"The mere fact that Museveni has signed the bill, they think it is OK for them to do anything to you because the law says so; that is the greatest fear I live under now," says outed LGBT activist Richard Lusimbo in this fascinating interview on being gay in Uganda in the wake of the "Jail the Gays" law .

Frequent fliers know the routine: seat up, bags stowed, phones in airplane mode, keep your seat belts fastened at all times as we can never predict rough air. When flight attendants go over their safety speech at the beginning of a flight, they're not doing it because they have to. The information is presented to help keep you safe. Rough air — polite airline-speak for turbulence — really can be unpredictable and dangerous if you're not strapped in when it happens.

Turbulence is caused by an aircraft flying through unstable air. Planes experience turbulence when they encounter an area with winds changing direction or speed (like a jet stream or air flowing over the peaks of mountains), or when they encounter swiftly rising air like one would find in a thunderstorm or fair-weather cumulus clouds on a hot summer day. As veteran airline pilot Patrick Smith notes on his "Ask a Pilot" website, turbulence is more of an inconvenience than a threat to the structural integrity of the aircraft.

The danger to the passengers in the cabin, however, is very real.

Last Friday, Yahoo News published an article declaring that turbulence-related injuries are on the rise and consulted with climate change experts to speculate as to what's causing all of this lap-baby-flinging turbulence.

In the last month, three major incidents of turbulence-related injuries made international news. A flight attendant for United Airlines was taken to the hospital in critical condition after she cracked the ceiling with her head during extreme turbulence. Eight people were hospitalized after a transpacific Cathay Pacific flight hit major turbulence. A flight attendant on a regional flight in Australia broke her leg during another bout of turbulence.

The Yahoo News article cites numerous reasons why experts believe turbulence itself seems to be an increasing phenomenon, but aside from mentioning unrestrained lap babies becoming projectiles, the article largely ignores the big question: "why are people getting hurt?"

The answer to the question has nothing to do with climate change or flight paths or any of that fake intellectual reporting that Yahoo is trying to pull. The reason people are getting hurt during extreme turbulence is because they aren't buckled into their seats. It's that simple.

The next time you get on an airplane, listen for the "clicks" around you. For every person who buckles up, another one or two likely won't. Just as people found stealthy ways to hide iPod use from flight attendants before the electronics ban was dropped last year, people will find every way possible to fake buckling their seat belts without actually doing it.

The reason turbulence-related injuries are on the rise is because people aren't strapped into their seats to keep from flying around like popcorn when rough air occurs. Every one of the incidents Yahoo News cited referred to injuries inflicted on people who weren't wearing their seat belts — including lap babies and flight attendants walking around in the aisles.

Sometimes unpredictable rough air will cause injuries. That's a given when people are moving around the cabin. But the "growing problem" can be eliminated using the only two words that matter, and the ones they didn't mention until the very end of the article: buckle up.

[Photo via United Airlines]

Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter and Australian national treasure, died nearly 8 years ago when he was attacked by a stingray while working on a documentary about the ocean's deadliest creatures.

Now Irwin's best friend and underwater cameraman, Justin Lyons—the only eyewitness to the sting that took Irwin's life—has come forward on Australian TV to discuss the crocodile hunter's final words: "I'm dying."

Lyons described Irwin's horrifying end to Australia's Studio 10:

"I had the camera on, I thought, 'This is going to be a great shot,' and all of sudden [the ray] propped on its front and started stabbing wildly, hundreds of strikes in a few seconds.

I panned with the camera as the stingray swam away and I didn't know it had caused any damage. It was only when I panned the camera back that I saw Steve standing in a huge pool of blood." ...

"It's a jagged barb and it went through his chest like a hot knife through butter." ...

"I was saying to him things like 'think of your kids Steve, hang on, hang on, hang on', and he calmly looked up at me and said 'I'm dying' and that was the last thing he said."

Lyons' decision to tell his story comes as Irwin's daughter, Bindi, faces criticism from animal rights groups and angry social media users. She signed on last week as a spokesperson for SeaWorld, a move she described as "carrying on Dad's footsteps."

The marine theme park is in the midst of a publicity campaign against the documentary Blackfish, a startling look at the lives of captive orcas, particularly SeaWorld's Tilikum.

[H/T: Uproxx]

The idea of "buying" a home in this economy is reserved for people who are richer , more responsible, and luckier than you. For you, the average American, the only choice is to rent. Which is good, because they're building rentals faster than you can say "But will you allow my dog, Baxter?"

Traditionally, the people that build new buildings for people to live in would build some to "sell," for people with money to "buy," and some to "rent," for people who can barely scrape together a few bucks to keep themselves off the street. (A very slight exaggeration.) Nowadays though, according to the latest numbers in the Wall Street Journal, builders are building a far higher proportion of rentals than usual—about one third of all residential units, the highest level in 40 years. Why? Because of trends.

The move toward apartment construction reflects the convergence of several trends. Mortgage credit is still tight. Also, Americans have seen muted wage gains, and others have high student-debt loads, forcing people who otherwise would have bought homes to rent instead.

At the same time, as the job market improves, larger numbers of young adults are leaving their parents' homes and forming their own households—adding more to the demand for rentals.

A double-ended trend convergence: on the bottom, grown ass Americans who should by all rights be able to buy a home by now cannot buy a home, because they are too poor; and on the top, dripping down like stalactites, god damn millennials are getting real jobs again and moving out into their own places. The result is that both god damn kids and grown ass people are all competing for rentals. So it's nice they're building more, because who wants to get in a bidding war with a god damn kid over a god damn shitty rental apartment, of all things?

Renting is our fate. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can get off that heroin.

[Photo: AP]

Long-time investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who has repeatedly suggested that dark government forces secretly infiltrated her home and work computers in order to make them act weird, is finally resigning from CBS News. Attkisson tweeted her resignation on Monday afternoon, just as Politico reported that her contentious contract negotiations fell apart over Attkisson’s belief that CBS suffered from a “liberal bias”:

Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.

For the past five years, Attkisson has focused intensely on stories about the perceived corruption of the Obama administration, including the Fast and Furious gun-running investigation and the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Still, she remained unhappy with CBS for not giving her adequate air-time or devoting enough resources to investigative reporting. Given 60 Minutes’ flawed Benghazi report , the latter charge isn’t necessarily inaccurate.

Lately, however, her moments in the spotlight have centered on the ongoing investigation into who was making her computers turn on and off by themselves. She revealed that development not on her own network but, instead, Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time Fox News show.

With her newfound freedom, Attkisson plans to write a book about her journalism experience, titled Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington.

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

Austin, TX — Strip away the pretension of the panels, and SXSW is pure leisure time. This rowdy crew swapped contraband wine bottles through the end of the night at one of this week's high budget parties, commanding the room, Google lanyards swinging. Now just think: soon every bar will look just like this.

[Claudia Breidbach, right, demonstrates a bionic hand that is steerable by a mobile phone to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron during the opening day of the computer fair CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, on Monday. Image via Frank Augstein/AP.]

Kotaku Eight Things You Might Not Know About The N64 | Deadspin 31 Buddy-Cop Clichés On True Detective | Jezebel Miracle Vodka Saves Puppy From Poisoning | io9 There is a scientific reason why it always rains on weekends

Julian Assange appeared, as we told you before, by Skype at SXSW over the weekend . Set against a green-screened Wikileaks logo, wearing a scarf straight from the Doctor Who wardrobe department and an actually respectable showing of facial hair, he gave his usual kind of speech. That's to say, one grounded in a lot of really honorable principles about disclosure and democracy and openness and how constant surveillance undermines all of those things.

Characteristically, of course, all of this noble talk was laced with moments of pure self-aggrandizement:

I am able to exist in a situation which is every national security reporter's dream, which is a land without police... It is a no man's land, as far as coercion is concerned.

If this boast of transcending the police weren't coming from a man who has been confined to an effective house arrest for more than 625 days, possibly he'd be right. Within that context, it's... not right.

Today, it was Edward Snowden's turn to remotely address the assembled (and those of us watching the live feed). Like Assange, he appeared in front of a green screen. His backdrop was what appeared to be the text of the Constitution. Compared to Assange's appearance, the talk was impressively specific and practical. For example: the moderator joked that Snowden's feed was coming through no fewer than seven proxy servers from Russia, where he lives in exile.

Most of his speech had a strange echo effect attached to it, which lent the whole affair a Hollywood futuristic quality. But it also gave you, as the moderators pointed out, an idea of how primitive and buggy a lot of the security tools available out there are. Which makes them less-than-totally-effective solutions for your average citizen just looking to keep their communications relatively anonymous.

Called upon to comment on Keith Alexander's worries that Snowden's revelations had undermined data security, Snowden offered a pithy and effective response, which characterized security officials as so eager to hack into others' communications they forgot to close their own backdoors:

They began eroding the protections of our communications in order to get an attacking advantage... It doesn't make sense to be attacking all day and never defending your vault, and it makes even less sense when you set the standards for vaults worldwide and leave a wide backdoor that anyone can walk into.

In case I'm not being clear: Snowden came off as an anti-Assange, the guy who'll show up to your videocast dressed for the office, to talk policy and sense. He didn't really talk about Assange or Wikileaks. Whereas Assange kept referring, over and over, to Snowden's bravery, to the bravery of the journalists who cover Snowden, etc. etc.

In short, Assange looked and talked like the older star welcoming the younger one to the biz, and not all that gracefully.

If you think I'm being too quick to apply the politics of celebrity to freedom fighters, you should probably read this excellent 26,000 word piece recently published by the London Review of Books. Written by Andrew O'Hagan, a regular contributor to the LRB and a contributing editor at Esquire, it details O'Hagan's abortive attempt to collaborate with Assange on a biography in 2011. O'Hagan was not particularly cowed by Assange's already well-documented eccentricities. But as he tells the tale, the far more frustrating thing about Assange was his (and Wikileaks') addiction to the spotlight:

He's not a details guy. None of them is. What they love is the big picture and the general fight. They love the noise and the glamour, the history, the spectacle, but not the fine print... even today, three years later, the cables have never had the dedicated attention they deserve. They made a splash and then were left languishing. I always hoped someone would do a serious editing job, ordering them country by country, contextualising each one, providing a proper introduction, detailing each injustice and each breach, but Julian wanted the next splash and, even more, he wanted to scrap with each critic he found on the internet.

And it was hard, watching both of these guys be livecasted over the last couple of days, not to agree with O'Hagan that Assange's thirst for fame has gotten the better of his project. Meanwhile Snowden's quieter jabs, filtered through the more "careful editing" they're receiving from the journalists who now have their hands on the documents, have probably been more effective than the Assange's sensational dump of cables.

The politics of being a freedom fighter have long been tangled up with those of celebrity. Part of your success at living "outside the law," no matter how just the cause, always seemed to depend on the romanticism of the public image you project. This helps explain why people like Jeffrey Toobin came out of nowhere to, with precious little actual experience of the man, preemptively accuse Snowden of being a "grandiose narcissist. "

There was a hope that if Snowden could be turned into a jerk in the public eye from the get-go, the strange guy with the funny girlfriend, that nothing else he'd say would catch on. But here we are, a year later, and he has sparked a giant—and specific—tech conversation.

And the guy who made the much bigger, more deliberate celebrity splash, complete with the rich friends and the million-dollar book deal (that he promptly botched)—well, it really is a nice scarf he's wearing.

Photo Credits: AP.

"One-quarter of [American] Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average...Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan."

The creators of two of TV's most beloved canceled-then-uncanceled comedies are collaborating on a secret project, and they don't want anyone else telling them what to do.

When Community's Dan Harmon invited Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz to guest on his show, he apparently had a bigger collaboration in mind. Harmon teased the project to Rolling Stone with a minimum of details.

"I invited him to come down on the show and then I parlayed that into what I really want from him, which is friendship, hanging out, talking about how dumb people are when they tell you what to do!" Harmon said.

He went on to explain that whatever the two are working on "would embrace the emerging mediascape, and use us both in a way that we weren't compromising each other, but are still collaborating, and giving the audience a lot to digest."

Which isn't much of an explanation at all, but it's enough to get fans wildly speculating.

Assuming it's a TV show—which Harmon didn't explicitly confirm—it could follow in Arrested's footsteps and embrace the straight-to-Netflix corner of the "emerging mediascape." And considering the dense layers of jokes that reward repeat viewings of both Arrested Development and Community, the "a lot to digest" claim isn't hard to believe.

Harmon's not ready to "ruin it" by laying the whole thing out on the Internet, though, so all we can do is guess and wait.

[H/T: Vulture, Photo Credit: Dan Harmon/Twitter]

There are bad people in every town, but New York has long managed to stay at the top of the prick-heap, despite steep competition from L.A and Portland. But the latest issue of New York mag raises the possibility of a Silicon Valley usurper.

The case against New York: the people, the places, the prohibitive cost of leaving your apartment, the complete absence of apartments, interns who line up around the block for experimental pastries.

The case against San Francisco, a city Kevin Roose says has become "in many ways, more New York–ish than New York itself," is fleshed out considerably. Take everything about New York, and overlay an Instagram filter of oblivion and the newest new money.

There's "Frat Mason," a neighborhood that's been overrun by white-collar man babies:

On a recent Saturday, there were dudes in Duke T-shirts and American-flag trunks playing Frisbee and cornhole. One drank Bacardi straight from the bottle. Women with high blonde ponytails cheered between glances at their iPhones. And you can see more evidence of the transformation in the Marina, the district of boutiques and cupcake bakeries on the city's north side, which people alternately compare to the Upper East Side and Murray Hill, and where it's possible to see every varietal and shade of Lululemon yoga pant on a single street.

There's also this anonymous San Franciscan, writing about the dating scene:

If you're an attractive woman in tech, odds are you've hooked up with a fair amount of people in the industry. I'm probably at the lower end of what these women are trying to hook up with, but I've hooked up with almost all of them.

At least it doesn't snow. But can a better climate cancel out a worse society? Are all the would-be bankers flocking to startups making a horrible mistake? Are they both equally miserable places?

Photo via SFist

Chipotle says it paid singer Frank Ocean $212,500 for a song he never delivered. Frank Ocean says "Fuck off."

The Mexican chain filed suit Friday in Los Angeles, claiming Ocean had agreed to record a cover of "Pure Imagination" for its viral "Scarecrow " ad campaign, but backed out after they advanced him the first half of his fee.

Ocean's legal team says he was deceived, shown a video with no Chipotle branding, and told the song would be used in a campaign to promote responsible farming. They also claim Ocean was promised final approval on the project.

Ocean himself had a much more direct response. He wrote Chipotle a check for the full amount of the advance, wrote "FUCK OFF" in the memo line, and posted it on his Tumblr without comment.

Will Chipotle actually fuck off? The check does appear to satisfy their complaint that he didn't return the money when asked, but they could still fight him over legal fees.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Matthew McConaughey is everywhere these days—even on this weekend's SNL, if you squinted hard enough.

Taran Killam pulled out his best alright-alright-alright on Saturday night for a Weekend Update bit, and while his demented Southern drawl isn't perfect, he captures the McConaughey "I'm my own hero" spirit with ease.

And there was also his deliverance of this line: "You've gotta stay ahead of the pack, a lone wolf. Awoooooo. And I'm huntin', sniffin', hungry for raw meats."

The only thing higher than Colorado's stoners right now are the state's tax revenues.

The numbers for January are in, and they're pretty astounding: the state made between $2 million and $3 million in marijuana taxes, meaning that recreational tokers spent somewhere around $500,000 per day on weed in the first month of legalization.

Even more impressive is that the recreational revenue is coming from less than 60 stores state-wide.

Weed in Colorado is taxed on two levels—a 12.9 percent sales tax and a 15 percent excise tax. The first $40 million to roll in from the excise taxes is earmarked for schools; any surplus is left to lawmakers' discretion.

Medical marijuana sales, which are taxed at a different rate, brought in an additional cool million for January.

And now lawmakers are now scrambling to get a piece of the space cake: "The whole world wants to belly up to this trough," state senator Pat Steadman told the AP.

[image via Shutterstock]

Justin Bieber is back on the court, ballin' like only Justin Bieber can. Which is to say, he's forcing his poor manager, Scooter, to pretend like he just got juked out of his shoes by Justin Bieber's KraZy Dribbling Skillz. Seriously, look at this dive. You'd think he was some jobber selling for the Undertaker.

This video is fraudulent and embarrassing.

h/t Arun

[A man prays in front of the main entrance of Okawa Elementary School, where 74 students went missing after the 2011 tsunami in northern Japan. Tuesday marks the third anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that killed 15,884 people and left more than 2,600 unaccounted for in vast areas of its northern coast. Image via Shizuo Kambayashi/AP.]

The internet is a sprawling place that has its fair share of great sites, like this site that lets you scroll through a scale model of the solar system based on the moon being the size of one pixel. There are tons of weather sites out there and while a good portion of them are freaky conspiracy websites run by high schoolers with inexplicably large followings, there are some true gems that many weather enthusiasts have yet to discover. Here are the five weather sites I frequent the most for their awesome graphics and information.

5. MODIS Today

I wrote about MODIS Today the other day while describing the awesome satellite image the Aqua satellite took of the United States covered in snow. The site updates once per day with two ultra-high-resolution images of the United States in vivid color. It's worth visiting every day, even if there isn't active weather occurring. It never gets old looking at our planet from above.

4. Iowa Environmental Mesonet

The Iowa Environmental Mesonet website is a treasure trove of weather information — past, current, and future — that is a required bookmark for weather enthusiasts.

My favorite feature on the site is called IEMBot. The iembotis great because it aggregates and archives almost every text product issued by the National Weather Service in real time. The site is incredibly useful if you're trying to track severe weather as it happens, as it alerts you to text products (including watches and warnings) the moment they're issued by the National Weather Service.

The site also features a meteogram generator (an example is pictured above) that allows you to visualize model data for certain variables such as temperature and rain/snowfall for up to a week in the future. It's great for getting a side-by-side comparison of different models to see how much agreement and variability exists between them.

3. WeatherBELL Models

WeatherBELL arguably produces the best quality model output available to the public. The site has the "big three" models (GFS, NAM, ECMWF) and all of the other smaller models that help forecasters make a prediction. They have pretty much everything and anything a weather enthusiast could ever want from a website that features weather models.

The catch? The best isn't free.

It costs almost $200 a year.

2. TwisterData

The next best model website behind WeatherBELL (that's free) is a site called TwisterData. The site allows users to surf through the RAP (Rapid Refresh model), NAM, and GFS model runs on a large scale view of the continental United States. The site is great for tracking synoptic scale features such as nor'easters and the jet stream. The model images are very well done and excellent for forecasting and illustrating weather analysis.

1. SimuAWIPS

SimuAWIPS, pictured at the top of this post, is an incredible resource for tracking current weather and predicting what will happen in the short- to medium-range. The website is modeled off of the National Weather Service's innovative Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), which is pretty much the beating heart of their forecasting and warning operations.

The SimuAWIPS interface is interactive, customizable, and allows you to view up to four windows of weather data at once. It's as close to using the National Weather Service's software as you can get without actually working for them as a meteorologist. Its features, layout, and interactivity make it my number one site for weather graphics.

[Image credits (in respective order): SimuAWIPS / CIMSS/University of Wisconsin / Iowa Environmental Mesonet / WeatherBELL / TwisterData]

The Malaysian military reportedly has radar data showing that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 changed course and made it to the Malacca Strait, hundreds of miles from its last reported location, before vanishing early Saturday morning.

How do you make it "from Novelist to Marxist Public Intellectual"? David Wallace-Wells' profile of Benjamin Kunkel in New York magazine shares several secrets for this epic journey, and reveals several things about this contemporary mode of "Marxist Public Intellectual." Let's read closely, and see what we can learn about achieving that particular moniker.

First, a fact-check on the headline gloss: Technically, Kunkel became a novelist after he became a Marxist. As Wallace Wells reports,

Kunkel's been a Marxist since at least Deep Springs, the single-sex cowboys-and-classics California ranch college.

So how did Benjamin Kunkel go from Marxist to Marxist Novelist to Marxist Public Intellectual? In part by providing a "lifeline" to "the intellectual left through the Bush years," in the form of "radical literary platform" n+1:

When n+1 appeared ten years ago this fall, it was in a vacuum of dissent, just a couple of years since the collapse of a whole string of Gen-X magazines that were the closest the neoliberal '90s got to an intellectual counterculture: The Baffler, Hermenaut, Lingua Franca. "It had been this pipe dream on the order of, 'So we'll move upstate and found a commune,' " Kunkel says, remembering "our first very ugly issue. We wanted it to be like revolutionary red and it ended up being, like, Harvard crimson and I was like, Fuck. That's the most telling production error that ever occurred. It looked like some in-house Harvard magazine and very ugly. Kind of heroically ugly."

In keeping with that heroic tradition, Kunkel and most of his n+1 peers ended up with establishment book deals. To Kunkel's great credit, he evinces some embarassment about the rapturous reception Indecision received. And also, consequent claustrophobia about the strictures "New York" was putting on his desire to write honestly and fully:

New York, by contrast, has "always seemed like a bit too much," he tells me. "The primary thing I think is just time and space—it's almost just a mathematical thing. There were too many people in New York and it required too much money and took too much time to do things that weren't writing."

Kunkel moved to Argentina, but did not, of course, abandon New York altogether:

We're sitting at the bar of a dingy, garden-level Spanish restaurant he says is the only place in the neighborhood of his Union Square–ish pied-à-terre here in New York he can still stand, just a few hours before kickoff.

Ah yes. The Marxist Union Square pied-à-terre, a long tradition in the movement, which property records show he purchased and paid off the mortgage on in 2006. With what money, who knows. Perhaps it's just the proceeds from Indecision's success.

Look: of course the main way in which Kunkel embodies the contemporary "Marxist public intellectual" is that he leads what some churlish blogger (hello!) could call an ethically compromised, or even just somewhat confusing and inconsistent, existence. Which makes him a human being and not a monster. Even just within leftist tradition there are plenty of people whose lives were structured such that they automatically compromised the politics those same people espoused in tracts, leftist journal articles, and dinner parties. Engels was the son of a rich factory owner. Sometimes life is complicated like that.

Although there are counter-examples too: the founders of the Partisan Review, on which n+1 sometimes seemed to want to model itself, were much less comfortably set up in life than someone like Kunkel is described as being in this article.

Not that Kunkel thinks material change is part of his remit. "I don't know how we're supposed to go about acquiring the power to do these things," he tells Wallace-Wells. "I see my role as more of being one of the people suggesting what it is we should try and do."

[Photo via MoMA/PS1.]