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"A lot of you do not like me after my latest article 'Congratulations, You've Vaccinated Your Child

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"A lot of you do not like me after my latest article 'Congratulations, You've Vaccinated Your Child And Now They're Retarded.'" Thought Catalog discusses public health.


The Coach Who Doesn't Care: How One Man Turns Skaters Into Champions

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The Coach Who Doesn't Care: How One Man Turns Skaters Into Champions

Gracie Gold was having a bad night. The 18-year-old figure skater was about a minute and a half into her free skate at the U.S. International Classic in September when she singled a double axel. It was a significant mistake—a loss of a couple of points—but for a disciplined skater, that kind of error shouldn't have resulted in disaster.

Gold, though, started to come undone. Upon flubbing the axel, she proceeded to botch her next three jumps, too, and when she wasn't botching her jumps she was skating with a listless and distracted air. She wound up placing second in a competition she should easily have won. It was the story of Gold's young career: enormous, Olympic-level talent, coupled with a reputation for getting the yips in the big moment.

Four months later, when Gold took the ice for the U.S. national championships, her skating told a different story. She had the speed and energy of her best previous performances, along with a newfound sense of discipline and style. Even her costumes had matured: less Cinderella, more Grace Kelly. Over the course of her two programs, Gold easily snatched the crown from reigning U.S. champion Ashley Wagner, winning her first national title and a ticket to Sochi.

On the surface, Gold's newfound steeliness seemed like a surprising about-face. But the truth is that in the months since her September disappointment, she had moved to California to train with Frank Carroll, a strict, business-like skating guru known for getting his skaters out of their own heads. And that, it turns out, is exactly what Gold needed.


Carroll has been coaching for over 40 years, and the septuagenarian made his name alongside some of the most legendary skaters in American history. Former and current students include Michelle Kwan (five-time world champion and Olympic silver and bronze medalist), Evan Lysacek (Olympic gold medalist in 2010), Linda Fratianne (two-time world champion and Olympic silver medalist), Timothy Goebel (Olympic bronze), Denis Ten (who won bronze in the men's competition in Sochi) and Mirai Nagasu (who placed fourth at the games in Vancouver and just missed out on a trip to Sochi this year).

Given his advancing age, Carroll has delegated some of the more physical elements of his job to other instructors. He has a physical trainer to assist his students with their off-ice practice, and a Bolshoi-trained ballet coach to help them develop grace and style. He works with choreographers like Lori Nichol to ensure his students' programs are artistic and original, and he calls in friends and officials to help him evaluate those programs for technical difficulty and scoring value. Much of what Carroll himself provides, in addition to on-ice technique, is a mental edge, an internal toughness and perspective, that allows his skaters to see themselves as champions—and then to become them.

"Frank Carroll knows what his skaters need to do to win, and he finds a way to get them to do it," said Kristi Yamaguchi, a 1992 Olympic gold medalist. "With Gracie, I think, it was giving her confidence and keeping her focused through a full competition. He's mastered [the art of] being able to bring out the best in his skaters, and knowing how to deal with each them depending on their personalities."

"There's a difference between being a coach and being a teacher," Carroll told me in December. "Teaching involves being able to on-pass knowledge about how to do a skill; how to teach someone to use their body to do a jump, or use their feet to create speed, or how to make a spin go faster. A coach is somebody who can prepare people for competition and give them a philosophy about how to be champions, how to deal with the disappointments and the triumphs, how to budget their time. And a coach teaches them the philosophy of being a competitor."

This involves a little roleplaying. From the first day Carroll begins working with a skater, he emphasizes the importance of carrying oneself like a champion.

"I tell the student to pretend I am a very mean, cranky, nasty judge, and that I want to see them go on the ice and warm up as they would at a competition. Not their jumping, not their spinning, but their stroking and skating," he said, referring to the brief group warm-up sessions skaters are allowed before taking the ice in competition. "I tell them, 'I want you to convince me, by the way you step on the ice and the way you move around, that you're the very best skater in this group.' Then I'll let them loose, and I'll see what their idea of impressing people is."

In other sports, coaches tend to get too much credit for their supposed guru-like ability to unlock "the winner within," as if the athletes themselves were nothing more than unformed masses of pure potentiality, in need of only an expert molder. But figure skating, at its uppermost levels, is a little different. Athletic tools are fairly evenly distributed across the sport. The top skaters in Sochi this year are performing similar combinations of the same moves, which means the final standings come down to who performs them best. The sport is psychological attrition disguised as judged competition. A top-10 skater who executes the performance of a lifetime could find her way onto the podium, while a single fall could knock a reigning champion out of the running. With such a thin margin separating the best from the very good, the intangibles—the ability to not come unglued, say—do matter. For the top competitors, it's all about handling the pressure.

The Coach Who Doesn't Care: How One Man Turns Skaters Into Champions

Gracie Gold, flanked by coaches Scott Brown (left) and Frank Carroll, celebrates after her free skate during the national championships in January. Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images.


And there is a lot of pressure. Competing as an elite skater can cost upwards of $60,000 per year, and earning money as an amateur is very difficult unless you're an international star who can book lucrative endorsements. (See: Yuna Kim.) Over the years of training, parents make sacrifices. Siblings make sacrifices. The athletes, obviously, make sacrifices.

"I'm one of five kids, and I just felt everyone in my family had sacrificed so much," said Linda Fratianne, who competed in the 1976 and 1980 games. "There's so much pressure. So you have to mentally turn it around and not blow it up in your head as a do-or-die moment. Because that will overwhelm you."

This is where Carroll comes in.


Carroll has spent a lifetime getting in his students' heads, and he's come up with what appears to be an effective formula for helping his skaters deal with competitive pressure: extreme repetition and emotional detachment.

He insists his skaters repeatedly do full run-throughs of their programs, and, unlike many of his peers, he will not tolerate a skater who stops midway through the routine due to a fall or a mistake.

"You have to prepare them for any mishap during a program," he said. "That means if you have a fall [in practice], you get up quickly and you go on. If you are doing a program you never complain. You prepare the best you can so that at the moment of test, when you're putting them on the ice, you can say to them, 'You do this program every single day, all the way through, and you do it extremely well or perfectly. Get out there and do it like you do it, because this is just another practice day.'"

You could hear a little echo of Carroll in Gold's comments to reporters after nationals. "When people go in and they want to make a performance that Olympic moment, they just end up getting tied into knots," Gold said. "I don't think I have to do anything extraordinary. I just have to do my job to the best of my ability—just my best average even—and I think I'll be pretty good."

"It's all about tunnel vision for me," Gold said.

Carroll does everything he can to keep distractions off the ice. When students refuse to practice their programs, he threatens to stop coaching them. If they curse or throw a fit, he kicks them out of practice for the day, and lets security deal with the rest. He refuses to engage emotionally.

"If you see your coach getting emotionally worked up, it just gives his students the opportunity to be the same way," said Mauro Bruni, one of Carroll's former skaters. "He'll never get wrapped up in the emotion. He never raises his voice. He's very businesslike on the ice, and I found that different from other coaches I'd worked with in the past. He's calm, straight to the point. There's no bullshit."

"If my eyes would start to well up because I was having a bad day, he'd say, 'I don't want to see any tears today,'" recalled Fratianne. "I never crossed Frank or pushed back against Frank; if I ever got angry, it was mostly at myself."

"I don't want to hear, you're emotionally upset. I don't want to hear, this didn't go right. I don't want whining. I want training," Carroll said. "The only way to have success is through preparation and, yes, I understand you're nervous, but I don't care. Neither do the judges care. No one cares. What they want to see you do is get through this program from the start to the finish very, very well."


Not everyone thrives under Carroll's exacting demands, though, and not everyone is able to mark a clean detachment between his or her life and what happens after taking the ice.

"I think that the skaters that get him the most are the ones who are willing to really show his level of commitment," said Scott Hamilton, an NBC commentator and Olympic gold medalist. "Look at Michelle Kwan—she totally answered his commitment and his work ethic, and that was a great source of power for her. And Evan Lysacek—same thing—nobody works harder than Evan. I think those are the skaters that get the most out of Frank."

By contrast, he has had a harder time working with skaters (or skaters' parents) who won't go all in on the Carroll method. Nagasu split with him in April 2012, and Carroll has since referenced emotional problems and a lack of discipline as one source of strife between them. Carroll booted U.S. champion Tiffany Chin from his roster because he couldn't handle her mother, who he said interfered with and second-guessed his training. (Chin's mother is also famous for a 1986 television interview in which she interrupted her daughter—the subject of the interview—to berate her for being lazy.) And there was Christopher Bowman, a U.S. champion and two-time Olympian, famous for his larger-than-life personality, who struggled with drug addiction for years before dying of an overdose in 2008, long after he and Carroll had stopped working together. Carroll has since discussed the anger and frustration he felt working with Bowman, not just because of his erratic and deceptive behavior toward him as a coach, but also because he was unable to reach his considerable potential.

"You cannot save them all," Carroll said. "You can do the very best you can to give them a philosophy of being fair and to evaluate things honestly, but sometimes if they're a highly emotional person, and they have demons in their head, and they're unable to set aside these demons, it can be ugly and impossible."

Even Michelle Kwan, who worked with Carroll for the majority of her competitive career, announced in 2001 she was splitting with her longtime coach just four months before the 2002 Olympics. Carroll suggested in interviews at the time that she had become distracted by her newfound fame and fortune.

"When Michelle Kwan was at the top of her game, she was a rock star in our country. You have no idea," he told me. "I mean, I have been walking down streets with her in cities when people start screaming and chasing her. You would think it was Elvis Presley or something."

When a skater reaches heights like that, he said, "it draws them away from the connection with you sometimes. They have the media and the world telling them they're an angel sent by god down to the earth to perform, and you're the cranky old man in the ice rink saying, 'You know what, I didn't like the way you just did that triple flip.' And so it does drive a little bit of a wedge between you."

Nevertheless, he tries to prepare his students for this, just as he tries to prepare them for everything else.

"If you can get into their heads, so they know this is a scenario that may come up, you can try to prepare them. For all of this stuff, you try to keep it straight with them," he said. "But there are always people pulling them in a different direction. Always."

Carroll has made it a point throughout his career not to be a surrogate parent to his skaters, and in part it's this attitude of omniscient detachment that makes him so good as a coach. He has a set of tools that he passes on to his students, and these tools, he says, are the keys to success. There's nothing particularly special about them; in fact, they're very basic, which is the point. In a sport so given to emotional superabundance that it sends its competitors to a designated "kiss and cry" area, Carroll has tried to reduce performance to a dispassionate sum of hard work and psychological robustness. Emotions, his method suggests, can be shaped and trained like any muscle.

"I don't think I have all the answers about how to be a coach, how to be a trainer, how to be a dietician, how to be a philosophy builder, but I think I have a pretty good mind and I think that I make good decisions. And, you know, my kids have done very well over the years," Carroll said. He paused. "What am I trying to say? I believe in my own philosophy. Hallelujah."


Lucy Madison is a NYC-based writer and reporter. Her work has appeared at the Awl, the Hairpin, Interview, CBS News, and more. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Top image by Jim Cooke.

Deadspin Here's Ray Rice Dragging His Unconscious Fiancée Out Of An Elevator | Gizmodo Stray Voltage

The Winklevii Launched A Bitcoin Index Called "Winkdex"

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The Winklevii Launched A Bitcoin Index Called "Winkdex"

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who misspelled Gandhi on a PowerPoint at the last Bitcoin conference, have decided to bring some precision to the rough-and-tumble world of cryptocurrency. Today they launched a Bitcoin version of the S.&P. 500 called WinkdexSM "to reflect the accurate price of Bitcoins."

According to the press release:

Winkdex will also be used to price the value of the assets held by the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust which, once approved, will be the first exchange-traded fund for bitcoins reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Winkdex was also disclosed in today's amended registration statement that was filed with the SEC.

The SEC filing was sponsored by their company Math-Based Asset Services and they're being represented by Katten Muchin Rosenman, a law firm that Dealbook says has "helped shepherd some of the most popular E.T.F.'s through the regulatory process."

But the Ken dolls aren't the only players in the field, explains Dealbook:

The new Winkdex will put the brothers in competition with a growing number of companies providing data on the virtual currency industry. The most popular index for the price of a Bitcoin is operated by CoinDesk, a news and information website.

CoinDesk's Bitoin [sic] Price Index is compiled using prices from two different virtual currency exchanges. Until last week it also used the price from a third, Mt. Gox, but that was removed from the index after the exchange suspended customer withdrawals.

With Mt. Gox crumbling and an altcoin scam around every corner, Bitcoin could certainly use some sure-footing, but Winklevii never seemed to graduate past that "first they laugh at you" stage. The founder of BitInstant, the last Bitcoin startup the Winklevoss twins invested in, was indicted for money laundering.

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

[Image via Getty]

Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

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Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

First came the Tumblrs, then the think pieces, then the distinction of being word of the year. What else could there possibly be for selfies? What about a huge data project analyzing how selfies around the world differ in everything from mood to mouthgape to head tilt?

Selfiecity—which compares photos from Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paolo—may be the largest data-driven exploration of selfies yet. Lead by Lev Manovich, a professor at CUNY, the project as a distinctly academic bent. The data visualization is accompanied by, yes, three more thinkpieces about the theory of selfies.

The selfies themselves, all 3,200 of them, were downloaded off of Instagram during a nine-day period in December. Then they were sent to Mechanical Turk, where the selfies got tagged with estimated age and mood. Here are some of the main findings sorted by city. Muscovites and New Yorkers, as you might expect, are a dour bunch compared to the other the cities.

Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

You can play with the whole dataset in the Selfiexploratory. For example, if you only want to see selfies of angry men looking up, well here you go.

Cultural Stereotypes As Revealed By The Ultimate Collection Of Selfies

Find anything interesting? Let us know in the comments. [selfiecity]

Facebook Buys Messaging App for $19 Billion in Blockbuster Deal

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Facebook Buys Messaging App for $19 Billion in Blockbuster Deal

Put the Snapchat co-founders on suicide watch: Facebook is buying WhatsApp, a smartphone messaging service that's enormously popular around the world, for $16 billion, plus $3 billion in restricted stock units for employees, making it one of the biggest tech deals in history.

It's going to be a dour afternoon for Evan Spiegel.

Facebook Buys Messaging App for $19 Billion in Blockbuster Deal

Over 450 million people use WhatsApp across the globe—and this will help Facebook lock in non-American users. But... Christ almighty, $19 billion is an incomprehensibly large amount of money to spend on an app. Any app.


Recent comments by WhatsApp's founders (above) also raise some eyebrows: just this past December, they claimed zero interest in selling out to a large company.

What does it take to change your mind? Luckily for Facebook, and WhatsApp's extremely well-compensated investors, something in the double digit billions must've been enough to change the execs' tune:

WhatsApp has "no plans to sell, IPO, exit, [get new] funding," Koum said.

"Despite the fact that we're able to monetize today, we're not focused on monetization," Koum said. "We view monetization as five, 10 years down the road. We're trying to build a sustainable company that's here for the next 100 years."

The company also vocally rejected online advertising:

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

Emphasis theirs. WhatsApp is now owned by one of the largest data-mining operations in human history.

Cash image: Shutterstock

Scott Walker’s Former Chief-of-Staff Sent This Insanely Racist Email

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Scott Walker’s Former Chief-of-Staff Sent This Insanely Racist Email

Wisconsin Governor and potential 2016 GOP contender Scott Walker hit a small snag today: Over 25,000 pages of emails, released today by a state court, that were collected during an investigation into whether Walker aides conducted political activity on the government’s dime. One of the emails, first spotted by BuzzFeed’s Evan McMorris-Santoro, contains a message titled, appropriately, “THE NIGHTMARE.”

THE NIGHTMARE, reproduced in full below, was forwarded in 2010 by Thomas Nardelli, who was Walker’s chief-of-staff when he served as Milwaukee County Executive, to an undisclosed number of recipients, including Walker’s deputy chief-of-staff, Kelly Rindfleisch. Walker, who was elected governor later that year, went on to earn national notoriety for passing legislation aimed at dismantling the political power of Wisconsin’s public-sector unions. (Nardelli became a full-time consultant.)

Nardelli isn’t the only Walker official known to make racist statements. The Republican fired his deputy finance director in December after the aide’s two-year-old tweets (one of which read, “I will choke that illegal mex cleaning in the library”) came to light.

Here’s the email:

THE NIGHTMARE

In the nightmare I found myself nude in bed, and I was looking at a mirror on the ceiling, and I discovered that I am a Negro, and I’m circumcised!

Quickly I sat up, found my pants and looked in the pockets to find my driver’s license photo and it was that same color, black.

I felt myself being very depressed, downcast, sitting in a chair.

But it’s a wheelchair! That means, of course, besides being black and Jewish, I’m also disabled! I said to myself, aloud “This is impossible! It’s impossible that I should be black and Jewish and disabled!” “It's the pure and holy truth,” whispers someone from behind me. I turn around, and it’s my boyfriend.

Just what I needed!!! I am a homosexual, and on top of that, with a Mexican boyfriend.

Oh, my God .... Black, Jewish, disabled, gay with a Mexican boyfriend, drug addict, and HIV-positive!!!

Desperate, I begin to shout, cry, pull my hair, and Oh, nooooo...I’m bald!!!

The telephone rings. it’s my brother. He is saying, ‘Since mom and dad died, the only thing you do is hang out, take drugs, and laze around all day doing nothing. Get a job, you worthless piece of crap... Any job!’

Mom? Dad? Nooooo ... Now I’m also an unemployed orphan! I try to explain to my brother how hard it is to find a job when you are black, Jewish, disabled, gay with a Mexican boyfriend, are a drug addict, HIV positive, bald, and an orphan, but he doesn’t get it.

Frustrated, I hang up. It’s then I realize I only have one hand!!! With tears in my eyes, I go to the window to look out. I see I live in a shanty-town full of cardboard and tin houses! There is trash everywhere.

Suddenly I feel a sharp pain near my pacemaker.... Pacemaker??

Besides being black, Jewish, disabled, a fairy with a Mexican boyfriend, a drug addict, HIV positive, bald, orphaned, unemployed, an invalid with one hand, and having a bad heart, I live in a crappy neighborhood.

At that very moment my boyfriend approaches and says to me, ‘Sweetie pie, my love, my little black heartthrob, have you decided what you are going to wear to Washington to see Obama?’

Say it isn’t so!!! I can handle being a black, disabled, one-armed, drug-addicted, Jewish homosexual on a pacemaker who is HIV positive, bald, orphaned, unemployed, lives in a slum, and has a Mexican boyfriend, but please, Oh dear God, please don’t tell me I'm a Democrat!

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

Here's the Video of a Man Destroying a Million Dollars Worth of Art

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"Don't touch," a guard warned, seconds before a 51-year-old Miami artist picked up an Ai Weiwei vase worth a million dollars and smashed it to pieces on the ground.

Maximo Caminero was arrested for criminal mischief this weekend after he destroyed one of 19 vases in an Ai Weiwei installation at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Caminero said he was protesting the museum's failure to represent local artists.

Caminero told the Miami New Times that although his protest was an homage to Weiwei, he had no idea how much the vases were worth and thought they were "common clay pot[s] that you'd find at Home Depot."

"It was a spontaneous protest. I was at PAMM and saw Ai Weiwei's photos behind the vases where he drops an ancient Chinese vase and breaks it. And I saw it as a provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance protest."

But Weiwei told the New York Times he doesn't think much of Caminero.

"The argument does not support the act," Mr. Ai said. "It doesn't sound right. His argument doesn't make much sense. If he really had a point, he should choose another way, because this will bring him trouble to destroy property that does not belong to him."


NYC's New Bathroom Clubs Will Let You Pay to Poop in Private

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NYC's New Bathroom Clubs Will Let You Pay to Poop in Private

A new startup is betting that you can't find a suitable public restroom to relieve yourself—and that you'll pay top dollar for a cushy seat when the urge strikes. Posh Stow and Go is billing itself as New York's "first members-only day storage and bathroom facility," with memberships that allow you to pay-as-you-poo.

Posh Stow and Go's facilities include private powder rooms with automatically flushing toilets, as well as some "individual, soundproof rooms with luxury showers" (for when you gotta hose down afterwards, I'm assuming). There are also digital lockers so you can safely stash your belongings during your shit, and you can also leave luggage and shopping bags with an attendant for an undetermined amount of time.

The rendering reveals a floor plan that's like a locker room for a spa. A spa for pooping.

NYC's New Bathroom Clubs Will Let You Pay to Poop in Private

At this ZipCar for your colon, you'll need a membership (which I hope comes with a key on a giant embarrassing keychain like at a coffee shop). Here's how it works: You pay a $15 annual fee, then you choose a "package plan" in various increments: $24 for three days or $60 for ten days, for example.

This is clearly a service marketed to tourists who are terrified to visit an authentic New York City restroom, but even then, who is going to fork over $39 to take their first crap? Any semi-rational person knows that department stores and museums have tolerable public facilities, and there are plenty of apps which even map and rate them. Some airports and train stations even have rentable showers and bathrooms for travelers, but that's because you're between destinations. Tourists have likely already rented one New York City toilet—in their hotel room. Even if you've checked out, a hotel could easily provide most of these services for free.

Maybe it would be good for parents with high-maintenance babies who could take advantage of the hassle-free changing rooms (kids get in free!). Or for someone who uses a wheelchair and can't locate an ADA-compliant commode. But unless you're exceptionally regular, the chances of needing a private soundproof toilet and being near a private soundproof toilet are very slim.

Posh Stow and Go claims they want to open their poop clubs all over the city, but right now they've just got one planned for Midtown Manhattan. It will open in June. Try to hold it until then. [Core77]

The Arizona Senate voted in favor of a measure that would allow business owners the right to refuse

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The Arizona Senate voted in favor of a measure that would allow business owners the right to refuse gays service based on religious beliefs. "This bill is not about discrimination," Sen. Steve Yarbrough said. "It's about preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith." Related.

Rebirth of the Shitheads: Silicon Villains Get a Second Chance

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Rebirth of the Shitheads: Silicon Villains Get a Second Chance

Every morning some startup founder rises and thanks our species for its short attention span. If we didn't forget the innumerable failures of yesterday, who would ever fund their close cousins today? The same goes for the people behind the debacles—people like our old friends Peter Shih and Greg Gopman, who are already banking on amnesia, if not amnesty.

Shih and Gopman epitomized San Franciscan villainy on a national scale, as their vile comments and cavalier social posts stood in for a new class of techie brutes. We can't touch the mostly veiled world of the startup—other than what's boasted about online—so it was a communal relief to put these two through the wringer. Their names were cited in trend pieces across Salon, Al Jazeera, HuffPo, the San Francisco Chronicle, and beyond—so they kept as low a profile as was humanly possible in 2013.

But Silicon Valley is the land of failing hard and failing often—and if bad businesses are rarely punished, it follows that jerks get carte blanche too.

So Peter Shih is back on the tech scene, with his payment startup, Celery, landing a healthy $2 million investment round, after ranting against homelessness and ugly women in San Francisco. In all the prominent outlets that reported the investment news, Shih's name was never once uttered, despite being so hated that posters protesting his existence were slapped up around San Francisco. What's he care? Now he has his money, which is all he wanted before he verbally spit on a pile of homeless people (not even bothering to teach them how to code!).

It doesn't matter how you fuck up; all you need to do is show venture capitalists that you're not an entirely abysmal person. Just look at Sarah Lacy, who despite becoming an editorial punchline, clenches onto enough goodwill to secure another round of cash. Even if much of it had to come from Tennessee.

Gopman's attempt at a comeback is nowhere near as formal as Shih's, and certainly a hell of a lot more crude. He hasn't received the TechCrunch benediction yet, but at he's at least daring to go back out in internet public and rejoin the tech community after giving it a horrible black eye by writing horrendous things about the homeless on Facebook. Pure impunity. Gopman is now helping organize a tragicomic "improv for startups" seminar. The session itself—which teaches corporate-centric routines like "Yes" and "Make your partner look good"—is put on by a networking company called Tradecraft, which Gopman says he's "helping out."

He didn't elaborate on that relationship, nor did the CEO of Tradecraft or either improv instructor ever get back to me about anything. Gopman's name might not be shit, but it's still certainly mud. Still, it's astonishing that anyone would want their name associated with his in a business context, or any other, really. And it may just be a start: a friend of Gopman recently told me he's considered a stunt run for political office, which speaks either to his delusion, desperation, or both.

If delusion is so popular among these primates of the Valley, it could be because it's so often swapped out for undue reality. No one's thought about Matty Monahan for almost a year, when he overshadowed a Google-sponsored trip to India by getting horrifically drunk on the beach, his naked dick subsequently the stuff of social media (and Gawker posts). Revealed as an asshole, his company imploded, and he proceeded on a yearlong pilgrimage of opulent photo-sharing and incomprehensible blog posts about Mark Zuckerberg getting blowjobs, renting boats, and other nonsense. At one point he pretended to be in touch with Banksy.

Who knows if any of it's true, but let's just assume most of it isn't, as he's got all the trappings of an unstable guy who went fully nuclear after his penis was published on the internet. People like Matty—the unstable, the unfaithful, the manic—aren't usually prime HR material.

And yet, in his latest rant, he boasted of being hired at Science, an investment firm that can claim fellow mega-failure Peter Pham among its ranks. I couldn't believe a company that handles the money of others would hire Matty Mo, but they confirmed it as true—in spite of, or because of his insanity, I've got no idea.

The three have that in common, the No way they're really that bad, right? quality. Even when they prove that YES THEY ARE, any sort of "pushing the limits" or "radical hideousness" can transmogrify itself into a techie virtue. Nowhere else is failure considered an inherently good thing, so, is it really so strange when public meltdowns and pariah-hood become the greatest thing of all?

Angry Cockfighters in Kentucky Vow to "Destroy" Mitch McConnell

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Angry Cockfighters in Kentucky Vow to "Destroy" Mitch McConnell

In Washington, Mitch McConnell is a power broker. In Kentucky, where the senator faces a tough re-election slog, he's just the big-government sonofabitch that made life tougher for hardscrabble locals trying to make a living by breeding animals to rip each other to death for sport.

The Lexington Herald-Ledger reports that the lobby for cockfighters in the state—yes, they have a lobby—is hopping mad at McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, over his vote for a federal farm bill. The belligerent peckerwoods say they may back McConnell's primary opponent, a tea-party-friendly Baptist zealot who's also endorsed by Glenn Beck:

"This will destroy Mitch McConnell in Kentucky," said Craig Davis, president of the United Gamefowl Breeders Association.

At issue is an amendment included in the $956 billion farm bill, approved and signed into law this month, that makes it a federal crime to be a spectator at an animal fight.

The new law makes attending a cockfight or dogfight a federal misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison and $100,000 fine. It makes bringing a minor to such fights a federal felony, punishable by up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine...

The lobbyists for Big Cock "say their 'culture and heritage' was misunderstood and wrongly maligned":

"When you make a law like that, you take good taxpaying people and you turn them into criminals overnight," Davis said. "The grass roots on this are not playing games anymore. They've been beaten and battered for 30 years. They're rural people. They want to be left alone."...

For many rural Kentuckians, Davis said, breeding gamefowl is crucial to helping shore up incomes decimated by the decline of coal and a dearth of manufacturing jobs. Hens used for breeding can sell for $100 and roosters can sell for $250, but Davis said two hens and a rooster that come from a winning progeny can fetch as much as $1,500.

Davis said the grass-roots movement associated with cockfighters was fed up after three decades of watching their freedoms being taken from them.

This is the logical consequence not (just) of Kentucky's backwardness, but of a national culture that for years has subverted every other value to jobs jobs jobs. If you can't adequately deregulate Big Coal and Big Industry to where we can all get subsistence wages while waiting to die of black lung, cave-ins or work-related carcinomas, then let us have our bloody roosterdeath business, goddamnit!

The junior senator from Kentucky, Republican Rand Paul, avoided the ire of Big Cock since he voted against the farm bill—even though he's actively campaigning for McConnell. Because, you see, Big Cock is about principles and the preservation of culture and heritage and most of all jobs jobs jobs, not your namby-pamby consistency.

"If Mitch McConnell doesn't help us now, then we're going to drag him down into the gully with us on Election Day," Davis concluded. May as well slap some spurs on each other in the gully and see if you can charge admission. That's job creatin', bluegrass-style!

[Photo credit: AP]

Buzzfeed and Facebook Are Like Cersei and Jaime Lannister

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Buzzfeed and Facebook Are Like Cersei and Jaime Lannister

The law of platforms puts boundaries on appropriate interaction between Facebook (a means for content distribution) and Buzzfeed (a content manufacturer). But, somehow, the two tech companies keep getting caught in an unholy alliance, including a little love from Facebook's $19 billion WhatsApp acquisition.

It's like watching Cersei and Jaime Lannister, the incestuous siblings in Game of Thrones. The rest of us are Ned Stark, left with the suspicion that something's not quite right in King's Landing.

According to Re/Code, late last year WhatsApp "quietly launched" a little button that lets users share content on the messaging app. WhatsApp, which has been holding "informal talks" with Facebook for two years, then picked Buzzfeed as one of the lucky beta testers:

In fact, BuzzFeed is already seeing more shares to WhatsApp than to Twitter on iOS, the company told Re/code.

"Every time we looked at WhatsApp's numbers, it blew us away," said BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg. "We knew last April this was a huge social network and have become increasingly obsessed with it."

With Facebook's ambitious plans to grow WhatsApp to a billion users, Buzzfeed can expect more action where that came from.

It's long been reported that part of Buzzfeed's "secret formula for getting posts to explode across the web" relies on buying Facebook ads, should a sponsor's content look a little under-viral. (It's certainly not the only company to pay Facebook for a little play.)

But the two were also found entangled when Facebook tweaked its NewsFeed algorithm, sending hordes of traffic to certain publishers. Even the sanitized version of a recent Business Insider article paints an unseemly picture:

Buzzfeed's business model is to create advertorials on Buzzfeed.com and then get traffic to these advertorials by buying Facebook ads.

If that's the reason, then the message Facebook is sending isn't so much that it wants "high quality" content for its News Feed. It's that if you are a media company, and you depend on Facebook for your traffic, you better make sure Facebook is benefiting from your existence.

No wonder Mark Zuckerberg and Jonah Peretti aren't friends on Facebook the way the two CEOs are in real life. People might find their closeness disturbing.

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

​James Franco Defends Shia LaBeouf in Ridiculous New York Times Op-Ed

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​James Franco Defends Shia LaBeouf in Ridiculous New York Times Op-Ed

James Franco, prize-winning blogger and talented poet, is now conquering the self-indulgent world of New York Times op-eds. In Thursday's newspaper, "actor and artist" Franco uses his incredible way with words to highlight his empathy toward Shia LaBeouf while actually addressing the only issue that really matters: himself.

Franco is no stranger to being published in the Times. But dare I say—and this may be pushing it—Franco's original take on LaBeouf's behavior is even more compelling than his December opus on the "selfie." In his new piece, an elderly Franco, 35, explains that LaBeouf's behavior (he's 27) might be based in "youthful recklessness":

This behavior could be a sign of many things, from a nervous breakdown to mere youthful recklessness. For Mr. LaBeouf's sake I hope it is nothing serious. Indeed I hope — and, yes, I know that this idea has pretentious or just plain ridiculous overtones — that his actions are intended as a piece of performance art, one in which a young man in a very public profession tries to reclaim his public persona.

Then, in a sophisticated writerly move that requires the reader to maintain a very willing suspension of disbelief, he compares LaBeouf to Marlon Brando because both commit "acts of rebellion" against the entertainment industry. Right.

But just because his name appears in a few paragraphs, LaBeouf's antics are not the subject of Franco's essay. The subject is "I," "I" as in Franco, a great soap opera artist who is often misunderstood:

At times I have felt the need to dissociate myself from my work and public image. In 2009, when I joined the soap opera "General Hospital" at the same time as I was working on films that would receive Oscar nominations and other critical acclaim, my decision was in part an effort to jar expectations of what a film actor does and to undermine the tacit — or not so tacit — hierarchy of entertainment.

While it might seem easy to compare joining General Hospital to weeping in a bag for a week, please be clear: Franco, unlike whatshisname with the paper bag on his head, aligns himself with Oscar-worthy films. None of that Transformers shit. The entertainment hierarchy must be kept in mind at all times.

Ultimately Franco classifies himself as a rebel (a rebel who acts in films that receive critical acclaim) and claims that he understands young LaBeouf:

Our rebellion against the hand that feeds us can instigate a frenzy of commentary that sets in motion a feedback loop: acting out, followed by negative publicity, followed by acting out in response to that publicity, followed by more publicity, and so on.

Franco ends the column with a challenge for LaBeouf, asking him to be careful "not to use up all the good will he has gained as an actor in order to show us that he is an artist." Show James Franco you're an artist, Shia. That's all you—or anyone—needs to do.

[Image via AP]

The Universal Shapes of Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut

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The Universal Shapes of Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut

The fundamental concept behind Kurt Vonnegut's master's thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago was, in Vonnegut's words, "that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper."

Vonnegut's thesis was rejected* ("because it was so simple, and looked like too much fun," according to him), and he left the university soon thereafter, sans degree, to take a job with the public relations department at General Electric; but he would champion his theory defiantly, with characteristic wit and charm, for the rest of his days, both in writing and in lectures like this one:

Now, Vonnegut's musings on the universally plottable shapes of stories have been cleanly and creatively reimagined by graphic designer Maya Eilam, in a rare, appropriate use of the otherwise hackneyed infographic format:

The Universal Shapes of Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut

The addition of contemporary examples is a great touch. What other examples can you think of that adhere to Vonnegut's shapely archetypes?

Complement with: The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar.


*Vonnegut readily admitted that he was a miserable anthropology student. In fact, if his account of history is to be believed, Vonnegut's "Shapes of Stories" proposal is one of at least two theses rejected during his pursuit of a master's degree. According to Vonnegut, the university turned down another thesis "on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painting and late-19th Century Native American uprisings," claiming it was unprofessional.

Vonnegut, as was previously mentioned, left school in 1947 to work for GE. Fourteen years later, UChicago accepted Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, and awarded him the M.A. degree based on "the anthropological basis of his novels."

[Maya Eilam via Open Culture]


How Venezuela Became a "Warzone"

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How Venezuela Became a "Warzone"

Not all those photos you're seeing of burning cities and pitched urban battles are from Kiev. Even as the near-apocalyptic imagery of Ukraine's violent protests have captured the top of the news, Venezuelan cities have gone from dangerous to "warzone" overnight. Here's what you need to know.

First, a handy video explainer from Fusion, the English-language network geared to Latinos and millennials, which is one of only a few outlets in the U.S. doing extensive reporting from Venezuela:

——

This is happening, at least in part, because Hugo Chavez is dead.

How Venezuela Became a "Warzone"

Since Chavez's passing, the populist, socialist strongarm leader's mantle has been taken up by a low-key associate, President Nicolas Maduro. Many of Chavez' tactics for mollifying the poorest Venezuelans have proven economically untenable for Maduro; last month, he announced that the government would have to raise gas prices, which had been frozen for a decade and a half in the oil-rich but free-spending nation.

Maduro also continues to enforce a Chavez-era "anti-terror" law that gives the government effective control over media and broad powers to arrest and detain dissidents.

Maduro continues to enjoy broad support in the nation, but his narrow victory in an election after Chavez' death, and Venezuela's continued economic decline, have emboldened opposition factions. Earlier this month, students launched mass protests in the streets of Caracas and several other cities—protests which political opposition parties and the small, squeezed middle class have been quick to support.

——

The peaceful protests have turned bloody.

In the past dew days, Venezuela has seen "a spasm of violence that's unlike anything the country has experienced since 1989," Audrey Dacosta writes on the "opposition-leaning-but-not-insane" blog Caracas Chronicles. As fires rage, antigovernment protesters have clashed with motorcycle- and helicopter-borne riot cops, who are responsible for clearing crowds by firing into them and killing at least several bystanders:

In this video, National Guard troops are seen and heard firing on protesters, one of whom is hit and is rumored to have been killed in the action:

——

Even beauty queens are not immune from the deadly violence.

Venezuelan protesters were in an uproar earlier this week after learning that Genesis Carmona—a beauty queen with the title "Miss Tourism"—was shot in the head and killed while participating in a demonstration in the city of Valencia.

A relative of Carmona's told Reuters that she was one semester shy of graduating from college, adding: "How long are we going to live like this? How long do we have to tolerate this pressure, with them killing us?"

——

You've heard next to nothing about this because Venezuela keeps it that way (and also because of Ukraine).

Earlier this week, Venezuela expelled three U.S. diplomats, accusing the United States of fomenting unrest to undermine the government. America has long wanted to topple Chavez' socialist party, but Venezuela's leaders have masterfully used its struggles with the U.S. and its allies to keep a tight rein on media coverage in the country. Few English-speaking Western outlets have a strong presence there, and AP and Getty and the big photography distributors don't have the sort of imagery coming out of Caracas that they have from Kiev.

Protesters have been forced to rely on social media, which has also been key to their keeping track of who's arrested and "disappeared":

Even much of the opposition acknowledges that it's working in an international media vaccuum, unable to compete with Kiev, the Olympics, and domestic news in North America. As Caracas Chronicles' Francisco Toro wrote this morning:

I understand that with an even bigger and more photogenic freakout ongoing in an even more strategically important country, we weren't going to be front-page-above-the-fold, but I'm staggered this morning to wake up, scan the press and find…

Nothing.

Toro then offered screenshots of the New York Times, Guardian, BBC, CNN, and Al-Jazeera to emphasize how little coverage was being given to Venezuela's political violence.

——

The opposition is not monolithic, and its biggest "leader" is already in jail.

How Venezuela Became a "Warzone"

Leopoldo Lopez, above in white, the 42-year-old Harvard-educated ex-mayor of a small, well-to-do neighborhood in Caracas, vaulted to national notoriety for his role in encouraging the protests. But last Wednesday, police responded to rock-throwers in a crowd with gunfire, killing three (including one supporter of the president), and the government blamed Lopez as a leader of the demonstrations, calling for his arrest.

After several days of tweaking the government on Twitter, Lopez emerged from hiding, turned himself in and now faces multiple trumped-up charges.

——

A little toothpaste and vinegar helps minimize the effects of tear gas.

That's according to protesters who gather in Caracas' Plaza Altamira each night:

They show no signs of flagging or surrendering. Against a government that's proven willing to tear gas apartments, fire into crowds, and stampede demonstrators with motorbikes, it's unclear whether that indomitable spirit will be rewarded, or simply crushed.

[AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd]

College Security Head Arrested For Jerking Off Into Co-Worker's Shoe

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Tim Margis is the director of public safety for Concordia University in Chicago. Er, he was, that is, until a week ago, when he was arrested for ejaculating into the shoe of a female coworker in her campus office.

Via Sun-Times Media's River Forest newspaper, Forest Leaves:

According to police, the employee reported seeing Margis exit her office around 9:30 p.m. while buttoning up his pants and fastening his belt. When the woman confronted Margis about what he was doing in her office, he allegedly stated that he was checking the room because the door had been left open.

Police said that after Margis left, the employee discovered a "clear liquid" inside one of her shoes, which had been left in the office.

Detectives interviewed Margis on Feb. 12 at his home and he later admitted to entering the office and committing a lewd act there, police said.

Margis was booked and released on $150 bail, according to the Chicago Tribune. He faces misdemeanor charges of public indecency and disorderly conduct. A spokesman for the university says Margis "was suspended and banned immediately from campus," and fired Feb. 13 after officials had cooperated with the police case.

Television broadcasters in the Chicago area, like the one above, alluded to Margis' termination for "a lewd act," but did not specify over the airwaves what he'd done.

Watch These Adorable Children Reenact the Oscar Best Picture Nominees

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There is absolutely nothing cute about The Wolf of Wall Street or any other 2014 Oscar Best Picture nominees. Until now, that is.

Thanks to the folks at CineFix, we now know what it would look like if tiny tots dressed up like Christian Bale in American Hustle or Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. If the real movies starred these kids, maybe people would actually be excited about the Oscars this year?

Watch and be charmed. And then give that sad little Her child a Best Actor Oscar immediately. And the Best Supporting Actor definitely goes to the little suit in Wolf of Wall Street.

[h/t The Hairpin]

Does Snow Make a City Cleaner?

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Does Snow Make a City Cleaner?Now is the time for "Hey, Science"—America's primary source of scientific education—in which we enlist real live scientific experts to answer your most most interesting and/ or inane scientific questions. Today: does snow make a city cleaner, or dirtier?

The question: Much of America has been deluged by record levels of snow this winter. Is When it all finally melts, will cities be left cleaner than before, their dirt washed away? Or does the grime and pollution that accumulates in snow actually leave cities dirtier than before? Is all this damn snow a net positive for urban cleanliness, when it's all said and done? To the snow experts!

Nolan Doesken, state climatologist for Colorado at the Colorado Climate Center:

As I'm sure you already realize, there is more to this question than meets the eye. Snow is great at cleansing particulate matter from the air as it falls, but once it's on the ground that's another story. Rain quickly washes off roads and sidewalks — the heavier it rains, the better the scrubbing. But snow melts quite slowly so doesn't have the flushing force of a good rain. And then there's the issue of road treatments — salt, sand etc. The more it snows and the longer it stays cold, the more salt and sand are applied to make roads and sidwalks "safe" for transportation. The sand, salt and other gritty materials effectively make things dirtier than they would be anyway — and you can get fairly exact numbers from the city streets depts to learn just how much materials they apply and how that varies from year to year. To a lesser extent there is also the issue of temperature inversions that trap cold air over snowcovered areas in stagnant "cold pools". Air pollution can build up in these conditions — and they are more likely to occur in cold and snowy winters.

Overall, though, I would say it is the road surface treatments that are the deciding factor.

One more thing — when it comes to snow — it makes it so easy to see the dirt. And it falls and melts at the time of year when there is not the lovely green patches of grass to help mop up dirt too.

Tim Garrett, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah:

I can only speculate on whether cities are cleaner or dirtier after snow or rain.

I can say this however. Snow easily gives the appearance of getting dirty in cities for the same reason that clean snow is white. Like rain, snow grains are transparent, but unlike a layer of liquid rain, snow is white because there is such a high density of individual snow grains on the ground. By working together, each of these snow grains scatters light many, many times (I can give a more precise answer on how many times tomorrow if you are interested). Light is bounced around repeatedly within the snow interior. And, because snow is also "deep", almost all light that is incident on the snowpack gets reflected back to the observer (i.e. it doesn't go through to the ground). Accordingly snow is bright and white (with a slight bias towards blue).

Now, because snow is so efficient at scattering, even the tiniest amount of soot, even in the parts per billion, is enough to produce a visible darkening of snow brightness. A particle of soot in the air might only get one chance to absorb observed light, but the same soot within snow has many, many chances to absorb light (again I can give the precise number to times later). This is due to the repeated bouncing of light back and forth between the snow grains. Before light can escape the snow it has many chances to be absorbed by the dark soot.

The result is that snow readily shows off slightest bit of city pollution. Because rain is transparent, it does not produce the same effect. So the higher dirtiness you suggest may be only an illusion with some interesting physics as its explanation.

Matthew J. Labovites, assistant commissioner of operations with the department of public works in Worcester, Massachusetts, one of America's snowiest cities:

Well, the thing is we spread sand on residential streets (salt on arterials), so naturally we are adding "dirt" or sand to the gutters. The snowbanks do tend to hold litter, etc., so whenever the snow does melt, things look a bit unsightly until street sweeping can occur.

One can argue either way [comparing snow to rain, in terms of cleanliness]: The incremental rainstorm-by-rainstorm flushing of street gutters that occurs vs. the unveiling of all the sand and litter when snowbanks melt. Certainly the snow scenario is more unsightly, if aesthetics are a factor. From a stormwater quality perspective, I would say it's close to a draw.

The verdict: A deceptively complex question. Dirty snow is, at least, probably not as dirty as it appears. That said, when you take into consideration the salt and sand put on the streets for snow treatment, combined with the dirt that snow accumulates when falling and the slow melting rate of snow, it seems that heavy snowfalls do not leave a city cleaner than it would have been otherwise.

Fucking snow.

Previously

The full archives of "Hey, Science" can be found here.

[Image by Jim Cooke. If you have a question for "Hey, Science," email Hamilton@Gawker.com.]

Meet the Adorbs 101-Year-Old Florida Man Who's Running For Congress

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If Joe Newman doesn't win this election, maybe at least he'll let you put him in your pocket and carry him around.

Grandpa Joe, a retired centenarian in Sarasota, has announced he's running for Congress this fall against local Republican Vern Buchanan, a car-dealership emperor whose crowning achievement in eight years in Washington is being anointed one of Congress' most corrupt members.

Does Newman have experience? Well, besides living through the Great Depression as a teenager, getting a degree from Notre Dame, helping set up the original Social Security program, and fighting decades ago for Indiana to create more school services for his mentally disabled daughter, oh, you know, not much.

"You learn through life you have certain responsibilities," he tells WFLA-TV. "And if you don't fulfill them, how can you look in the mirror?"

Later, after graduating from the University of Notre Dame, Newman got a job spreading awareness about a new federal program called Social Security.

"That was our job, to sell them why a program like Social Security is essential to the economy and to society," Said Newman. "You had the same attitudes: 'We don't want government involved.' And they forget what government is, they forget that government is society's tool to manage things."

Newman's platform is to turbo-boost Social Security, Medicare, and anti-poverty programs. "If people are saying, who is this fool at 101 and running? Call me a fool. I'm sorry, but I've got to get out and convince John and convince Jim: Hey, think!" he said. "What is the best thing our society can do and what is the responsibility of our society?"

So, yeah, by today's standards, he's an old socialist. Which likely explains why he's a write-in candidate: The Dems probably are afraid to throw money at a gerrymandered conservative district that's called an R+5 by the Cook Political Report.

But hey, it's nice to have an aw-shucks alternative to Buchanan's Rotarian dystopian ethics trainwreck. Now at least the faculty at New College and the retired circus folk of Sarasota have a candidate they can call their own!

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