Sarah Slocum, persecuted computer pioneer and San Francisco socialite, is experienced when it comes to privacy outrage: the LA Times reports Slocum was the target of a restraining order after allegedly peeping on her neighbors with a smartphone two years ago.

If you think someone in your face with Google Glass at a bar sounds bad, just imagine Sarah Slocum peering into your open window:

In an interview with The Times, Jessie Lilley Campbell said she was sitting with her husband and their landlord in the living room of their Aptos, Calif., home on the evening of May 15, 2012, when she noticed that someone was holding up a smartphone to record the conversation through an open window.

Campbell said she opened the front door and spotted Slocum, who at the time lived in a cabin on the property. She confronted Slocum, who denied recording the conversation.

Slocum, who's become a de facto Glass advocate and symbol of everything inherently wrong and perverse about mounting a smartphone on your face, denies violating anyone's privacy in any way. But does not deny standing in her neighbor's window with a recording smartphone.

I further hope to help educate the public about @GoogleGlass & other #wearables such as @EpiphanyEyewear in the interview w/ @InsideEdition

— Sarah Slocum (@SarahSlocum) March 4, 2014

Which suggests—well come on, confirms—that there is a particular kind of person who is preternaturally drawn to Google's face computer: the kind of person who lives in a cabin and takes covert videos of their neighbors without remorse.

Photo: Twitter

Game of Thrones comes back to television in just a few weeks, and already we're feeling the imperative: All Men (And Women) Must Freak Out. But why is Game of Thrones such a huge cultural phenomenon, among all other fantasy series? It comes down to two huge cultural trends, that are rooted in our widespread anxieties about life in the 21st century.

Top image: A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar 2015, cover by Donato Giancola, via Tor.com

First of all, it should be noted that Game of Thrones is, in fact, awesome. This cannot be discounted: the writing, based on George R.R. Martin's acclaimed novels, is sharp enough to cut yourself on. The cast is almost uniformly fantastic. And the worldbuilding is complex enough to get lost in, but also has enough larger-than-life and insane moments to keep drawing you in. The show's high quality can't be discounted as a reason for its success.

And yet, Game of Thrones also seems to have struck a chord in the popular imagination, as one of a few new pieces of mass media that speaks to people's psyches. What's that about?

It's worth remembering that when A Game of Thrones was first published in 1996, it was hailed as a response to a tradition of sanitized epic fantasy that had become stale. The novel's stark conclusion (pun intended), restrained use of magic and intense brutality seemed more realistic than the legion of Tolkien imitators that were dominating epic fantasy at the time. Nobody thought of A Game of Thrones as an especially relevant text for Clinton-era America, but rather as a renovation of the shopworn Medieval European fantasy tradition. (Read reviews published at the time here, here and here.)

Since the first book came out, though, we've seen a rise of two trends in pop culture, in general, that help to explain why Thrones is more relevant than it was 18 years ago:

1) The Dystopian/Apocalyptic Craze

Apocalyptic and dystopian books, movies and shows have been around forever — but the past decade has seemed more consumed with them than ever before. From Hunger Games to Walking Dead to 2012, we're obsessed with visions of devastation and societies fallen into hell. Even our superheroic escapist fantasies, like Superman and Star Trek, have to involve cities being trashed and massive destruction.

Game of Thrones takes place in a land that feels somewhat post-apocalyptic — there are occasional glimmers of hints that something really bad might have happened to Westeros long ago, and that's the reason for the irregular and attenuated seasons. But even more than that, we know Westeros is on the brink of a zombie apocalypse from the very first moment of the story. And part of the genius of Martin's slow-as-soil-erosion storytelling is that the zombie threat never quite arrives, but we keep seeing it getting closer and closer on the horizon.

In other words, even more than 2012 or whatever, Game of Thrones captures the real anxiety at the root of our apocalyptic fascination — the sense that disaster is coming closer at an almost imperceptible rate, and we can never really know when it will arrive. We all sense that our unsustainable economic system will collapse, and/or our biosphere will no longer support so many humans, but we don't know if the crunch will come next week or in 50 years.

And the endless wars and scheming show how short-sighted people can overlook a looming disaster, due to political infighting and stupidity. You wonder why they don't look over their shoulder and see the ice zombies creeping closer — until you realize that their denial is nothing compared to our own.

And meanwhile, Game of Thrones is the kind of dystopia that Hunger Games aspires to be — one in which we see in horrible detail how entrenched power and wealth gives certain people the right to walk all over everybody else. And how this injustice forces people to reinvent themselves and become monstrous in their own right. But it's also messy, showing the internal conflicts among the ruling classes, and the conflicting and contradictory ideologies that underpin this inequality. This is a dystopia that's enough removed from our own world that we can see its faults clearly, but it remains recognizeable.

With its focus on the power dynamics of feudalism and the slow but inevitable collapse of everything, Game of Thrones is uniquely suited to tell the story of America in the 20-teens. It allows us to talk about enivronmental disaster and political corruption, without actually facing up to the world we live in.

2) The Nostalgia for Awful History

Call it Schaden-stalgia. When we're not consuming futuristic dystopias and world-breaking disasters, we're obsessing about a somewhat idealized past in which men were men and women were women, and everybody Knew Their Place. Often, these visions of the past include a soupcon of social change, a hint that the Times They Were a-Changin', and the seeds of today's world were already in place.

Masters of Sex, Mad Men, Downton Abbey and countless other historical dramas seem to benefit from our obsession with imagining a past where gender and social roles were less fluid than they seem today. Even something like True Detective, which takes place in the present, draws a lot of its power from exploring the sordidness of the past.

We revel in the nastiness of past eras, without dwelling too much on the lack of indoor plumbing and decent medical care. Probably there's a part of us that longs for a time when things were less confusing and everybody knew where they stood, plus it's hard work being egalitarian. But also, social change has accelerated so rapidly in recent years that people want to retrace their steps and try to figure out how we got here from there.

Game of Thrones is like the perfect idealized-but-awful past. Especially in the television version, everybody looks beautiful and has perfect teeth, but almost everybody takes a turn of being that peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who shouts, "I'm being oppressed!"

You absolutely feel the social stratification and gender oppression of Westeros in your bones, even as you cheer for the occasional outlier like Bronn or Brienne who gets to break out.

It's a kind of a self-immolating wish fulfillment — you know, deep down, that you wouldn't last a minute in the real-life past that Westeros represents. If you weren't instantly maimed or otherwise brutalized, you'd be miserably suffocated. But it's still an alluring escape from our seemingly more complex and fluid era, where women can (possibly) be president and gays can marry and stuff. The genius of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is that it takes our pervasive sick nostalgia in the face of social change, and perverts it into something much more twisted.

(Plus see above about dystopia: We also suspect, deep down, that the social stratification reflects something real about our world.)

A Song of Ice and Fire is the work of a man who has an anti-war, anti-establishment agenda — but who also understands perfectly the seductiveness of power and violence. If the books and TV show seem to be reveling in the worst aspects of human nature, that's partly because those aspects are what Westeros helps us to recognize in ourselves. And partly because those terrible parts of ourselves are exactly what yearns for a really nasty bit of entertainment like this one.

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is now in its tenth day, and as authorities attempt to make sense of the plane's disappearance, and family members grapple with the likely loss of its 239 passengers, the internet is hard at work trying to figure out what happened. Some theories are obviously wrong (aliens?). Some are just probably wrong—but their plausibility has led to widespread dissemination online. Here are four of the least crazy-sounding:

The crew disabled the plane's communications system because of a fire. The smoke from the fire eventually knocked everyone unconscious, and the plane, which had been traveling on autopilot, crashed once it ran out of fuel.

This theory has been advanced by pilot Chris Goodfellow:

If they pulled the [electrical] busses the plane indeed would go silent. It was probably a serious event and they simply were occupied with controlling the plane and trying to fight the fire. Aviate, Navigate and lastly communicate. There are two types of fires. Electrical might not be as fast and furious and there might or might not be incapacitating smoke. However there is the possibility given the timeline that perhaps there was an overheat on one of the front landing gear tires and it blew on takeoff and started slowly burning. Yes this happens with under inflated tires. Remember heavy plane, hot night, sea level, long run takeoff. There was a well known accident in Nigeria of a DC8 that had a landing gear fire on takeoff. A tire fire once going would produce horrific incapacitating smoke. Yes, pilots have access to oxygen masks but this is a no no with fire. Most have access to a smoke hood with a filter but this will only last for a few minutes depending on the smoke level. (I used to carry one of my own in a flight bag and I still carry one in my briefcase today when I fly).

What I think happened is that they were overcome by smoke and the plane just continued on the heading probably on George (autopilot) until either fuel exhaustion or fire destroyed the control surfaces and it crashed. I said four days ago you will find it along that route - looking elsewhere was pointless.

Sounds terrifying—but also very possible! Then again, Goodfellow wrote the post before Malaysian authorities announced their hijacking theory on Saturday.

"I wrote this post before the information regarding the engines continuing to run for approximately six hours and the fact it seems acars was shut down before the transponder," Goodfellow wrote in his comments.

His suggestion that the plane would have flown erratically in the case of a hijacking has irked some. From Jalopnik:

Would hijackers really seize control of a massive jet with over 200 people on board with no planned destination? Absolutely not. They would immediately demand to be flown somewhere very specific.

And one former pilot told Business Insider that, before dumping the communications system, he "would have communicated their emergency and intentions to turn around, as well as ask for assistance and direct routing to a suitable airport from the air traffic controllers very quickly."

The plane crashed in a pilot's suicide attempt.

Some pilots and aviation officials believe pilot suicide is the most likely explanation for Flight 370's disappearance.

In an interview with CBS News, Mike Glynn, a committee member of the Australian and International Pilots Association, pointed out that pilot suicides are suspected as causes in for the 1997 SilkAir crash and an EgyptAir crash in 1999.

"A pilot rather than a hijacker is more likely to be able to switch off the communications equipment,'' Glynn told CBS News. "The last thing that I, as a pilot, want is suspicion to fall on the crew, but it's happened twice before.''

There are also more outlandish theories on reddit (of course) supporting the pilot suicide idea.

Flight 370 flew behind another airplane in the area, hiding it from radar and allowing it to land elsewhere undetected.

This one, proposed by hobby pilot and aviation enthusiast Keith Ledgerwood, was making the rounds on Tumblr earlier this week. It seems to make sense; there are certainly lots of maps and charts, and some knowledgeable-sounding jargon. Here's the crux:

There are too many oddities in this whole story that don't make sense if this theory isn't the answer in my opinion. Why did MH370 fly a seemingly haphazard route and suddenly start heading northwest towards the Andaman Islands on P628? If not for this reason, it seems like a rather odd maneuver. The timing and evasive actions seem deliberate. Someone went through great lengths to attempt to become stealthy and disable ACARS, transponder/ADS-B (even though SATCOM to Inmarsat was left powered).

After looking at all the details, it is my opinion that MH370 snuck out of the Bay of Bengal using SIA68 as the perfect cover. It entered radar coverage already in the radar shadow of the other 777, stayed there throughout coverage, and then exited SIA68's shadow and then most likely landed in one of several land locations north of India and Afghanistan.

Sure, why not!

Courtney Love found the plane.

Sure, some people claim to have disproved Love's theory. But we still believe, Courtney.

And here's what we (think) we know for sure about what happened: The flight was reportedly rerouted by a pre-programmed computer system just after its final communication ("all right, good night") with Malaysian air control. After reviewing military data showing that it soared above 45,000 feet, Malaysian officials believe the plane, which reportedly flew for hours after it vanished from civilian radar, was either hijacked or sabotaged.

[Image via Getty]

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if we pay you for a PlayStation 3 and you never deliver, do we not spam your phone with Shakespeare until you submit?

Graphic designer Edd Joseph, of Bristol, U.K., is putting on his own personal revenge play after the gaming console he bought on Gumtree (basically the British Craiglist) never showed up.

After trying to cancel the sale—he couldn't, because he'd paid by direct bank transfer—and contacting the police to no avail, he came up with an ingenious plan. Copying and pasting passages from the web into a text message doesn't cost anything, so he sent his nemesis the complete text of 22 Shakespeare plays.

Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and more have blown up the scammer's phone with 17,424 texts, costing Joseph exactly nothing.

He's started to get responses, too.

"I got the first reply after an hour, and then a few more abusive messages after that. His phone must have been going off pretty constantly for hours," he told the Bristol Post, "But recently he has taken to calling me and giving me abuse on the phone. I tried to ask him if he was enjoying the plays, but he was very confused."

"I'm not a literary student, and I'm not an avid fan of Shakespeare but I've got a new appreciation you could say," Joseph added. "Especially for the long ones."

Update: To clarify, Joseph's phone carrier splits long messages into multiple texts—so he only needed to copy and paste 22 times.

[H/T: Betabeat, Photo Credit: Shutterstock]

Fortune quotes a venture capitalist saying that he and his peers are now investing in bitcoin: "I think bitcoin investing is becoming to this generation what real estate investing used to be." So... purchased by unsophisticated consumers at prices so high above actual worth that owners will end up underwater?

Remember the Academy Awards? Don't worry, no one else does either. The show was boring, the parties were lame , and the dresses were forgettable. But this year's forgettable ensembles—complete with the usual blood diamonds and useless, tiny purses—were also as expensive as fuck.

So whose boring outfit had the highest retail value? Best actress Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, of course. Quite the overachiever! According to Australian Vogue, Blanchett's look totaled an estimated $18 million, which is $17.95 million more than your overall net worth.

Her dress by Armani Privé is valued at "around $100,000." And her jewelry by Chopard is worth "around $18 million" and included the following pieces:

• Earrings of 62 opals with a combined 33 carats
• Brown diamond bracelet
• Pear-shaped diamond ring

Best actress loser and poor person Sandra Bullock only showed up wearing an embarrassingly cheap $8.24 million dollar outfit.

[h/t Vanity Fair Hollywood, Image via AP]

Deadpsin A March Madness Pool Scoring System That Doesn't Suck | Gizmodo Beware of This Dangerously Convincing Google Docs Phishing Scam | io9 The Real Experiment That Determines How You Should Split The Check | Lifehacker Make Your Own Cookie Cup Shot Glasses | Kinja Popular Posts

Chick-Fil-A's CEO says he hasn't changed his mind about opposing gay marriage but regrets speaking publicly about it: "It's probably very wise from our standpoint to make sure that we present our brand in a compelling way that the consumer can relate to."

The jury in the trial of a British publicist accused of sexual assault had to be dismissed from the courtroom today after they couldn't stop laughing about testimony concerning the defendant's two-and-a-half inch penis.

Max Clifford, the defendant in the case, is a publicist accused of assaulting seven women, including today's witness who testified the 70-year-old assaulted her in the 1980's when she was trying to make it as a model.

The woman said when she was 17 and trying to break into the modeling world, Clifford took advantage of her, groping her, masturbating, and possibly ejaculating on her before trying to pimp her out to Cubby Broccoli in exchange for a role in a James Bond film.

But according to court testimony, Clifford, who once claimed to have slept with Diana Ross, was so poorly endowed that even his victims made jokes about his size.

The woman said in her evidence she thought Clifford was well-endowed and his penis was very large. "I had only seen one before, I had never seen one in that proximity and that situation."

The court has heard claims that his penis is "tiny" and no more than two-and-a-half inches when erect. When Richard Horwell QC, defending, asked her about the issue, the woman remarked: "I have a small mouth. I do, my dentist has always said."

The judge then had to dismiss the jury for a "few minutes" so they could compose themselves, saying, "It is inevitable in a case dealing with this sort of graphic detail that members of the jury want to burst out laughing."

[image via Shutterstock]

Stanford professor Andrei Linde wasn't the only physicist to celebrate the Big Bang discovery yesterday. "It is another confirmation of inflation," Stephen Hawking told the BBC. "It also means I win a bet with [physicist] Neil Turok." Hawking's last wager over the Higgs-Boson particle cost him $100; it's not clear what he won this time.

A dark, spreading stain overshadowed the Colombian president's impassioned campaign speech Sunday.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, elected in 2010, kicked off his reelection campaign with a speech to supporters in Barranquilla this weekend. But footage of the president apparently wetting himself onstage (starting around :10) is raising questions about the 62-year-old's health.

Santos, who appears to be unaware, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2012. He underwent surgery to remove a prostate tumor that same year, which his doctors said gave him a 97 percent chance of beating the disease. He has not publicly mentioned any health issues since.

A Massachusetts mom threw herself under a car and used her body as a speed bump to save her two-year-old twin daughters earlier this month.

Twenty-two-year-old Mindy Tran thought she had parked her Honda at her apartment building when she got out to lock her front door. But to her horror, the car—parked at the top of a steep hill leading to a busy street—began to roll away.

Tran threw herself under the car, slowing it down enough for a neighbor to jump in and get the girls out. Firefighters had to free Tran, and she was airlifted to the hospital with a broken leg and dislocated shoulder and hip.

"My daughters are my everything and I don't want to see my daughters in the hospital, and I knew at that time it was either mine or theirs," Tran told WCVB.

Tran, who had just moved to the apartment from a homeless shelter, is facing more surgery, but should be out of the hospital in a few weeks. She's currently in a wheelchair but said she's confident she'll be able to walk again.

"It was all for my kids. I'm just glad my kids are fine," Tran said.

[image viaWCVB 5]

Courtesy of Instagrammers at the Mall of America, we now have a first look at How I Met Your Mother's Jason Segel as the late David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour .

Jesse Eisenberg co-stars as Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky, whose 2010 book Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, about a 5-day road trip with Wallace, was adapted for the film.

When Segel was cast in December, many were skeptical that he could play Wallace. Really, though, the biggest challenge for The End of the Tour might not be the casting: It might be the source material.

[H/T: Vulture]

Target is America's third-largest retailer. It is also as staunchly anti-union as they come. In 2011, we showed you the cheesy anti-union video all Target employees were shown. We now bring you the new cheesy anti-union video all Target employees must endure.

The existence of Target's new anti-union employee training video (entitled "Think Hard: Protect Your Signature") was first reported today by Josh Eidelson at Salon. And we have obtained the actual video, which is above. It features Dawn and Ricardo, a cool, knowing, multiracial pair of Target employees who are here to talk to you, the Target team member, about the dangers of unions. "Someday, someone you don't know may approach you at work, or visit you at home, asking you to sign your name to an authorization card, petition, or some other union document," Ricardo warns.

Stranger danger!

"At Target, an open door policy isn't just a catchphrase," clarifies Dawn, in her smirky, Rachel Maddow-esque way. "It's a policy." She's referring to the sort of policy that caused a former Target manager to tell us, of the store's HR policies, "on paper it sounds great but the reality is a horror story."

"Unions want what we have" the video declares. How so? Ricardo explains, as if speaking to a child: "We're a target, because unions are threatened by us. And here's why: when we take business away from retailers that are unionized, those companies may downsize, reducing the number of employees. And that means the union loses members, which is a big problem for the union business. Did you notice how I just called it a business? Because that's what it is."

Target, which posted $73.3 billion in revenues in 2012, is presumably not a "business." Businesses sound bad.

Dawn warns, "But if the unions did try to organize our team members, chances are they would change our fast, fun and friendly culture." That's the fast, fun and friendly culture that Target employees have described to us as "the sketchiest place I ever worked." "Sketchy" should be understood to mean "fast, fun and friendly."

The video drones on for 15 minutes, as Dawn and Ricardo plod through various dire consequences of unionization. "You could come into work one day to find union protesters telling our guests not to shop at Target," Dawn says. "And how could that possibly be good for anyone on our team?"

I dunno... higher wages and better benefits and improved working conditions? Notably absent from this video is any discussion of the fact that the primary reason Target does not want any of its employees to unionize is not because it fears a loss of its precious "culture," but because it fears having to pay higher wages and provide better benefits and working conditions. I don't know how that bit was left out of the script. Quite an oversight.

At the end, the video proclaims that if a union comes into the happy Target workplace, "All those open doors may have to close." Considering what lies behind those open doors, that sounds like a great improvement.

In celebration of its upcoming centennial, World War I killed two more people today.

How many times have you seen New York City destroyed onscreen? Los Angeles? Kansas? For nearly as long as there have been movies, there have been disaster movies. The map above shows 189 such cinematic attacks—using a very broad definition of the "disaster" genre—that have afflicted various parts of the United States. Below, you'll find each category listed as its own map, with an accompanying movie list.

Some caveats:

• This is not an exhaustive list.
• We tried to limit our selections to movies where the disaster happened during the course of the movie (no purely post-apocalyptic flicks), and the disaster in question threatened more than just a few stragglers (Jaws counts, Deep Blue Sea doesn't). That second requirement produced a lot of borderline cases.
• A lot of disaster movies are set in fictional or undefined locations; for those, we tried to find an approximate real-world place (based on geographic cues, or location of filming).
• We didn't have space to fit Alaska and Hawaii on the map, but the five disaster movies we found for them are included in the tables.

Trickiest of all was dividing these movies into neat categories, based largely off plot synopses. We took our best shot, though many films could fit in more than one category—let us know what we missed in the comments.

Monster Attacks

While King Kong originally invaded New York in 1933, the monster-attack genre really hit its stride in the '50s, when an incredible string of B-movies unleashed everything from giant ants (Them!) to locusts (Beginning of the End) to octopuses (It Came From Beneath the Sea). In an unsettling sign of the times, many of these monsters had been enlarged/enraged by nuclear radiation. While Godzilla has spent decades destroying various parts of Japan, he's only visited the U.S. twice (Destroy all Monsters and 1998's Godzilla).

Please note that we're making a somewhat fine distinction between which large animals count as monsters, and which count as creatures. If the animal seems to be on the margins of biological possibility, it's a creature (Lake Placid). If it's bigger than that, it's a monster (King Kong).

Creature Attacks

Do creature attacks really count as disasters? If they menace an entire town, sure, why the hell not? While we're using a shark symbol, attacking creatures in disaster movies have included birds (The Birds), bees (The Swarm), and worms (Squirm). Thanks to the success of Jaws, most of these movies involve animals attacking from out of the water, because that's scary as hell.

Climatic Events

Climatic events include hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, avalanches, and other weather-related phenomena. Compared with other disaster categories, you'll see that the Gulf Coast and Tornado Alley are well represented. The sudden rise of the global-warming-as-action-movie genre has brought some serious climatic destruction to major U.S. metro areas lately.

Geologic Events

In keeping with the general scientific literature, geologic events—including volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis—are mostly concentrated on the Pacific Rim. Los Angeles has been destroyed by geologic events at least seven times, but New York, which is not on the Pacific Rim, has still managed to be destroyed by a tsunami (Deluge and Quantum Apocalypse), an earthquake (Aftershock), and a volcano (Disaster Zone).

Infections

Zombies, diseases, and parasites. Along with superhero movies, this genre has exploded in the last decade. Compared with other disaster types, infections seem to be more likely to strike in the Midwest and Appalachia.

Man Is The Real Disaster

Sometimes—in the case of invasions, terrorism, fires, and especially nukes—it turns out that MAN is the real disaster. This list doesn't include the many post-apocalyptic movies that make the same general point, but start after the disaster has taken place.

Alien Attacks

For obvious tactical reasons, alien attacks generally hit major metropolitan areas, particularly D.C. Independence Day set the standard, destroying New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Houston in one go.

Space Rocks

Self-explanatory! Rocks from space tend to destroy New York a lot, including twice in 1998 (Deep Impact and Armageddon).

Superhero Battles

Superheroes have caused enough collateral damage in California and New York over the past decade that the clean-up crew might get its own movie. We know that the Transformers are aliens (or alien robots), but we're going by genre here—it's clearly a superhero battle.

Sharknados

A sharknado is a tornado composed of sharks. There has only been one sharknado. So far.

The Concourse is Deadspin's home for culture/food/whatever coverage.

Throughout the investigation of missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the government has been accused of being uncooperative and withholding details. Now, their insistence on keeping families away from media is making it look even more like they're hiding something.

The New York Times reported that prior to a media briefing on Wednesday, protesters claiming to represent the Flight 370 families unfurled a banner that read: "We oppose the Malaysian government concealing the truth. Delaying time for saving lives." Protestor Xu Denwang said, "All our feelings are the same: we demand to know the truth." Police came into the room and took down the banner and forced outspoken members of the crowd to leave.

A distraught mother is taken away from cameras by Malaysian authorities

A female family member in the room called out the integrity of the government, saying,

"We need to know the truth! The Malaysian government is a bunch of cheats. All the governments of the world must join together to pressure the Malaysian government to give an explanation."

In the above video, BBC reporter Jonah Fisher is denied access to where the families are, with no explanation as to why. He notes that Malaysia officials "are not used to having their authority challenged like this. This was not a message the Malaysians want the world to hear, and they crudely stepped in and dragged the women kicking and screaming out of the room."

Once the protestors were quelled, at the subsequent news conference, Malaysia's defense minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, commented on the protest saying that he could "fully understand" the grief of the families. "It is heart-wrenching, even for me," he said. Hussein later issued a statement, saying:

"We regret the scenes at this afternoon's press conference, involving some of the relatives of passengers on board MH370. One can only imagine the anguish they are going through. Malaysia is doing everything in its power to find MH370 and hopefully bring some degree of closure for those whose family members are missing. I have ordered an immediate inquiry into the events in the press room today."

What does the Malaysia government know, that they're not telling us? Their refusal to let families and media communicate openly only raises suspicion. Hopefully, the other 25 nations participating in the investigation can convince Malaysia to be more open as the search continues, clouded in doubt and secrecy.

All photos provided by Getty Images

Facebook pulled the best practical joke of the internet age: the company convinced countless celebrities, bands, and "brands" that its service was the best way to reach people with eyeballs and money. Maybe it is! But now that companies have taken the bait, Facebook is holding the whole operation hostage.

Update: To be perfectly clear, none of this will affect the average Facebook user's ability to freely use Facebook—only entities that use Facebook as a promotional tool.

A source professionally familiar with Facebook's marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is "in the process of" slashing "organic page reach" down to 1 or 2 percent. This would affect "all brands"—meaning an advertising giant like Nike, which has spent a great deal of internet effort collecting over 16 million Facebook likes, would only be able to affect of around a 160,000 of them when it pushes out a post. Companies like Gawker, too, rely on gratis Facebook propagation for a huge amount of their audience. Companies on Facebook will have to pay or be pointless.

That 160,000 still sounds like a lot of people, sure. But how about my favorite restaurant here in New York, Pies 'n' Thighs, which has only 3,281 likes—most likely locals who actually care about updates from a nearby restaurant? They would reach only a few dozen customers. A smaller business might only reach one. This also assumes the people "reached" bother to even look at the post.

The alternative is of course to pay for more attention. If you want an audience beyond a measly one or two percent, you'll have to pay money—perhaps a lot of money, if you're a big business.

The change was described to me by a source as a cataclysm for businesses, something Facebook is calling the extreme throttling a "strategy pivot" they're slowly telling brands one by one so as not to start a panic. It might be too late. Reports of "crashing" engagement numbers have been floating around for a little while, but this is the first time we've heard it drift out of Facebook proper.

Two things: fuck "brands," really, those constructed succubi meant to look and feel familiar and friendly but really just advertise and annoy us. If Nike isn't able to bombard millions of people with a picture of a shoe without shelling out some money, no one ought to care besides Nike. But smaller places and people will see their ability to self-promote basically zeroed out. The fans they've attracted will be pushed behind a curtain, only to be pulled back now and then when cash is on hand. If you've spent years trying to build up a following for yourself, this is a bummer—maybe a career-altering bummer.

On the other hand, Facebook is a business. It's easy to forget. It's not a charity, or a non-profit, or an art project. So much of the tech industry is predicated on the myth-belief that income is optional, that as long as you make something pretty and well-liked, success will somehow arrive out of the ether. That's a sham. Facebook has to make money like the Nikes of the world—the same companies that are now going to raise hell when the free firehose runs dry.

Facebook has not returned a request for comment.

Image via Shutterstock

Ed Houben, a single Dutch gentleman with a knack for getting ladies pregnant, has built his livelihood on just that. He's fathered 98 children since 2002, succeeding even in some cases where doctors have failed.

In a BBC profile, Houben said he started out going to sperm banks, but after the Netherlands banned anonymous donation, he switched over to the "traditional way" of helping women get pregnant: having sex with them. He's never looked back.

Women and couples have traveled from across Europe to solicit Houben's services, which he advertises online.

Asked whether husbands were uncomfortable with his method of sperm donation, he told the story of a family he recently helped: "They came here three times and now they have a baby. They are beyond these feelings of 'Ooh, there's a stranger sleeping with my wife.'"

Houben no longer bothers making his clients sign contracts, which probably wouldn't protect him anyway. He spends time getting to know the families, and sometimes even the kids he's fathered.

Houben also keeps a spreadsheet that he can show his progeny later in life to prevent the possibility that they might unknowingly sleep together.

"If, later on, one of my children meets someone who doesn't know who his natural father is, he can consult this list," he told the BBC.

Eventually, he'd like to retire from the sperm game and start a family of his own. But for right now, he's really enjoying his job.

[H/T: Reddit, Photo Credit: Ed Houben/Facebook]

Say, Republicans: Have you heard of these "millennials"? Did you know they're hurting economically , and they vote? Well, of course you know they vote. You've tried for so long to make it harder, because they don't vote for you so much. But hey, there's another solution: Make stuff up!

Enter Scott Greenberg, a 30-year-old ad guy with a cool shirt, the sort of shirt Adam might wear on Girls. Scott is a hipster. Scott is young. Scott is concerned about paying for things. That's why Scott is a Republican, the face of a new GOP-sponsored ad campaign running in 14 swing Senate states this election cycle:

I feel pretty lucky to have a job. So many people I know are unemployed. It's like their lives are stuck in neutral.

So I get ticked off at politicians who say they want to help the unemployed and then vote for regulations that make it impossible to hire anyone. Listen, you can't help the unemployed by hurting the people who could employ them.

I'm a Republican because my friends need a paycheck, not an empty promise.

I should like Scott. After all, we're products of the same university English department and local podunk newspaper. And we both have unemployed friends and feel pretty lucky to have jobs! But Scott has a lot of hardships that I don't, frankly. And I don't just mean his inability to take his eyes off the cue cards beside the camera. (Going for on-the-street conversational veritè? You're doing it creepily wrong.)

Here are the hardships in Scott Greenberg's life:

• His Audi needs gas .
• The house he just bought in the DC metro area, that hipster haven, is covered in snow.
• His house appears to be a fair distance from his one-man marketing firm's glass-and-steel office in DC's NoMa district. (Hey, create some jobs already, you small-business slacker.)
• He probably worked really hard after law school at his glossy magazine job "during Mercedes Benz swim week and independent gallery and fashion shows throughout Miami Beach and the design district."
• He and his wife must have had sleepless nights trying to figure out what to say while chilling with the Fabulous Beekman Boys:

• When hanging with his homies from Paste magazine, Scott had to spring for the $34 vintage FSU shirt that never goes on sale:

Update: Susan Busch, manager for Dan Deacon—the musician featured here with Greenberg in this photo—emails us to clarify that Deacon and Greenberg are absolutely not friends. Here's her statement:

Dan Deacon (pictured in this article) is in no way affiliated with Scott Greenberg other than being interviewed by him for Paste Magazine and a quick photo after a show. Dan's political views are no where near in line with the GOP. He's active in the Occupy Wall Street movement and is specifically outspoken about his views on fracking. Scott had Dan listed, with many many other bands he's interviewed, as a client on his CV but removed his name upon request.

How do you expect him to be able to afford his gas and heat with expenses like that?

But at the end of the day, Scott's chief offense isn't living richly and talking like a pauper. That's a fairly Gen Y thing to do. His cardinal sin is making absolutely no coherent sense in terms of political rhetoric. Like when he wants an "all of the above" energy strategy:

I shouldn't have to check my bank account before I fill up my car. Sooo much of my paycheck ends up going to gas. We haven't even talked about my heating bill at home. So when it comes to energy policy for this country, I'm for everything—solar, wind, shale gas, oil, whatever. I'm a Republican because we should have an all of the above energy policy.

First, if he likes "all of the above" energy policies, he should vote for Obama. Second, he shouldn't like "all of the above" energy policies, because they don't make his gas cheaper. They make all of the energy companies richer. Third, stop fucking driving everywhere. Or at least car pool with your awesome unemployed friends. What kind of a hipster are you?

Is this more evidence of the GOP's inability to resonate with young voters? It would be, if youth outreach really was the aim of this campaign. Certainly it evinces the same post-2006, post-2012 implosion reasoning we've seen Republicans display: "It's not our philosophy that's wrong! It's our messaging!" They've seen all the Obama ads, and they think the ads' cultural currency lies in their special sauce of buzzwords and images, not in the underlying ideas and beliefs. Conservatives give liberals credit for pathos, but never for ethos and logos, probably because of conservatives' pathological belief in their own ethical and logical superiority.

But I'm not convinced this is a serious effort, any more than the GOP's half-hearted, comically failing efforts at online crowdsourcing, grassroots outreaching, cyber innovating, or Hispanic bridge-building. It's not as if they made a truly bold ad showing Scott talk about how glad he is that his gay friends can finally share work benefits through marriage because so many GOP leaders have acceded to public opinion on that particular issue. They didn't make that ad because they don't want to alienate, you know, real Republicans.

More likely, an old donor wants to see some youth outreach, and the RNC finds Scott, a young Beltway acolyte to provide them with a simulacrum of youth culture for a couple of shekels. We have the horn-rimmed glasses! The pomaded hair! A brick tenement across a city street! Talk of money problems and friends!

The RNC likely doesn't give a flying rat's patoot if this campaign hooks in a single under-35 voter. But if it impresses a couple of rich country-club grandpas and loosens up their checkbooks, it will have served its purpose. This is marketing for dollars, not for votes. When the alpha and omega of your philosophy is market capitalism, you assume dollars can always buy votes. And until the American electorate starts proving Republicans wrong on a regular basis, the shitty, laughably cynical ad-making business will persist.