more about how penises work, I admit that I might’ve misread something, but who could blame me for not knowing any better? I was only a sophomore.

The senior girls at JJHS were brutal, loudly asking one another if anyone needed a rake when I walked past them in the hall. It was humiliating, and even my friends turned on me and laughed behind my back. I’d go home in tears, unable to discuss my blowjob mishap with my parents, but I was safe in the confines of my pink and red bedroom, as long as I didn’t sign into AOL.

These devils in Abercrombie and Fitch could yell at me during the day, but there was not yet an open forum for their wrath afterhours. Those of us that grew up in the late '90s through the early aughts should consider ourselves lucky. We could use the Internet to cheat on our Latin exams, but not to destroy one another. I can only imagine what this little girl in the viral video had to go through. She changed schools, but kids who clearly had too much time on their hands tracked her down. They found her new school and ruined her life there, too, via social media. The cruelty of teenagers knows no bounds. In a perfect world, the meaner ones would be caged until age 18.

While I watched the girl hold up signs, narrating her sad tale, I scrolled down to see just what made this video go viral. It was compelling, but it was no “It Gets Better.”

I stopped when I figured out why. The video had garnered more than one million shares because the pretty teen, called a slut across two counties, decided it wouldn’t get better. She killed herself.

***

Suicide, in my experience, has been like a shitty song that’s gotten too much play —the Rihanna’s Umbrella of my life. In my junior year of high school, a friend of mine violently committed suicide. He wasn’t being bullied—we were part of the popular crowd by then.

There were other kids that I remember us mercilessly bullying, but I’ve checked up on most of them on Facebook and it looks like they’re all still alive, though one girl did send me a very long email recently about what a terrible person I had been to her. I had a few choice things to say to the girls in the grades below me when I got older in spite of the fact that I’d been bullied as a freshman. I should’ve been kept in that cage I mentioned earlier until college.

People do frequently attempt suicide because of its presumed effect on their friends, family, and peers afterword. That’s why notes are left. So while I felt very bad for the little girl in the video, I also found the virality of her story distressing. When people shared the teen’s story to bring light to what they consider “a bullying epidemic,” they glorified her suicide.

I used to fucking hate that phrase—glorifying suicide. I heard it for the first time when I was 16. After my friend's funeral was over, we all still felt like we had some unfinished business. We went to the Dean of Students with a grand proposal for a memorial concert for our dead friend. She shot it down. My memory still shades her as being a complete cunt about the whole matter, but with my somewhat grown-up hindsight, I think the dean was trying to be as gentle as possible when she said, “We can’t do that, you guys. There might be other kids who are thinking of doing the same thing, and if we celebrate him, we’re condoning the way he died, and others might copy him.”

We were devastated, and furious. If we had Tumblrs or Facebooks or even lame old Myspaces we might’ve taken to them and created animated gifs of the Dean of Students being decapitated—we were that mad. But we were helpless. All I could do was build a mini-shrine to my dead friend in my bedroom with candles left over from my Wiccan phase—and then I wasn’t even allowed to do that. My dad came into my room (the horror) and made me dismantle it, echoing the dean’s sentiment about the glorification of suicide.

“He chose to leave,” he said. “He’s not a hero.”

Sixteen-year-old me wanted to slosh around in my misery for a bit longer— that was how I needed to grieve. Then, maybe a day later, my older ex—the one responsible for much of that slut talk about me—returned from college. And what he did seemed miraculous.

Above the site of my dead friend’s suicide, my ex erected an enormous, wooden cross. I thought it was the sweetest thing ever. To my knowledge, my ex hadn’t even been very close to my late friend. While he was perpetuating the slut rumors about me, it had been my dead friend who had come to my defense.

Curiously, after that, my ex didn’t go back to college.

“I really like that you built that,” I told him one night. We were standing on the side of the road outside of a high school party. He was the oldest person there, which made me feel important. Both of us were a little tipsy, so we’d forgotten about our history and were making out while I waited for a taxi to bring me home by curfew.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at something just beyond my head.

“I’m sorry that I cheated on you,” I told him then. (When he’d still been in high school, I had kissed his friend who had a lazy eye in my living room in front of the cockatiel cage when my parents weren’t home, as you do when you’re that age.)

I waited.

He didn’t say anything.

Then I got into my cab, assuming his omnipresent melancholy had something to do with the fact that he really did think I was a slut.

A couple months later, my ex, the 20-year old who’d built the most glorious monument to my friend who had taken his own life, drank a Budweiser tallboy, smoked two cigarettes, and hanged himself from a tree in his parents’ backyard.

As adults, we suffer from collective memory loss, clinging to the ridiculous notion that we were always independent thinkers. We forget about what phenomenal mimics we were as teens, and how willing we were to do things we wouldn’t otherwise do if our friends did them first.

These days, the most extreme performances get the most YouTube hits, and kids will go pretty damn far to be internet famous. Go ahead and Google “girl who ate tampon.”

When that article about the little girl who was bullied and then committed suicide went viral, there were almost certainly kids who came home from school, having endured a day of being called “faggot” or “slut” or “fatty,” and saw the video and the sympathy being expressed literally everywhere online. Perhaps they watched it and thought: just look at how everyone loves her now…If only people loved me and knew me in that way

Maybe instead of sharing anti-bullying sentiments via the flimsy internet, we should bring these conversations offline. If you see someone sharing a viral video about suicide, make an actual effort instead of clicking LIKE or SHARE. Make a call using that old fashioned voice function on your phone, or, I don’t know, pay your sad friend a visit. If you simply send a link of “It Gets Better” to your young buddy, you never know what videos might pop up in the “Suggested Videos” sidebar of YouTube. And as adults, we should be trying to prevent the darkest domino effect of all.

Maia McCann is a writer and artist based in lower Manhattan. A graduate of Tisch at NYU, she has worked in theater and television. She was sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts for her New Media Series, Practice of Artemisia. She's currently working on a young adult novel, and she occasionally blogs at NYC Life Advices and NYNightlifer. More of her's work can be found at www.maiastarmccann.com, and you can tweet at her at @maiastar.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Dr.


Are You Fucking Kidding Me with These Rats?

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Are You Fucking Kidding Me with These Rats?

As an abandoned cruise ship packed to the brim with cannibal rats who are hungry for human blood heads ominously toward land, the viral Internet maintains that these infected vermin are worthy of "squee" and "cute!" For several years, two photographers, who work independently of each other, have been documenting their pet rats in a series featuring the miniature scavengers embracing teddy bears. Jessica Florence and Ellen van Deelen have cataloged photos of their pets in states of infantile repose, clasping stuffed toys for what looks like dear life. Their eerily translucent feet claw into the fur of the unwitting bears, crushing any hopes of escape. There are books.

For the many, the strong, the wise anti-rat stalwarts, this week, NYC.gov unveiled the handy, easy-to-use Rat Information Portal for locating isolated areas within the city that are home to the most rodents, so you know to never go there. The map—colloquially known as R.I.P.—allows users to search "by address, or by borough, block and lot (BBL)." For those who are still in puerile denial of the evil nature of rodents, who is piping whom here?

Are You Fucking Kidding Me with These Rats?

[Images via Jessica Florence/Ellen van Deelen]

Updates on today's Maryland shooting have begun to trickle out.

Today's Doge-decorated Jonathan Mahler New York Times op-ed declaration of war against thoughtless #

This is An Amazing Story About Rihanna Partying

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From New York hip-hop radio and TV personality Charlamagne Da God, who calls Rihanna "the realest n*gga in the game since Tupac."

DiCaprio Crashes Jonah Hill's SNL Monologue to Recreate Titanic

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DiCaprio Crashes Jonah Hill's SNL Monologue to Recreate Titanic

Last night on Drake TV SNL, Jonah Hill got a special visit from his pal and Wolf of Wall Street costar Leo DiCaprio. Though DiCaprio made no mention of Hill's salary for the money-grubbing film—potato peels and Dave & Buster's gift cards—the two did act out a scene from a very familiar movie, pan flute and all. Still no word on when exactly DiCaprio's jeans-with-belt-and-button-down look is going to end, but—really—he must be stopped.

Queens Man Stabbed Daughters Because He Didn't Have Car Seats For Them

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Queens Man Stabbed Daughters Because He Didn't Have Car Seats For Them

Last weekend, a 28-year-old Queens man named Miguel Mejia-Ramos stabbed his wife and two daughters to death. On Friday, the NYPD revealed the mind-boggling reason why he took the lives of his kids, neither of which was older than two.

According to Ramos, he was going to flee with his daughters except he felt like he had no way to drive away with them. "I was going to take them with me, but I didn't have car seats," he allegedly told police. Prior to the murder, Ramos and his wife — a 21-year-old woman named Deisy Garcia — were reportedly having marital issues.

Approximately 20 hours after Ramos killed his wife and daughters, relatives discovered their bodies. Ramos had already left New York City, but would be arrested in a small town in Texas a day later.

It's believed that the murder was sparked by an innocuous photo Ramos found of his wife with another man. According to the New York Times, Garcia had alluded to prior abuse by Ramos, and police had responded to domestic violence calls at their home on multiple occasions, though arrests were never made.

Ramos was in court on Friday on a number of charges that include weapons possession and first-degree murder.

34 couples will be married on-air during the Grammys tonight while Macklemore performs his song "Sam


Evil Triumphs: Satanic Birds Attack Pope's Peace Doves

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Evil Triumphs: Satanic Birds Attack Pope's Peace Doves

In the Vatican earlier today, two peace doves were viciously attacked by a crow and a seagull when they were set free by Pope Francis from a window at Apostolic Palace. We've spent countless years of our precious time on this planet debating over whether evil would triumph over good, whether the Dementors would eventually find us, and if birds—despite our blame in their pitiful helplessness—were actually hotblooded, malevolent predators searching fiendishly to corrupt their own.

It was confirmed today in St. Peter's Square that the search for these answers was over when the malicious crow and its seagull henchman overtook the two peace doves as a horrified group of children watched from the window. The children were young, impressionable, and are now likely ruined.

Blood dripping from its beak, the seagull repeatedly went after one dove, pecking and taunting it, while the crow chased after the other, its mouth agape, ready to impart a Dementor's kiss. The doves struggled beneath the grasps of their dark winged brethren, and it's clear from the images above and below who the real victor is: unforgiving evil and soulless villainy. A Hitchcock film brought to life, the scene shook the tens of thousands of people watching below, a reminder that birds are not only angry, they also cannot be trusted, a notion that has been supported since biblical times:

Has not my inheritance become to me like a speckled bird of prey that other birds of prey surround and attack? Go and gather all the wild beasts; bring them to devour. —Jeremiah 12:9

Prior to the fight, Pope Francis had prayed for peace in the Ukraine, where violent protests in Kiev turned deadly last week. Speaking from the palace, Pope Francis told the crowd below, "I hope that a constructive dialogue between the institutions and civil society can take place, that any resort to violence is avoided and that the spirit of peace and a search for the common good is in the hearts of all."

Evil Triumphs: Satanic Birds Attack Pope's Peace Doves

[Images via AP]

A Royal Caribbean cruise ship docked in the U.S.

This Impromptu DMX Performance is the World's Greatest Wedding Crash

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This is DMX boarding a bus of wedding partiers in New York City and immediately launching into a performance of his classic single "X Gon' Give it To Ya." THAT IS ALL.

[via Complex]

New 49-Cent Stamps Probably Won't Save the USPS

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New 49-Cent Stamps Probably Won't Save the USPS

Tell your grandma that Christmas card is never coming—the USPS announced today that one first-class stamp is now going to cost you just shy of two quarters, at the new rate of 49 cents. Up from the previous price of 46 cents, the three-penny increase is due to swiftly declining profits that the United States Postal Service has been dramatically struggling with the past few years. This is the first spike of that magnitude since 2002, and follows up 2013's inflation from 45 cents to 46.

The early 2000s were the gilded age of stability for stamp prices—for four solid years, the cost to ship a letter to your half cousin in Missouri remained stably at 37 cents. But not for long. In just as many years since 2002, the USPS has tacked on a penny, leaving us with the question of how soon will the double-quarter minimum arrive?

"Our financial condition is urgent," Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe said at a news conference last February when announcing the proposition to suspend letter delivery on Saturdays. In the year since, weekend delivery has continued, but the five-day schedule is still a precarious possibility, at the encouragement of epistolary disdaining Republicans.

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-California) reintroduced Bill HR 3801 two weeks ago in a measure to reduce USPS spending, which would also likely serve as an attempt to make the currently government-run agency "vulnerable to privatization." Issa claimed that "This common sense reform will help restore the cash-strapped Postal Service to long-term solvency," proposing that his bill would shave off $17 billion dollars of the federal deficit over the course of ten years.

Issa's determination to halt Saturday delivery didn't come without subtext—his proposal was meant as a restructuring of the House Budget Committee agreement made in December, as a method to safely repeal veteran pension cuts. The conflict in Issa's forward momentum comes from the fact that the USPS is the second largest employer to veterans, crested only by the Department of Defense, and the desire to cut out Saturday delivery would adversely affect those who Issa planned to help in retirement.

According to the National Association of Mail Carriers, however, suspension of six-day delivery was shut down and signed into law on January 17, maintaining the USPS's current Saturday schedule—at least for now.

"We are pleased that Congress has rejected the elimination of Saturday delivery as counter-productive," NALC President Fredric Rolando said. "Now we call on it to enact reform that will allow the Postal Service to innovate and grow—without dismantling the retail, processing and delivery networks that make it a national treasure."

The USPS is the only governmental agency required to hand over nearly $5.5 billion a year to pay for healthcare benefits for future retirees, and reassessing this mandate might be at the source of a stable postal service future. Whether Issa plans on pursuing other options for USPS spending cuts is still to be determined. And if anyone has a heads up on the sorcery of Forever Stamps, don't stay quiet.

[Image of Patrick R. Donahoe via AP]

Police have identified Darion Marcus Aguilar as the man who killed two people and then himself at a

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