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Google Glass Continues Passive-Aggressive PR Campaign

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Google Glass Continues Passive-Aggressive PR Campaign

By 2014, wearing a Google Glass on your face has become only slightly less stigmatized than a giant swastika or swath of acne. But if face computers die, Google's rep will take a hit, too: so the company just put out another try-hard list of antisocial propaganda.

Following up Google's request that its customers stop being creepy jerkoffs, the company has flagged a series of "urban myths" about Glass, which really sound more like corporate insecurities orbiting around actually terrible things. For example:

Myth 3 - Glass Explorers are technology-worshipping geeks

Our Explorers come from all walks of life. They include parents, firefighters, zookeepers, brewmasters, film students, reporters, and doctors.

You said it, not us! If anything, the myth-stereotype is "psychotic window-peepers ," not "geeks." Also, "brewmasters" are not a real thing, and "doctors" who wear cameras into examination rooms should probably not be allowed to practice medicine.

But more telling than the "myths"—Glass is the perfect surveillance device, Glass is only for those privileged enough to afford it, Glass is the ultimate distraction from the real world—are the means by which Google tries to dispel them: shame. It looks like Google's strategy right now is making its face computer look more friendly by making our regular cell phones look more sinister, with the expectation that we'll regret all this criticism when Glass is ubiquitous:

Instead of looking down at your computer, phone or tablet while life happens around you, Glass allows you to look up and engage with the world.

[...]

Next time you're tempted to ask an Explorer if he's recording you, ask yourself if you'd be doing the same with your phone.

[...]

The next time you're on the subway, or, sitting on a bench, or in a coffee shop, just look at the people around you. You might be surprised at what you see.

[...]

In the future, today's prototype may look as funny to us as that mobile phone from the mid 80s.

[...]

Before jumping to conclusions about Glass, have you actually tried it? The Glass screen is deliberately above the right eye, not in front or over it. It was designed this way because we understand the importance of making eye contact and looking up and engaging with the world, rather than down at your phone.

How dare we jump to conclusions! Basically: cell phones have already harmed our privacy, so why not turn the screw a few thousand more times? What are you, some sort of luddite? Doesn't this cherry-picked-by-Google photo of tweens on their "smartphones" scare you?

Google Glass Continues Passive-Aggressive PR Campaign

Just look at them, stumbling around. What if they walk into trees? Wouldn't it be safer and more wholesome if they wore their phones across their eyes, never needing to look away, never needing to know a separation between screen and self? Won't we feel silly and backwards someday, when we look back at 2014 and wonder why we ever wanted to put our screens away? Google is banking on this looming, manufactured sense of future-shame to cancel out the very real and current shame Glass users experience right now. The difference being that the former is fake, and the latter is justified.

Photo: Getty


Little Kid Recites Every Bad Word He Knows

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Meet the playground's most profane shock comic, This Kid in a Dinosaur Shirt. He knows swears you've never even heard of, and he's not afraid to say them. With his butt-mouth.

[H/T: Digg]

High School Teacher Plans to Complete Sex Change Over Spring Break

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What are you doing with your April vacation, Yosemite High students? Beach reading? Killing some brain cells? That's nice. Your veteran science teacher, the former Army officer, plans to finalize her gender transition and return to the classroom as her "authentic self."

Last year Gary Sconce, 56, came out to his California family and friends as a woman trapped in a man's body. "When you aren't who you really are, it's like being smothered. It's like being rolled in a wave, if you've ever been rolled in a wave in the ocean where you can't find your way up, you don't know which direction you've been turned," Sconce told Fresno's KFSN-TV in the interview above. "My earliest memories were that even though my body was a little boy body, which I really didn't understand, I was a girl. I knew I was a girl."

Coming out is like "being your authentic self after being a fake you," she told the Fresno Bee.

Since coming out, Sconce has transitioned in most aspects to living as Ms. Karen Adell Scot. Except in one place: work. For 24 years, that's been Yosemite High School, where Scot teaches science and multimedia. She now plans to work and live as Scot 100 percent, beginning April 22, when YHS students return from spring break.

Fox News and the Fresno Bee have managed to find the random grumbler or two, but for the most part locals seem to be accepting Scot's courageous move. And it is courageous:

"Being transgender is not a choice," Scot wrote in a letter to Yosemite High employees earlier this week. "Consider: I have lost my marriage of 35 years to a magnificent, brilliant woman, am going to lose my house, and am spending (money) on serious and painful physical changes — including both medical and psychological services.

"I have been shunned by those who used to be my friends, have been shunned by family, have had people try to cast demons out of me, have left my church of nearly 30 years, and have been scorned and laughed at by those who had for decades said they were my friends. Who would choose that?"

In fact, Scot's efforts to avoid transitioning over the years sound like they were herculean:

For years, Scot said she participated in many traditionally masculine activities to prove to herself that she wasn't a female — to no avail.

She was once a sheriff deputy, helped found Yosemite High's Cadet Corps (a student military drill unit), played football in college and is a martial artist.

In other words, a "man's man"—acknowledging that manhood in this case was an unfulfilling performance for its performer. High school, perhaps more than anywhere else in our culture, is a bad trip of gender-based expectations and frustrations in even the best of times. Hopefully, Scot's students and the Yosemite community will use her difficult decision as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of those dynamics.

More than 100 people remain missing after Saturday's deadly mudslide in Washington, though officials

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More than 100 people remain missing after Saturday's deadly mudslide in Washington, though officials said that was a "soft number" and likely to go down. Still, Snohomish County Fire Chief Travis Hots said "the situation is very grim."

Thatz Not Okay: Can I Rebuff My Girlfriend's Signature Sex Move?

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Thatz Not Okay: Can I Rebuff My Girlfriend's Signature Sex Move?

I have a hickey. Yes, I would high-five all my buddies for this if I were fifteen. However, I am a thirty year-old man. I have been seeing a young lady and spent an enjoyable night with her. Unfortunately, I didn't realize until looking in the mirror the next morning that her idea of enjoyment involves her teeth bruising the dickens out of my neck. Is this just a necessary evil? I feel like I'm too old for hickeys and have been for some time. When I pointed it out, she laughed and said it's her "calling card." Calling card or not, I still have a meeting at work in a few hours. Is that okay?


Thatz not okay.

You know who leaves calling cards in 2014? Serial killers.

As sexual calling cards go, there are worse (chlamydia) and better (500 minutes to Costa Rica on a crystal clear connection for just $8). But the best sexual calling card of all—the move that everyone should adopt as their "signature move" before moving on to extra credit—is probably just being really good at sex.

Intercourse shouldn't involve anything you describe as "a necessary evil." Leaving "Kilroy was here"-style graffiti to indicate that the bearer of this mark is a Sexually Active Adult is fine—as long as both parties agree that it's fine. Otherwise, your thinking going into a sexual encounter should not be, "When I'm done, this person will be changed. Physically." Sex is like a national park: take only pictures, leave only memories—except that you shouldn't take pictures without permission either, so maybe sex is more like an art museum: no unauthorized flash photography; donations welcome; audio guides available (French, Italian, Japanese only).

(Incidentally, giving a hickey doesn't usually involve excessive gnawing with teeth. It sounds like this young woman was trying to chomp her way through to your jugular, either because she is Vampyr or a regular human murderer. Or perhaps she's just a hypersexualized version Lennie from Of Mice and Men. Do her hugs always leave you with cracked ribs? Does she knock you over every time you try to dance? That's not normal, adorkable girl stuff.)

Potential nefarious intentions aside, the Gilded Age debutante sucking her way into your heart isn't singularly at fault here. To use a metaphor that will appeal to her old-timey sensibilities, the acquisition of a hickey is not unlike the rapid acceleration of a steam-powered locomotive toward its final destination. It is the responsibility of the train operator to throw the brake when the tiny, grayish pinprick in the distance begins to materialize into a railroad station. It is the responsibility of the thirty-year-old man dating the baddest teen in AP Spanish to unlatch her from his neck after he realizes she has been slurping on the same area for fifteen seconds. By this point, you are old enough to know what it feels like to get a hickey. (If you didn't before, now you do. It feels great!) If you don't want one, shut that process down as soon as it lurches into motion.

Granted, even if your phrasing is polite, you might feel a little rude calling a time-out mid-coitus to complain. No one wants to be told not to do something during sex, unless it's a sexy order like "Don't stop!" or "Don't wake up the dog!" If you can't bring yourself to confront her outright, guide her attention somewhere else. Maybe you maneuver yourself so that instead of giving you a hickey on your neck, she's giving you one on your...upper arm (high enough that all but a cap sleeve T-shirt would cover it). Maybe she's putting a hickey on your lips, which is what this sexual deviant calls "kissing."

Since this seems to be the first time you received a hickey from this young woman (How did you know you had sex with her all the other times if she didn't leave her calling card? Did your servants alert you that an enigmatic stranger had dropped by?), it's possible she was horrified to have given you a hickey and was covering up her embarrassment with false bravado. If that's the case, her calling card should read "Inexperienced Perfectionist." Make sure she knows the bedroom is a safe space where mistakes, experimentation, and even periodic minor injuries are allowed, but hickeys are not, and you get one warning.

However, if this young lady continues to jab her calling cards into the delicate skin of your neck after you have specifically asked you not to, consider phasing her out of your life once we're out of turtleneck weather. It doesn't bode well for the future of the relationship (sexual or otherwise) if her commitment to "JUST DOIN' MY THING" is so great that she ignores your reasonable requests.


My husband and I are expecting our first baby this summer. A friend of mine is very excited for us...excessively so. She keeps talking about how much time she's going to spend with the baby and how she's going to be his "auntie." She's even gone so far as to suggest that she could act as godparent to the baby if anything should happen to me and my husband. The thing is, I don't want her to be that involved with my child. She's perpetually single, knows nothing about children, and generally has a hard time understanding boundaries and social etiquette. If we were to ask anyone to watch after our child, it would be a professional, or at least married friends who already have children and understand what kind of commitment it is. Further, this kid will already have two "real" aunts, and I don't want to diminish that title by letting someone who's just a friend use it, too. I want to tell my friend that she needs to back off a bit. Is that okay?

Thatz not okay.

Believe me, once you and your husband welcome that baby, the last thing your cool, single friends are going to want to do is hang out with you all as a unit.

The longevity of your baby's novelty is roughly equivalent to that of an Xbox. At this stage (prenatal), your baby has not yet been released, so anticipation is at its apex. People cannot wait to see what your baby looks like and learn all of its specs. They go to bed dreaming of playing with your baby. In a few months, your friends will finally be able to get their (thoroughly sanitized!) hands on your baby. They will love him! They will say they are "like, OBSESSED with your baby!" But they will not actually be obsessed with your baby, as you will come to realize, say, 10 months postpartum, when he is no longer the cutest, smallest thing in the world, and is instead just another pretty cute, fairly small thing. "You want to come over and play with my baby?" you will ask. But they will not want to come. They will be at a PlayStation 4 adults-only release party with a beer in one hand and a DualShock 4 controller in the other.

It sounds like this woman is exhibiting a normal level of politeness, perhaps amplified by what you imply is her inherent social awkwardness. (Offering to act as godparent in the event of your premature death is overkill. Then again: at least she's a planner.)

"I can't wait to be Aunt [My Name]!" is just something people say now. A modern congratulation, it allows people to express support for your pregnancy while also making your huge, life-changing news about them. It's about as genuine as saying, "We should grab a drink soon!" to someone you run into at a party, which is to say: heartfelt in the moment; will never be thought of again.

Let's not forget that your baby isn't even due until this summer. Complaining about this now is like pitching a fit because an acquaintance exclaimed, "You're going to be the prettiest bride!" when you told her you were engaged. (Gina, SHUT UP. Now there is WAY too much pressure on me to be THE PRETTIEST BRIDE.)

Even if this woman does insist on referring to herself as "Auntie" in front of your baby, her self-appointed nickname isn't going to jeopardize the line of succession. It's meaningless. (By the way, I'M YOUR BABY'S AUNT, TOO–no takebacks.) If it makes you feel better, you can always draw up a document identifying your son's blood relations as The Good and True Aunts and have it notarized.

But do you know who would love to have this good-natured woman with no financial or emotional dependents for an auntie? Your baby, aged 11, when he wants an expensive toy for his birthday. Also you, later that same year, when you suddenly have to move a large volume of raffle tickets so that his school can afford to buy new computers.

Of course you can and should restrict the access of any adults you do not feel comfortable having around your child. But it will probably create unnecessary tension if you pull your friend aside six months into your pregnancy and tell her she is WAY too excited about your baby. (It will also rob you of a future free babysitter. Do you really think your already-married, kid-laden friends are looking forward to watching your kid all the time?)

Weather her enthusiasm as graciously as you can. Schedule her visits as sparingly as you please. Invite her to hang out one day when the baby is in a fussy mood, and she will not ask to come back.

Thatz Not Okay is a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay." Art by Jim Cooke. Photo via Shutterstock.

"The World Health Organization reports that suicide rates have increased 60 percent over the past 50

Texas Town Pays Ted Nugent $16,000 Not to Play Fourth of July Concert

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Texas Town Pays Ted Nugent $16,000 Not to Play Fourth of July Concert

After booking conservative rocker Ted Nugent, known for hits like "That Time He Called President Obama a Subhuman Mongrel," to play its Fourth of July concert this year, the town of Longview, Texas had second thoughts. Now they'll be paying Nugent $16,250 not to perform on Independence Day.

The amount was half of Nugent's guaranteed fee, and Longview says it still has the budget to book an alternate headliner.

The city cancelled the show for "a variety of reasons," a city spokesman told the Longview News-Journal:

"Cost, structure, is it the right musical act for this type of event — a city-sponsored, family-oriented overall event. They decided no, we don't want to move forward, it is not the right act for this. At that point we decided to end discussions."

Nugent, who has also called Obama a "chimpanzee," continues to campaign for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R-Duh) in the Texas gubernatorial race.

Keith Rothra, chair of the Republican party in Gregg County, believes the state-level race is the only reason Longview cancelled its contract with Nugent, who once said Hillary Clinton had "spare scrotums," whatever that means.

"We have paid $16,000 to Ted Nugent for political correctness," Rothra said. "It's directly related to the state level stuff."

The Longview city manager's office is in the process of booking a replacement act who never said that "apartheid isn't that cut-and-dry" or entreated President Obama to "suck on [his] machine gun."

[H/T: UPI, Photo Credit: AP Images]

What Is And Is Not "Cool," According to Greg Gutfeld

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What Is And Is Not "Cool," According to Greg Gutfeld

Greg Gutfeld, the Joy Behar of Fox News, has a new book* out (*HAVEN'T READ) called "Not Cool: The Hipster Elite And Their War on You." What is and is not "cool," according to Greg Gutfeld? A brief guide** below.

**This guide is based upon information contained in Saturday's Kyle Smith review of Gutfeld's book in the New York Post. Since "Greg Gutfeld's sociopolitical think pieces" and "New York Post book reviews" exist in the same plane of literary merit, we presume that the review's information is accurate. As we mentioned, we have not read this book. If we did read this book, we would probably keep that fact to ourselves.

Things That Are "Cool" (Which Is Bad) According to Greg Gutfeld's Book, According to the New York Post

  • "Icons of cool like Robert Redford, Mark Zuckerberg, Jesse James and Yoko Ono"
  • "Facebook — a company that oozes cool out its pores"
  • "murderous enemies of America (the Weather Underground, Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Boston Marathon bombers)"
  • "daft activities like collecting signatures on petitions for Greenpeace"
  • "the San Francisco ban on plastic shopping bags"
  • "artisanal tricycles"
  • "groovy artisanal types... who decided not to vaccinate"

Things That Are Uncool (Meaning Good) According to Greg Gutfeld's Book, According to the New York Post

  • Exxon
  • Koch Industries
  • DDT
  • "bankers, executives, ministers and professors"
  • Republicans

I certainly believe that Fox News viewers believe Greg Gutfeld knows what is cool.

[Pic via]


New Research: Nixon Wanted "Dirty Tricks" to Cover Up My Lai Massacre

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New Research: Nixon Wanted "Dirty Tricks" to Cover Up My Lai Massacre

Richard Nixon was a secretive paranoid bigoted sonofabitch. But we never knew the half of it: It turns out his administration waded neck-deep into efforts to sink a war-crimes investigation against U.S. soldiers who notoriously butchered an entire village in Vietnam.

CBS News says new research by historians into old notes collected at the Nixon Presidential Library suggests that years before Watergate went down, Tricky Dick wanted to use nasty tactics with plausible deniability to help bury what happened in the ville of My Lai in 1968:

The documents, mostly hand-written notes from Nixon's meetings with his chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, lead some historians to conclude that President Richard Nixon was behind the attempt to sabotage the My Lai court-martial trials and cover up what was becoming a public-relations disaster for his administration.

One document, scribbled by Haldeman during his Dec. 1, 1969, meeting with Nixon, reads like a threatening to-do list under the headline "Task force - My Lai." Haldeman wrote "dirty tricks" (with the clarification that those tricks be "not too high a level") and "discredit one witness," in order to "keep working on the problem."

"Haldeman's note is an important piece of evidence that Nixon interfered with a war-crime prosecution," says Ken Hughes, a researcher with the University of Virginia's Miller Center Presidential Recording Program.

New Research: Nixon Wanted "Dirty Tricks" to Cover Up My Lai Massacre

Haldeman knew a thing or two about dirty tricks; he went to federal prison after being convicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the Watergate scandal.

My Lai's devastation is one of the enduring, iconic moments of America's military involvement in Vietnam. A company of U.S. soldiers, led by Lt. William Calley, killed between 350 and 500 Vietnamese in cold blood and razed their village, essentially erasing it from the face of the earth, as captured in these images by Army photographer Ronald Haeberle:

New Research: Nixon Wanted "Dirty Tricks" to Cover Up My Lai Massacre

New Research: Nixon Wanted "Dirty Tricks" to Cover Up My Lai Massacre

New Research: Nixon Wanted "Dirty Tricks" to Cover Up My Lai Massacre

The carnage was interrupted at one point by two helicopter crewmen, who attempted to save some of the villagers and evacuate casualties. Those men's testimony was reportedly one target of Nixon's dirty tricks.

It's unclear whether any of Nixon's darker My Lai plans came to fruition, but he was deeply involved in the case. Incredibly, many in the U.S. either denied that American soldiers were capable of such evil or wrote the acts off as justifiable. Of the 26 men charged in connection with the massacre, only one—Calley—was convicted of a crime. He was sentenced to life in prison for killing more than 20 civilians.

But Nixon ordered that Calley be transferred, and he had his sentence commuted; he eventually served three and a half years on house arrest before being paroled.

The entire mass-killing might have remained unknown by the U.S. public, in fact, if not for the investigative work of a young reporter named Seymour Hersh, who brought the killings to light, and in doing so changed many Americans' attitudes towards the war, and towards the behavior of their own soldiers.

Even more incredibly, Haldeman's incriminating notes actually were released to the public in 1987, but only now have historians begun to confirm their significance. The helicopter crewmen who saved some of My Lai's villagers supposedly knew about the Nixon notes awhile back—and one says he was flummoxed "there was no reaction at all" from chroniclers when the notes were unearthed. "I was amazed. I thought, 'Are you kidding me?'"

[Photo credit: AP]

Neon Trees lead singer Tyler Glenn has come out as gay.

Beware the Tornado Drought: It Only Takes One

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Beware the Tornado Drought: It Only Takes One

The Weather Channel published an article on Saturday touting the fact that the recent cold weather suppressed this March's number of tornadoes to almost nothing, with just four tornadoes confirmed through March 20. While this is an interesting bit of information from a weather geek standpoint, and one I've seen many weather enthusiasts Tweet and write about lately, it's risky to make a big deal about "tornadoes at a record low!" this close to the climatological ramp-up of tornado season.

According to data from the Storm Prediction Center, last year saw one of the lowest tornado counts in decades, with only 943 tornadoes confirmed by the National Weather Service for the entirety of 2013. This falls well below the eight year average of 1,478 tornadoes between 2005 and 2012. The total for 2013 is the lowest count since both 2002 and 2012, each of which saw 955 twisters, and the last year with a lower number of tornadoes was 1989, with 871 reported.

TWC's piece was a surprisingly solid piece of weather writing given the current state of their channel and associated website, and it pleased me to see this important nugget of information thrown in there — not prominently, mind you, but at least it's there:

However, history shows that a slow start to the year doesn't signal a quiet period is ahead. Both 2012 and 2013 featured at least 400 less U.S. tornadoes than the 10-year average. Despite that apparent tornado drought, we had the following destructive events:

  • Mar. 2-3, 2012: EF4 in Henryville, Ind.; EF3 in West Liberty, Ky.
  • May 19-20, 2013: EF5 in Moore, Okla.
  • May 31, 2013: EF3 in El Reno, Okla.

That is the most important takeaway from any story involving how many or how few tornadoes have occurred over a period of time: it only takes one tornado hitting one town to create a tragedy. I'm an avid follower of James Spann's Facebook and Twitter pages, and out of all of the posts and comments I've seen from meteorologists through the years, his one comment on one particular day stuck with me the most. He posted the link to one of his forecasts, and a gentleman asked if this year would be a bad tornado season. A few minutes later, Spann succinctly responded "it's a bad year if one hits your house."

That's the right way to frame stories like this. Yes, the last few years have been unusually quiet on the tornado front, but it only takes one to create a tragedy. One of the biggest disservices any meteorologist or weather enthusiast with an audience can do is to downplay something like tornado activity. It can lull people into a false sense of security, which can prove costly during a severe weather outbreak.

The state of severe weather education in the United States already needs improvement without the added complication of inattentiveness. In one 2003 study (caution: PDF file) of residents near the path of a damaging tornado in Indiana, the author's data shows that only 70% to 80% of those surveyed knew the difference between a "tornado watch" and a "tornado warning" — the former indicating that conditions are favorable for the development of tornadoes, while the latter indicates that a tornado may be imminent. However, this number widely varies by age, education, and location; for instance, older residents of Oklahoma City would likely have greater knowledge of severe weather terminology than residents in, say, Pittsburgh. But it isn't a far stretch of the imagination to say that even fewer people elsewhere around the country know the difference between the two tornado alerts, or comprehend the severity and immediacy of a tornado warning.

If you do a search for "emergency alert system" on Twitter or ask any local television meteorologist who has to do a severe weather cut-in during a popular network program, people absolutely flip out when an emergency interruption happens. They will send stations vitriolic messages for having the gall to warn other people that there is a tornado warning. It's insane, but it's the sad truth — there are people who would rather watch American Idol than allow their neighbors in other counties to receive potentially life-saving information.

The general public doesn't need any more of a reason to ignore the threat for tornadoes, especially with the peak of tornado season approaching. If you talk or read about a lull in tornado activity, keep in mind that regardless of whether that season is above average or at a record low, every tornado is dangerous, and it only takes one tornado hitting one populated area to be a disaster.

[Image via Getty]

U. of Alabama Greeks Win Fight For Their Right to Be Racist Dicks

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U. of Alabama Greeks Win Fight For Their Right to Be Racist Dicks

Last summer, the University of Alabama campus was rocked by allegations that the fabled Greek scene was racist. Well, not allegations: The school's all-white sororities rejected two women because they weren't white. The school's student Senate had a chance to fix things. But last week, they said "fuck it."

A modest proposal encouraging Bama's fraternities and sororities not to discriminate or segregate on the basis of race died in the student Senate last week—after it was sunk by senators with Greek sympathies, according to several of the bill's sponsors.

"I think ultimately the reason that it failed to pass was it gave the impression, I think maybe, that – to a lot of the senators – that maybe we were attempting to disparage the Greek community, you know, which wasn't the case," Chisholm Allenlundy, an Alabama student who co-sponsored the measure, told the Crimson White, UA's school paper. "Ultimately, the resolution was to just encourage further integration based on diversity, specifically racial diversity on our campus, which I think a lot of people would agree with."

The proposed resolution was tame as hell; after decrying the school's longtime "stigma... regarding its legacy of segregation," it stated that "the Senate supports the complete integration of all Greek letter fraternities and sororities at the University of Alabama, with respect to social diversity among its membership."

Opponents used a parliamentary procedure to table the resolution before the Senate adjourned from its final meeting. 27 senators voted to kill the bill; 5 voted for it, and 2 voted "present," according to the Crimson White.

"I think that this reflects our SGA poorly but also accurately," Katie Smith, the resolution's lead sponsor, told the Crimson White. "I am not surprised. I don't believe that I put anyone in a catch-22. They chose to vote on it and they chose to vote it down."

It was that school paper that first broke the news last summer that the school's all-white sororities had rejected two uber-qualified pledges because they weren't up to racial snuff. Thus far, only one black woman and another multiracial student have gained acceptance to any of those sororities since the school's founding in 1831. (That latter pledge also didn't divulge that she was multiracial until she'd been accepted in her sorority's ranks.)

In fairness to the University of Alabama's racially fraught Greek organizations, they also seem to like beating and humiliating white students .

And plenty of other campuses house fraternities that were begun by unrepentant Southern whites during reconstruction, or who share their beginnings with a secret society that formed the basis for the Ku Klux Klan. As I write this, one frat on the local campus in Tallahassee is preparing for its annual "Old South" ball by remaking its house into a fort, complete with cannonades:

U. of Alabama Greeks Win Fight For Their Right to Be Racist Dicks

Damn these liberal brainwashing campuses.

[Photo credit: AP]

Students protesting against a China-Taiwan trade pact are forced by riot police to leave the governm

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Students protesting against a China-Taiwan trade pact are forced by riot police to leave the government Cabinet buildings in Taipei, Taiwan, on Monday, when hundreds of protesters opposed to a broad trade pact with China invaded the offices. Image via Wally Santana.

Five former aides to Bernie Madoff have been convicted of participating in his $17.5 billion Ponzi s

Florida Woman Claims Police Made Her Poop on Her Lawn During Meth Bust

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Florida Woman Claims Police Made Her Poop on Her Lawn During Meth Bust

A Florida woman is suing Volusia County and the city of New Smyrna Beach after police officers forced her to poop in her front yard and undress in front of them while they searched her house for meth.

Dawn Brooks says officer brought her outside in handcuffs, and then refused her requests to use the bathroom indoors. They "told her to 'just use the restroom right there' in the front yard, which plaintiff did," according to a district court judge's summary of the incident.

Brooks claims that instead of helping her clean herself up and get dressed again—remember, she was handcuffed at the time—the officers had her strip down and put on a plastic jumpsuit, laughing and yelling at her the whole time.

Court documents don't say whether police found the meth they were reportedly looking for.

Brooks's complaint alleges the officers violated her Fourth Amendment rights and that the city failed to adequately train the cops who searched her house. Judge Roy Dalton Jr. dismissed her initial claims, saying she failed to show that the need for training was "plainly obvious" and didn't specifically explain how her rights were violated.

Brooks has until April 4 to submit an amended complaint.

[Photo Credit: Shutterstock]


Shockingly, 87 percent of consumers think awful banks are also awful at social media.

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Shockingly, 87 percent of consumers think awful banks are also awful at social media. There's only one way to change perceptions like that: Hire credit ratings agencies to lie to us that the banks' Twitters are doing great.

Ageism Turned Silicon Valley Into a Hotbed for Male Plastic Surgery

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Ageism Turned Silicon Valley Into a Hotbed for Male Plastic Surgery

If I had $1 million for every time a founder told me "It's impossible to raise funding if you're not a twenty-something dude," I could lead their Series A round. The same bias applies to hiring. The ideal resume shouldn't be much longer than "Dropped out of Prestigious University." This obsession with youth, reports The New Republic, has turned Silicon Valley into "one of the most ageist places in America":

Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don't think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. "Young people are just smarter," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its "careers" page: "We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them." [...]

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it's better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s

Because time only moves in one direction, to keep up with the cerebral crowd, one is a forced to find a superficial fix. So now in the cradle of innovation, renowned for its radical openness to new ideas, male tech workers have resorted to plastic surgery in order to make themselves fit the pattern and perpetuate the status quo .

The New Republic talked to Dr. Seth Matarasso, a San Francisco plastic surgeon who caters to this clientele:

First, the age at which people seek him out is dropping—Matarasso routinely turns away tech workers in their twenties. A few months ago, a 26-year-old came in seeking hair transplants to ward off his looming baldness. "I told him I wouldn't let him. His hair pattern isn't even established," Matarasso said. The techies also place a premium on subtlety. "They're not walking into their office in front of thirteen-year-old co-workers looking swollen and deformed. They'd rather go slow, do it gradually," he told me. This helps explain why Fridays are his busiest days for tech-industry patients: They can recover over the weekend and show up Monday morning looking like an ever-so-slightly more youthful version of themselves, as though they'd resorted to nothing more invasive than a Napa getaway. [...]

Matarasso told me that, in ascending order of popularity, the male techies favor laser treatments to clear up broken blood vessels and skin splotches. Next is a treatment called ultherapy—essentially an ultrasound that tightens the skin. "I've had it done of course. I was back at work the next day. There's zero downtime." But, as yet, there is no technology that trumps good old-fashioned toxins, the most common treatment for the men of tech. They will go in for a little Botox between the eyes and around the mouth. Like most overachievers, they are preoccupied with the jugular.

The free-thinking empiricists who demand a youthful glow argue that the correlation between age and startup success is an uncomfortable fact—you're just too politically correct to admit it. But according to the New Republic, VCs have not done their due diligence. If you mine the data, it actually shows that:

...the whole premise of youthful innovation isn't even true. It turns out older people have historically been just as "disruptive" as younger people. A 2005 paper by Benjamin Jones of the National Bureau of Economic Research studied Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics over the past 100 years, as well as the inventors of revolutionary technologies. Jones found that people in their thirties contributed about 40 percent of the innovations, and those in their forties about 30 percent. People over 50 were responsible for 14 percent, the same share as the twentysomethings. Those under the age of 19 were responsible for exactly nothing. One study found that even over the last ten years—the golden age of the prepubescent coder, the youth-obsessed V.C., and the consumer Internet app—the average age of a founder who could claim paternity for a billion-dollar company was a rickety 34.

Much like the notion that truly smart people are socially awkward introverts or that only hardcore hackers can be great programmers, the cult of youth was born at a time when unkempt geeks were the underdog. (Nevermind that these "formerly excluded groups" are now the privileged class.)

Fast-forward to the present and it's hard not to detect the PCC/Homebrew influence on the local patois. In 2011, famed V.C. Vinod Khosla told a conference that "people over forty-five basically die in terms of new ideas." Michael Moritz, of Sequoia Capital, one of the most pedigreed firms in the tech world, once touted himself as "an incredibly enthusiastic fan of very talented twentysomethings starting companies." His logic was simple: "They have great passion. They don't have distractions like families and children and other things that get in the way." But, of course, whereas the Homebrewers mostly wanted to unleash the power of computers from IBM and share it with the common man, the V.C.s want to harness youthful energy in the service of a trillion-dollar industry.

If dollars are what they're after, venture capitalists should A/B some of these outdated assumptions. Otherwise Silicon Valley is doomed to leave a lot of billions on the table .

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

[Image via Shutterstock]

Vice Is the Tech Bubble

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Vice Is the Tech Bubble

Vice Media, a company that sells cool kids to corporations for marketing purposes and does good journalism on the side, is a legitimately profitable business. Makes a lot of cash. But is Vice really worth one jillion skillion bazillion dollars? Hmm...

In an interview with Bloomberg yesterday, Vice boss Shane Smith said that he is thinking of taking the company public. Okay, fine. That would almost certainly destroy whatever remaining punk ethos resides in the Vice empire, but that is a side issue. Let's focus on how much Smith pretends his company is worth:

The growing online, mobile and TV business could have a market value equaling Twitter Inc.'s $28.9 billion if Vice Media goes public, Smith said.

"We'd be stupid not to test what the market would bear," said Smith, who is chief executive officer. "There's a lot of money sloshing around in the system, obviously valuations are high."

Obviously! Valuations are high! Is Vice Media worth $28 billion? Hmm. Last August, Rupert Murdoch invested in Vice at a valuation of $1.4 billion. Shane Smith posits here that his company has increased in value by 2000% in the past seven months.

That is the tech bubble talking.

Vice is privately held, so its financials are a matter of some speculation. The company is "expected to post revenue of $500 million this year," according to one insider. How much of that is profit? We don't know. But even if it was all profit, which it is not, a $28 billion valuation would give a public Vice Media a P/E ratio of 56. For a media company! (Most media companies would like investors to value them like tech companies. This does not mean they are not, in fact, media companies.) By comparison, Disney's ratio is about 22; Time Warner's is about 17; and the New York Times Co.'s is about 40 (which is also rather high).

That is the tech bubble talking.

Of course, Shane Smith may not be the most unbiased source of opinion on what Vice Media is worth. But the fact that such speculation would even be credulously reported goes to show that shit is fucking insane right now. (Twitter is insanely valued itself, by the way!) I guess you can't blame Shane Smith for wanting to cash in while the getting is good. I'd IPO my balls for a billion bucks, too.

[Do check out Danny Gold's VICE documentary on the Central African Republic, it's great. Pic via.]

Meet Auroracoin, Iceland's New Digital Cryptocurrency

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Meet Auroracoin, Iceland's New Digital Cryptocurrency

Today in Iceland, every citizen of the country is entitled to claim 31.8 "Auroracoins," which are valued at just under $400 US.

Auroracoins are the invention of an anonymous person or collective organized under the pseudonym Baldur Friggjar Óðinsson, which would make a great name for a pet bear or perhaps a Maine Coon, by the way, if anyone's in the market. It's being offered as a salve for the collapsed value of Iceland's official currency, the króna, now under strict controls. The króna has been struggling ever since Iceland's financial collapse in 2008.

Like most well-intentioned efforts from the crypto-currency crowd, it's a little too early to guess whether this will actually have any measurable effect on the Icelandic economy. Icelanders have several options for claiming the coins: they can do it on Facebook, or by SMS text, either of which is matched with a national ID number Icelanders use called the kennitala.

It's pretty easy, in other words, to claim them. Which opens them to possible fraud or abuse, and there is some skepticism already on the Auroracoin reddit about the national ID numbers being a sufficient check against fraud.

But one bad sign: At the time we published this post, auroracoin.org was reporting that only about 1.3 percent of the coins thusly "airdropped" on the country overnight had been claimed. This does not exactly scream success. But let's keep watching.

[Photo, of a protester wearing a shirt that reads "Your Bank does not care about you" at a rally in 2008, via AP]

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

Donald Rumsfeld Compares Obama to "a Trained Ape" on Fox News

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Oh, Rummy, Rummy, Rummy. You're senile, you're white, you're conservative and entitled, so it sort of makes sense. But you don't just say these things out loud, old man.

While lambasting the White House's management of the Afghanistan war last night, Bush-era defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that "a trained ape" could do a better job running the campaign.

Rumsfeld joined the program by phone, and was attempting to criticize Obama for not securing a long-term "status of forces agreement" with Afghan president Hamid Karzai—a contract that would permit U.S. military forces to remain in the country beyond the current agreement and regulate their conduct in the war zone:

"We have status of forces agreements, probably with 100, 125 countries in the world. This administration, this White House and the State Department have failed to get a status of forces agreement [in Afghanistan.] A trained ape can get a status of forces agreement. It does not take a genius. We have so mismanaged that relationship."

Rumsfeld then rambled somewhat incoherently for a few more seconds before Van Susteren, perhaps slightly taken aback, ended the interview there.

Rumsfeld, of course, was (eventually) fired as defense secretary and replaced with the more staid, less blowtorchy Bob Gates after bungling both the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, and after reportedly screwing up the Bush administration's response to Katrina for petty personal reasons.

He may think the administration is dumber than trained apes for not renewing a force agreement with Afghanistan, but the public certainly doesn't. A December 2013 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 96 percent of respondents thought the U.S. should bring all or most of its troops home from Afghanistan in 2014.

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