A corruption case out of New Orleans has turned into a fight over an issue that might be of interest to certain users of this here website: Do commenters on a news website have an absolute right to anonymity? And it all traces back to a federal prosecutor with an out-of-control, borderline-rehab-requiring online commenting habit. Federal prosecutors: They're Just Like Us.

Last July, the feds indicted Stacey Jackson, the head of the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership (NOAH) agency, which was charged with post-Katrina rehabilitation efforts for low-income homeowners. The four-count indictment—conspiracy, accepting a bribe, theft of public funds and obstruction of justice—alleged that through NOAH, Jackson had misappropriated federal Katrina relief funds in various ways, including accepting kickbacks from contractors.

Jackson's defense team is looking into a prosecutorial misconduct defense. Among the evidence it dug up was a 2008 article on NOLA.com, the news site run by the Times-Picayune. It was a mundane news report about council members being served with a subpoena, but had a number of comments on it, including one from a user calling himself "campstblue":

well, man-you know, man. I didn't know anything about dis stuff, man, you hear what I'm saying, man. You know, man, like you always looking for something negative to write about, man. How's dis going to help the racovery, man, you hear what I'm saying, man. We just trying to make it back, man. Didn't you hear what I said man, dis is a chocolate city, man and we do things the choclate way, man–-you hear what I'm saying, man?

TRANSLATION: It's our turn to steal. We got the power. You can't do anything to us.

God Bless the US Attorneys office!!!!!!!!!

This all would have unremarkable for a terrible comments section, had subsequent investigations by Times-Picayune reporters not revealed that Sal Perricone, a former Assistant United States Attorney, was a prolific pseudonymous commenter on NOLA.com. And that "campstblue" may have been one of Perricone's ailases.

Other sockpuppet identities, confirmed to have been Perricone's work, have already caused problems in a number of cases he was involved with. Most notably, Perricone's commenting habits contributed to a judge's decision to overturn the convictions of five police officers in the notorious Danziger Bridge shootings after Hurricane Katrina. He has since "explained" that he was "stressed" and taking Ambien, which was related to this behavior.

Because Perricone was involved in the Jackson case, her attorneys have subpoenaed the hell out of the U.S. Attorney's office for material about him. In one of their submissions to the court, they appended a copy of the article in which the campstblue comment appeared, to show that they needed a better look at Perricone's comments.

The magistrate judge in the case happened to notice other suspicious-looking comments under the article (which you can see here, though the relevant comments seem to have been removed), from users named "aircheck":

The "fun" has just begun. . . Wait until the next round of subpoenas go out, then arrests will follow a little while after that etc. . .

Can't wait to hear about Stacey "ring leader" Jackson when's (sic) it's her turn to face the music. . . expect to see her rat out a few to minimize prison time she's likely to get.

Will be most interesting to see what SCUM rises to the top.

And "jammer1954":

Mark my words. The canaries are going to start singing, and Car 54 is going up in smoke.

Stacey Jackson is going to rat out every one, every body, and every thing to make the best deal for herself-after all she did this as chief of NOAH so her behavior isn't going to change.

RayRay is going down, as is Cedric and who knows who else.

Alerted to these comments by the judge, Jackson's attorneys promptly subpoenaed the Times-Picayune/NOLA.com to discover what it knew about the identities of those commenters. The attorneys asked for all documents related to those commenters, particularly documents involving the registration of the names and the IP addresses connected to the postings. There's no proof that anything in the Times-Picayune's records would actually show that those comments were made by law enforcement officials.

So the Times-Picayune, notwithstanding its own investigations into Perricone's commenting activities, contested the subpoena on First Amendment grounds. The judge in the case upheld the subpoena, pointing out that the First Amendment only provides a limited right to anonymous speech, and that that right is probably even more limited when you're, say, a federal prosecutor. She has, however, stayed her ruling while the Times-Picayune appeals this to the Fifth Circuit.

Anonymous commenters who are not federal, state, or local law-enforcement officials leaking information about investigations probably have less to worry about here. But the case does go to show: There may be some situations in which your anonymity online can and will be knocked over by a court.

A general rule of thumb might be to exercise caution when posting illiterate, Ambien-fuelled rants on articles about federal grand jury investigations, though. At least for the immediate future, until the Fifth Circuit rules on this case.

[Image by Jim Cooke.]

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

A guy has taken the time to painstakingly analyze and rank all of the cuss words in popular rap albums from 1985-2013. The least we can do is to find out what he discovered.

I imagine Andrew Powell-Morse with a notepad and an abacus and a tape deck, toting up every last "fuck" and "bitch" and "pussy" on every Too Short album in the past three decades. You have to respect that level of workmanship. Here is the full post that Powell-Morse assembled, on the Best Tickets blog. Among his findings:

-Tupac had the two most profane popular rap albums in history.

-Too Short's Raw, Uncut, & X-Rated had the highest number of cuss words per song in hip hop history.

-The Geto Boys have the highest cuss words per song average of any group in the survey.

-"Real Nigga Roll Call" by Lil Jon and Ice Cube reportedly has the most cuss words in any single song (that the author knows of).

Read it all here. Fuck that shit, I'm through with that bitch.

[Pic via]

Today begins the second quarter of 2014. You made it through a long, hellish winter and the light at the end of the tunnel isn't from a snow plow for once. April is a beautiful time of the year. It brings warmer weather, flowers blooming, birds chirping, bees buzzing, and the atmosphere's most violent phenomenon: tornadoes.

Tornado Season

April begins the climatologically active period known as "tornado season," even though tornado outbreaks are possible at any time during the year. It is during the next three months that the United States sees a massive uptick in the number of recorded tornadoes.

In fact, the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) analyzed the probability of at least one tornado in the United States on any given day, and based on 32 years worth of data, April 2 begins a five-month long stretch when we're more likely than not to see a tornado.

The trend peaks at the beginning of June, when the SPC found that the country has almost a 90% chance of seeing at least one tornado every day for the first week of the month.

Of course, we're not going to see a tornado every day, but the overall weather pattern becomes more conducive for violent tornado outbreaks as the atmosphere begins to warm up. Warmer temperatures and ample Gulf moisture breeds instability, allowing bigger and stronger thunderstorms to develop and tap into the jet stream, creating wind shear that lets storms rotate and potentially produce a tornado.

Watch vs. Warning

It's always worth going over the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning, since so many people confuse the two terms.

A tornado watch means that conditions are favorable for the development of tornadoes, and that you should stay alert for rapidly changing conditions.

A tornado warning means that a possible tornado is imminent and you need to take immediate action to protect yourself by getting to shelter.

Tornado Alley

Tornadoes have been reported in every state in the country — less in Alaska than Alabama, obviously — but just because an area doesn't traditionally see Oklahoma-like outbreaks doesn't mean they're immune from the occasional twister or two.

Most of the tornadoes in the United States develop in two distinct regions of the country — the traditional Tornado Alley, and a (relatively) new region called "Dixie Alley."

Tornado Alley is that area in the middle of the country that everyone is taught about in elementary school. The track of weather systems, the flat terrain, and its proximity to the ample moisture of the Gulf of Mexico allow storms in this region to easily produce massive tornadoes during the spring months. Some of the worst twisters in American history have occurred right in the middle of the Alley in Oklahoma (twice in the same town, even) and Kansas.

Tornadic supercell thunderstorms in the middle of the country tend to take on the classic "hook echo" shape that almost everyone is familiar with, like the one pictured above from the historic 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore F5 tornado.

However, it's not a good idea to look for the classic hook whenever you're under a tornado warning. Not all thunderstorms come with the hook and pendant indicative of a tornado. Most tornadoes are wrapped in rain and impossible to see purely using reflectivity (precipitation) images generated by radar.

Meteorologists use velocity (wind) imagery produced by Doppler radar to see rotation within a thunderstorm, and it's almost always based on that information that they issue a tornado warning.

Dixie Alley

The southeastern United States — including Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama — is often referred to as "Dixie Alley" due to its tendency to see violent tornado outbreaks in the same vein as the traditional Tornado Alley sees (albeit less frequently). One of the worst tornado outbreaks in American history started in Texas and ramped up over Dixie Alley between April 25 and April 28 in 2011. Coming in at over 350 twisters, this four day period saw more tornadoes reported in one outbreak than ever before. It produced 4 EF-5 tornadoes, 11 rated EF-4, 22 rated EF-3, and hundreds more that were less intense.

The outbreak became a defining moment for the state it hit the hardest — Alabama. The Cotton State saw over 200 deaths on the afternoon of the 27th and billions of dollars worth of damage. Birmingham, Alabama-based meteorologist James Spann became a national figure because of his incredible, continuous on-air coverage of the twisters, a small segment of which is seen in the video clip above from when an EF-4 tornado tore through Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The Enhanced Fujita Scale

The strength of tornadoes is estimated based on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, originally created by meteorologist Ted Fujita in the mid-1900s and modernized ("enhanced") with some adjustments in 2007.

National Weather Service meteorologists survey the damage left behind by a tornado and use the EF-Scale to estimate how strong the twister's winds were. EF-0 is the weakest tornado, and EF-5 (winds >200MPH) is the strongest — obviously, weaker tornadoes are much more common than stronger ones.

I wrote an article for the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang last summer in which I found that the frequency of violent (EF-4 and EF-5) tornadoes is actually going down with time. While there are some glaring issues with comparing tornado reports written in 1950 to ones written in 2013, it's an interesting trend that actually goes against logic.

Since the EF-Scale estimates the strength of a tornado based on damage rather than direct observation of its winds (which is impossible in almost all cases), one would think that the population explosion and spread into previously-unpopulated areas would lead to an increase in destructive tornadoes.

Last year, a Doppler-on-Wheels (weather radar attached to a flatbed truck) measured winds in the El Reno, Oklahoma tornado at over 200 MPH, which would classify it as an EF-5. However, the National Weather Service refused to assign it the highest rating based on Doppler radar measurements, sticking with its initial EF-3 rating assigned after a survey of the damage the storm produced.

While the downtick in violent tornadoes seems like it goes against logic, it could be explained by dumb luck and improved building codes. As I wrote in the CWG article:

The population explosion may account for why there's so much destruction when a major tornado occurs, but why isn't there as much EF-4 or EF-5 damage as there was back when this type of recordkeeping began? The answer likely lies partially in luck, and partially in the quality of building construction. It's rare for the strongest part of a tornado to hit any building, let alone a well-built one.

The amount of damage it takes for a tornado to be classified as an EF-5 is immense – the destruction of a public school building or a hospital, for one, or an anchored bank vault being tossed – so it's a good thing that they aren't too common.

For example, above is an annotated photo from the American Meteorological Society showing the "graduation" of tornado damage over one block in a residential neighborhood. The house on the bottom-right sustained EF-5 damage (winds estimated >200 MPH), while homes just a few streets away sustained minimal tornado damage.

Unless a tornado hits a structure — or we can directly measure its winds, à la DOROTHY from the movie Twister or a Doppler-on-Wheels — we won't know its true wind speed or be able to estimate it with the EF-Scale.

Predictions for This Year

Everyone wants to know how bad this spring's tornado activity will be compared to the last couple of years. There is no real answer to this question. AccuWeather says that there may not be that many outbreaks this April due to "the lingering chill impacting a significant part of the nation," but that's from AccuWeather so take that as you will.

As I wrote last week , don't focus on the number of tornadoes that occur in an outbreak or in a year, because every individual tornado is dangerous in its own right.

What About Climate Change?

Climate change is real and it is happening, regardless of how much your political persuasion makes you want to shout "NO!" and ignore the scientific evidence to the contrary.

After the devastation seen in 2011 — a year in which we saw an unprecedented (to modern standards) 700+ tornado fatalities — and the major tornadoes in Oklahoma last spring, many people wanted to know if climate change would affect the frequency of tornadoes.

The answer is "probably not." Tornadic thunderstorms need two major ingredients to form: instability (warm, moist air) and wind shear. While a warming atmosphere would increase instability — thereby increasing the odds of severe thunderstorm development — a warmer atmosphere would also create less wind shear, which would prove detrimental to the development of tornadoes.

How to Prepare

Have a plan for what to do in case you need to take shelter at home, at work, at school, or when you're in your car. Oh, and get a weather radio.

No, seriously. Get a weather radio.

Tornado Threat This Week

The Storm Prediction Center predicts a "daily severe weather risk through Thursday," with the outbreak on Thursday potentially packing quite a punch. If you live in any of the shaded areas on the above three maps, stay tuned to your local weather forecasts for potential watches and warnings.

[Images via: WIAT / SPC / NOAA / Gibson Ridge / SPC / WTVR / AMS / SPC]

Things dogs understand: Treats. Doritos. Rubbing their furry butts on a soft carpet. Things dogs don't really get: Illusions. The magical arts and sciences. Deception.

Watch a bunch of adorable puppies who think they're about to get a treat get a good old-fashioned sleight-of-hand foolin' instead. And then get a treat. These are magicians we're talking about, not monsters.

And last time on José Ahonen's Magic for Dogs:

[H/T: Tastefully Offensive]

How I Met Your Mother, the long-running CBS sitcom, ended last night. There was a, sort of, twist. Fans were disappointed:

WHAT THE FUCK! #HIMYM

— Ele punto 7 (@luktvs) April 1, 2014

Dear writers of #HIMYM: FUCK YOU.

— Martin McHendry (@martinmchendry) April 1, 2014

Etc.

Twitter's keenest observers of culture were baffled at the volume and vehemence of the emotion:

It's wild how many very smart people I follow on twitter/IRL apparently watch how I met your mother

— Sam Faulkner Biddle (@samfbiddle) April 1, 2014

It would never have occurred to me, until last night, that I knew so many people who watched How I Met Your Mother.

— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) April 1, 2014

Yes: One of your friends or family members may be a fan of How I Met Your Mother.

What was How I Met Your Mother?

How I Met Your Mother was a sitcom, the underlying premise of which was that an unseen narrator, voiced by Bob Saget, was telling his children the story of how he met their mother.

Most of the episodes had very little in particular to do with the meeting-of-the-mother; instead, they focused on the day-to-day life of the narrator's younger self and his friends.

For your benefit I will refer to the characters as you know them, rather than by their fictional names. The main character, played by a bland Jimmy Fallon-type, lived in an apartment with his best college friends: the band camp girl from American Pie and her husband, the tall goof from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. They were friends with Doogie Howser, who is a cartoonish womanizing corporate bro-type.

In the first episode, milquetoast Jimmy Fallon met a newscaster played by that one girl from Avengers. They had a series of romantic mishaps and the viewer was led to believe that this was the titular mother. But she wasn't. The final line of the first episode was: "...and that's how I met your Aunt Robin."

Did people really like this show?

Yes. It was a very good show, at least at one point. Its first three seasons were the best multi-camera sitcom seasons of the last decade.

It also had a steep dropoff in quality from the first season to the last. Somewhere in season four it fell off a cliff. I wouldn't recommend finishing it. I should stipulate also that its portrayal of New York was embarrassingly homogenous and unrealistically white.

Why do people like this show?

At its best, How I Met Your Mother was Friends as executive-produced by Laurence Sterne, which is to say that it used remarkably sophisticated narrative techniques to tell stories about selfish young whites in New York.

(At its worst it was a mess of misogyny, unconvincing or misplaced character motivation, and saccharine garbage. If the first episode you watched was last night's finale, that's what you got.)

This sort of overarching yuppie Tristram Shandy shaggy-dog thing set the stage for deft and ambitious storytelling. Sometimes it scanned like a 22-minute version of Memento, without the unrelenting self-seriousness: The narrator told one story, only to have it undermined over the course of the episode by his acknowledged unreliability. Memories were pieced together slowly and with complexity. Characters, details and recollections were changed or replaced mid-episode. We'd get three versions of a story deftly woven together, or seemingly woven together but unraveled by the end.

It was also very funny.

How does it end?

Throughout the series Ted (insipid Zach Braff-y main character) and Robin (Avengers chick from the first episode) had a kind of Ross-and-Rachel on-and-off thing. But the ending of that first episode was treated (by viewers) as a kind of promise: No matter how good their chemistry, Robin and Ted were not going to end up with each other. Robin was not the mother.

In the final season, set around the wedding of Doogie Howser to Robin, we met the mother. At the end, there was a twist: She's been dead. The mom died, at some point between the two timeframes in which the show took place, and the story was really about how the narrator has been into Robin forever, and his kids told him to go bang her, or whatever.

This was a kind of cheap out, to say the least. (It was also unfair to Robin, who got married and divorced very quickly, and to the wife, who died.)

But the truth is anyone who expected a good ending to the lately horrible show was fooling themselves. The real reason everyone is so mad is that the show was terrible for several seasons and people committed a significant part of their lives to it. The hope that it might be redeemed by a well-landed ending is laughable.

(For example: Barney, the corporate-bro pick-up artist played by Neil Patrick Harris, was tolerable in early seasons only because his creepy misogyny is so cartoonish that it was unbelievable, and he was largely left as the butt of jokes. When writers set him up with Robin, a baffling and unconvincing couple if there ever was one, viewers were asked suddenly to take him seriously as a human with an interior emotional life. Suddenly his misogyny was no longer a cartoon: It was a terrifying streak in what was being sold as a sympathetic character.)

(Also the main character was a total drip.)

When can I next commit emotional energy to a long-running and ultimately disappointing television program?

Next season you can catch How I Met Your Dad on CBS.

If you didn't understand how much Frankie Knuckles meant to people before last night, when news of the 59-year-old DJ and producer's death started spreading on social media, by now you probably do . If you need a lesson in what he meant to the world, watch the clip from the 2001 U.K. documentary about house music, Pump Up the Volume, above.

The story goes something like this: In the beginning, there was Frankie, and Frankie had a groove. Through the sharing of that groove, he improved lives. As Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton wrote in their 1999 history of the DJ (thus dance music), Last Night a DJ Saved My Life:

In Chicago, as the seventies became the eighties, if you were black and gay your church may well have been Frankie Knuckles' Warehouse, a three-story factory building in the city's desolate west side industrial zone. Offering hope and salvation to those who had few other places to go, here you could forget your earthly troubles and escape to a better place. Like church, it promised freedom, and not even in the next life. In this club Frankie Knuckles took his congregations on journeys of redemption and discovery.

DJing begat re-editing, which Knuckles would do by chopping up and splicing his favored funky disco tracks on reel to reel tapes. Re-editing begat producing. Knuckles' early original productions like the canon-certified "Your Love" and the underrated "Waiting on My Angel" (both featuring vocalist Jamie Principle) had more in common with the icy thump of Italo disco than with the lush orchestrations typical of the American strain, but Knuckles would soon catch up with the past, as the world was catching up with the future. House music was too good an idea to stay underground, the four-on-the-floor beat too insistent to ignore. In a matter of years, house music was a global phenomenon.

By the early '90s, when house had been co-opted by the mainstream, many of its early innovators came along for the luxurious ride. Knuckles was one of the go-to mainstream remixers of the day, crafting lovely, twinkling dance songs out of existing pop tracks by the likes of Chaka Khan, Janet Jackson, and En Vogue. He signed to Virgin and released an album of his own, 1991's Beyond the Mix, which spawned the crossover hit "The Whistle Song."

House was made to get bodies moving, and a big way it does that is with tempos faster than what you generally hear in pop music. Frankie Knuckles could do high energy—some soulful house heads will argue that his remix of Sounds of Blackness' "The Pressure" is definitive Knuckles, period—but so could a lot of people. My favorite type of Frankie Knuckles track is the late-night burner that's a bit slower than house's characteristic 120 BPM and infinitely more sensual. His remixes of Lisa Stansfield's "Change" and Vanessa Williams' "The Comfort Zone" have never gone out of rotation in my life. Also in this vein and just as gorgeous are his remix of Electribe 101's "Talking With Myself" and his and David Morales' take on Inner City's cover of Stephanie Mills' "Whatcha Gonna Do With My Lovin'."

Also see "Tears," which has a more conventional house tempo but a similar sort of welling emotion.

Frankie Knuckles kept the disco in house before "disco house" or any of the mass sub-genre-ization of house was a thing. The racist and homophobic Disco Demolition Night, held July 12, 1979, largely killed disco's mainstream cool, but Knuckles stuck with it, riding it through the '70s and well into the '90s and beyond. A maligned people had their maligned genre, and from there it grew to become a global phenomenon. Knuckles called house "disco's revenge."

Today, plenty of people listen to house music (whether via EDM or otherwise) without recognizing its roots as gay black music for gay black people. But that is what it is, and that it came to prominence at a time in which the gay community was being ravaged by AIDS, is a triumph. It's but one of several examples of the gays knowing something it would take years for the rest of the world to discover. And it might not have happened without Frankie Knuckles, certainly not in the way it did. He was one of the handful of people who've been on this earth that we could point to and say, "There. That man changed culture."

Before I ever could admit that I was gay, before I even entered my teens, I was openly and emphatically a fan of house music. Maybe the music spoke to me before I could even understand what it was saying. Maybe it was just a coincidence. But the sounds that mattered to Frankie Knuckles (and Steve "Silk" Hurley and Mark Kinchen and David Morales and Ben Liebrand and Tony Humphries, and so many other house producers from back in the day) helped uplift me as a kid, when it sometimes felt like there wasn't much else to be happy about.

My favorite remix of Frankie Knuckles is the one he did of Michael Jackson's "Rock With You." Knuckles pushes the song into deep house territory, while preserving exactly what needs to be preserved from the original (chiefly, the full vocal, the strings, and that bubbly sound from the break). It's so masterfully done, with full respect for both the original composition and what listeners expect from a Frankie Knuckles remix. It's as though Knuckles were using Jackson's lyrics as his guide.

Share that beat of love:

Sheriff's deputies arrested a woman on Tuesday for falsely reporting a school shooting as an April Fools' day prank.

According to Spartanburg County Sheriff Chuck Wright, Angela Timmons sent a text to her daughter claiming that shots had been fired at Virginia College, where Timmons works. The daughter responded, but didn't receive an answer and called 911.

More than a dozen law enforcement agents rushed to the school, where they found no evidence of a shooting.

WSPA reports that Timmons later admitted the text was just a joke. She also confessed to pulling similar pranks in the past.

Timmons faces one charge of disturbing schools.

A Balinese girl tries to avoid a kiss during the Omed Omedan kissing festival in Bali, Indonesia, on Tuesday. During the festival, village priests dump buckets of water over couples to douse their passions. Image via Firdia Lisnawati/AP.

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I've seen some surreal moments in our nation's capitol, but few can compare to watching Republican members of Congress lecture John Holdren last week on the meaning of "science." Here are some highlights.

Holdren, the president's science advisor, was the lone witness at a hearing held by the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to review the White House's fiscal year 2015 budget request for science agencies.

You can watch the two-hour video here—or better yet, don't. We've watched it for you. Plus, you don't want to be more embarrassed than you already are about a science committee that includes a congressman who describes evolution as a "lie from the pit of Hell" and another who claims that climate change is a liberal plot to "create global government to control our lives."

Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) set the tone of the hearing right away, beginning with the observation, "Unfortunately, this Administration's science budget focuses, in my view, far too much money, time, and effort on alarmist predictions of climate change." Smith then questioned Holdren about the National Science Foundation (NSF), which, he said, was swindling American taxpayers by funding apparently useless programs, such a $340,000 grant to study the ecological consequences of early human-set fires in New Zealand.

And that was one of the more courteous exchanges during the hearing. What came next was a series of Bizarro World lectures on climate change.

Doesn't the Entire Earth Have the Same Climate?

Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) demonstrated his inability to grasp the idea that the world's climate varies across different regions (which, in fairness, is a sensible line of questioning—if we were living on the forest moon of Endor):

Rohrabacher: Do you believe that tornadoes and hurricanes today are more ferocious and more frequent than they were in the past?

Holdren: There is no evidence relating to tornadoes. None of all. And I don't know any spokesman for the administration who has said otherwise. With respect to hurricanes, there is some evidence of increased activity in the North Atlantic, but not in other parts of the world. With respect to droughts and floods, there is quite strong evidence that in some regions they are being enhanced by climate change—not caused by [climate change], influenced by climate change.

Rohrabacher: "I don't mean to sound pejorative...but they're Weasel words—that in some areas, "globally" there's not more droughts, "globally" there's not more hurricanes and they're not more ferocious. Is that correct?

Holdren: If you want to take a global average, the fact is a warmer world is getting wetter, there's more evaporation so there's more precipitation, so on a global average there's unlikely to be more droughts. The question is whether drought-prone regions are suffering increased intensity and duration of droughts, and the answer there is yes.

Rohrabacher: [snickering] So we actually have more water and more drought? Okay, thank you very much.

Note to Rohrabacher: You can read about how increasing levels of temperature and precipitation can worsen droughts here. Or, if reading is not your thing, here's a short animated video (with pretty colors!)

The Dinosaurs Didn't Mind Climate Change

Next on the GOP lineup, Bill Posey (R-FL) observed that cycles of extreme climate change are normal, and then trotted out the Newt Gingrich "dinosaur" argument. ("Hey, it was hot during the Jurassic Era, and T-Rex seemed perfectly content."):

Posey: How many ice ages do you think we've gone through?

Holdren: The Earth has undergone climate changes throughout its entire history. The difference is that, for most of that history, there weren't 7 billion people on the planet who needed to be fed, clothed and kept prosperous. And the other difference is that the pace of change was generally much slower.

Posey: I'm aware of that. You know, obviously, we've had global warming for a long time. You can't have one single ice age encompassing three ice ages. We had to have warming periods between each one of those, so that is a natural phenomenon. You know, just because we're alive now, the tectonic plate shifts aren't going to stop, the hurricanes and tsunamis aren't going to stop; the asteroid strikes aren't going to stop. These things have been going on for eons and they're going to continue to go on for eons....What do you think the temperature was on Earth before the disappearance of the dinosaurs?

Holdren: There have been periods when the temperature was 3, 4 or 5 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. The difference between the circumstances you're describing and the circumstance we're in now, is the changes that are being imposed on the climate—in a substantial part because of human activity—are faster than the ability of ecosystems to adapt and maybe, even more importantly, faster than the ability of human society to adapt....The natural changes, which we understand and which are underway on a long-term basis as we speak, would, if they were the only influences, be cooling the planet rather than warming it. We would be in a long term cooling trend as a result of the natural forces affecting climate that we understand. We are, instead, in a warming trend, which suggests that human activity, is overwhelmingly responsible for the difference.

Posey: I remember the 70s, that was the threat. We're going to have a cooling that's eventually going to freeze the planet, and that was the fear before Al Gore invented the Internet….

Those Crazy "Hypotheses"

Saving the last for best, freshman congressman Randy Weber (R-TX)—whom the National Journal has labeled a "conservative legend in his own mind"—expressed his doubts about whether this whole science thing actually makes any sense:

Weber: So, when you guys do your research, you start with a scientific—what do they call it—postulate or theory, and you work from that direction forward, is that right?

Holdren: It depends on what sort of science that you're talking about, but the notion of posing a hypothesis and then trying to determine whether it's right is one of the tried and true approaches in science, yes.

Weber: So, I'm just wondering how that related, for example, to global warming and eventual global cooling... I don't know how you prove those hypotheses, going back 50, 100, what you might say is thousands or millions of years, and how you postulate those forward.

Silly scientists! But what Weber and his GOP colleagues overlooked—because that would require research and stuff—was that the NSF-funded program denounced at the very beginning of the hearing was a classic example of how researching the past helps us better understand climate change today.

Here's a summary about why Montana State University researchers are so interested in the topic of human-caused forest fires in New Zealand:

Dave McWethy, assistant research professor in earth sciences and Cathy Whitlock, professor of earth sciences, chose New Zealand because humans arrived there just 700 years ago, and changes to the environment after people arrived were dramatic.

"Our goal is to better understand how the first peoples of New Zealand influenced the environment and how resilient landscapes were to human activity," McWethy said. "New Zealand provides a unique setting for examining human impacts because the country was settled fairly recently during a time of relatively stable climate. In addition, the wet forests of New Zealand were highly sensitive to disturbances, such as fire."

The first peoples in New Zealand initiated a sequence of events that caused the loss of more than 40 percent of the forests, and this deforestation occurred within decades of human arrival. It was accomplished by the introduction of a new disturbance—fire.

According to McWethy, New Zealand provides a dramatic case of how rapidly forests can be transformed by introducing a new disturbance. "Information from this research may also help us better understand how climate change and land-use change will influence fire and other disturbances in the western U.S."

Holdren told the committee that basic research such as this NSF-funded program is crucial to "promoting the progress of science." Somehow, I doubt that any of the GOP members of congress were listening.

Photo by alphaspirit via Shutterstock

For the first month in close to eight years, there were no American military deaths in Afghanistan.

A very drunk priest hit the unholy trinity when police officers arresting him for drunk driving noticed that he was also carrying marijuana in his sweatshirt and hiding a pistol in his back pocket.

Father Sean P. Thomson, a University of Alaska Fairbanks parish priest, got pulled over last week when a police officer noticed Thomson's truck "weaving, crossing the center line and speeding 79 mph in a 65 zone."

When the officer asked for his license and registration, the blitzed priest handed over a receipt before blowing a .247 BAC—three times the legal limit.

Asked if he had any weapons, Thomson mentioned a .357 in the back seat but neglected to mention a 9mm pistol in his back pocket, Bitz said. Thomson had a bag with a small quantity of marijuana in the pocket of his hoodie sweatshirt, Bitz said.

Thomson later admitted to officers that he was drunk and refused to submit to a second, more accurate BAC test.

[image via Shutterstock]

Egyptian security forces stand guard after multiple explosions hit the area outside Cairo University, killing at least two, in Giza, Egypt, on Wednesday. The bombings targeted riot police routinely deployed at the location in anticipation of near-daily student protests. Image via Sabry Khaled, El Shorouk Newspaper/AP.

The anonymous app Secret is good for bragging about polyamorous deviances, lifting the veil on #crushit culture, and now getting a job with a powerful venture capitalist.

Last night a Secret user asked their feed to "dish" about Keith Rabois' new company, an eBay for houses. Within an hour or so, someone claiming to be Rabois joined in the conversation—under the randomly assigned green skull icon—and told the anonymous poster: "You should join our team." Rabois also gave out his email and encouraged other anonymous commenters to apply for a job at his startup, which is going by Homerun as a "code name" and will "allow you to sell your home instantly online."

Rabois confirmed to Valleywag by email that it was indeed him. "To be clear, the original post is not 100% accurate, but as TheInformation covered about a month ago I am co-founding a new company while at Khosla Ventures." Rabois joined Khosla last February, a month after leaving his role as COO of Square over sexual harassment claims from an unnamed male junior staffer. Rabois had been in a personal and physical relationship with the employee and Square backed Rabois under threat of a lawsuit.

Perhaps it's not such a stretch to tease jobs on Secret, which secured a $40 million valuation (and $10 million in venture capital) a mere five weeks after its launch. After all, recruiting can get desperate and chances are awfully high that the tweety bird or poop icon you're chatting with on Secret already works in tech, or at least has a Silicon Valley state-of-mind.

Like many threads on Secret, the discussion is more interesting than the post. Watch commenters salivate over Rabois' plans to disrupt the housing market by selling used homes online. There must be something in the water. Today Pando reported the existence of a "Tinder for home buying."

To contact the author of this post or give her your phone number so that she can get better Secrets, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

A Queens college student says her terrible OkCupid date stole her phone (and her OkCupid account) after she decided not to go back to his place.

The 22-year-old woman told the New York Post she talked to the guy for two weeks before they went out, but when she turned him down after a few drinks, he followed her to the subway and threw a water bottle at her head.

It gets worse: Once she got away from the man, she realized he had taken her phone. He used it to text her friends and log into her OkCupid account, pretending to be her.

"I'm all right everyone, just a little drunk but I'm home now," she says he wrote in a text.

On OkCupid, he uploaded photos of her and changed her profile to say "I'm available for threesomes."

"I guess he doesn't take rejection well," the woman told the Post. "He was acting like a child."

She turned the Brooklyn man's name and OkCupid photo over to police, and they're currently seeking him in connection with the alleged phone theft.

[H/T: New York Post, Photo: OkCupid]

America's most-loved NFL player , Richard Sherman, on the moral panic over ex-Eagles star DeSean Jackson's rumored "gang ties" : "Nobody suggested the Colts owner had 'ties' to drug trafficking, even though he was caught driving with controlled substances ... and $29,000 in cash to do who-knows-what with."

Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B, bought the rights this week to a story on the Steubenville rape case and the involvement of the hacker collective Anonymous. According to a report from The Daily Dot, it's the first confirmed project for Plan B since last year's 12 Years a Slave.

Anonymous announced the acquisition yesterday on Twitter. Turns out it wasn't a joke.

Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment has bought the rights to the Rolling Stone article Anonymous vs Steubenville http://t.co/REQOshR38y

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 1, 2014

"Anonymous vs. Steubenville," written by David Kushner and published in Rolling Stone last November, covers the case of a 16-year-old girl who was raped at a party by two high-school football players and the subsequent fallout. It follows Deric Lostutter, an Anonymous-affiliated hacker who exposed the rape's apparent coverup by Steubenville authorities. After he found and publicized social-media posts from the night of the crime, activists both Anonymous-affiliated and not began protesting the coverup, leading directly, the story says, to widespread charges and indictments.

At this time I have no further comment about the Brad Pitt Plan B movie on my life coming out. Please direct your questions to my lawyer

— KYAnonymous (@DericLostutter) April 1, 2014

The tragic twist worthy of the Hollywood treatment? Lostutter now faces up to ten years in prison for his actions. The rapists were sentenced to one.

[H/T Daily Dot, image via AP]

Like "hipster" and "douchebag," the word "bro" has been applied to such a vast swath of American culture that it seems no one is really sure what it means anymore. Turns out, much of that confusion can be attributed to the fact that a bro is different depending on where in the Bronited States of Bromerica you're currently bro'ing down.

Before we enter the brozone, we must answer, for our purposes, the age-old question: What is a bro? The most practical, workable definition: An adult male whose social life revolves around collegiate homosocial bonding and who also presents himself in a way that assimilates to the prevailing aesthetic of men with similar socialization patterns. Or, if I was going to put it in a way that sounded less like a student who didn't do the reading trying to fill out the essay portion of a sociology exam, a bro is a young, usually unmarried, often immature guy who just does what everyone else his age seems to be doing. He's not necessarily a bad guy, he's not necessarily worthy of derision (some of my best friends are bros!). He's just figuring life out and trying to enjoy himself in the process (unfortunately, this pursuit of enjoyment combined with a lack of self awareness, can, in the case of some bros, result in asshole behavior), and he's not secure or confident enough to do it on his own.

Overall, bros just wanna have fun! In a group of 5 or 6 other, similarly dressed bros!

Interestingly enough, what's required for bro-ing down in, say, Chicago would not fly in a bro bar in, say, New York City. And imagine a New York City bro rolling into a gathering of Portland bros. Imagine a Red State Frat Bro trying to kick it with an LA Bro. A DC bro and a Cowbro. Bros, like liquor, rarely mix well, if at all.

So, without further ado, a brief survey of regional bros and their aesthetic ideals.

The Manhattan Bro

Uniform: Blue button down shirt, grey or black work pants, nice leather Big Time Job Shoes. Good hair.
Intoxicant: Beer/Adderall.
Habitat: The office (they're all investment bankers), or the bar down the street from the office that is filled with other bros who have identical jobs and identical wardrobes, or the biggest table at a popular but expensive steak house in Brooklyn during the after work hours. Bathroom stalls that lend themselves well to the blowing of lines.
Hobbies: Over-identifying with the really over-the-top scenes from Wolf of Wall Street. Stealing cabs. Eventually marrying women named Claire, and then divorcing her for a woman named Madison (who is 23). Yelling.
Secret shame: Feels bad about small penis.
Celeb brospiration: Alec Baldwin punching a guy

The Chicago Bro

Uniform: North Face jacket, Big 10 college sweatshirt (ALMA MATER ONLY), athletic shoes. During the summer, basketball shorts, a college tee shirt, baseball cap, and sandals. Toes aplenty among the bros of Chicago during warm weather.
Job: Consulting or accounting. Finance, but not, like, sexy finance. Maybe a loan officer or a financial advisor.
Hobbies: Getting blackout drunk every weekend.
Secret shame: Is going bald (that's what the baseball cap is supposed to hide) and getting large in the middle from all that drinking, despite only being 28 (every bro in Chicago is 28).
Celeb brospiration: Vince Vaughn

The Mid-Atlantic Bro

Uniform: Boat shoes without socks, pastels. Salmon colored shorts. Sailing motifs.
Intoxicant of choice: Beer, vodka, whatever. Eventually the night will lead to cocaine.
Secret shame: Has poor parents. Actually does not know how to sail.
Celeb brospiration: Bradley Cooper in Wedding Crashers.

The Southern Frat Bro

Uniform: Like The Mad Hatter preparing to appear on Fox News or a Dad about to go golfing. Impeccable, possibly side-parted hair. Think high school bully in an 80's movie.
Intoxicant of choice: SoCo. Occasionally chewing tobacco.
Hobbies: Fancying self to be "gentleman" (one source familiar with southern bros even referred to them as "gentleman bros") Being borderline psychotic about SEC football.
Secret shame: Belongs to a fraternity that is still segregated. Has scar on neck from bar fight he got into after his favorite football team lost to another SEC team.
Celeb brospiration: Tucker Carlson

The LA Bro

Uniform: Knit cap in warm weather, ironic tank top, comfortable shorts, flip flops, lazy beard, shades.
Job: Agent or something. He's friends with Zac Efron. He's on the list, okay?
Hobbies: Weekend trips to Vegas with the boys. Name dropping.
Secret shame: Barely-under-control coke problem.
Celeb brospiration: Brody Jenner

The Masshole

Uniform: Polo shirt, backwards BoSox cap, white Adidas shoes. Shamrock tat. That. Accent.
Habitat: Dive bars. Fenway. Massive L-shaped couch in a white-walled apartment.
Hobbies: Driving like an aggressive dick, throwing around homophobic insults like it's the early 90's.
Secret shame: They feel very little shame.
Celeb brospiration: The Wahlberg brothers

The D.C. Bro

Uniform: Vineyard Vines pants, lacrosse jersey, croakies.
Job: Lobbyist, consultant, or something random on The Hill.
Habitat: One of, like, three Georgetown bars where bros go.
Hobbies: Googling self. Name dropping. Attending Georgetown basketball games even though mostly did not go to Georgetown.
Secret shame: Knows job is totally unnecessary, is aware of his own irrelevance. Is horrible at lacrosse.
Celeb brospiration: Paul Ryan

The Portland Bro

Uniform: Nike or Adidas workout clothes worn as regular street clothes. Well-formed calves from hiking, kayaking, and "fun runs" that involve costumes.
Job: Works for Nike or Adidas.
Drink of choice: Water
Hobbies: Adult soccer, basketball, softball, or running team.
Secret shame: Owns clothing made by rival sportswear brand. Owns those individual toe shoes, which we all can agree are gross.
Celeb brospiration: Lance Armstrong

The Dallas Bro

Uniform: The Dallas (or Houston) Bro is a hybrid of many bro styles; a frankenbro if you will. Like the Mid-Atlantic bro, the Dallas Bro enjoys boat shoes without socks and pastel shirts. Like the Midwestern bro, the Dallas Bro loves a good pair of comfortable shorts and the occasional visor. Like the Red State bro, the Dallas bro sometimes wears gingham button downs. And like the Country Bro, the Dallas bro appreciates the value of a good pair of leather Redwing boots.
Job: Oil, gas, real estate, insurance.
Drink of choice: Brown liquors. Smokes when he drinks.
Secret shame: Very concerned with finding a wife before a certain target date, usually in the late twenties.
Hobbies: Hunting, fishing.
Celeb brospiration: Matthew McConaughey, obviously

The Colorado Bro

Uniform: Also known as "The Winter Bro," the Colorado Bro is dressed for the slopes as often as the weather and his budget permits.
Intoxicant of choice: Bales and bales of pot.
Hobbies: Skiing/snowboarding, smoking bales and bales of pot.
Celeb brospiration: Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy

The Provo Bro

Uniform: Also known as the "Mormon All-Star," the Provo Bro is a preening, hair geling, gym ratting, thick necked doofus who dresses like an Abercrombie ad and burns through Crest Whitestrips.
Intoxicant of choice: Cologne stink waves. Sugary desserts.
Hobbies: Going to the gym, attending church services in order to flirt with eligible Mormon women, bragging about piety.
Celeb brospiration: Bentley Williams, the biggest villain in Bachelor history.

The Brooklyn Bro

Uniform: skinny jeans, a plaid shirt, beard (optional), glasses (mandatory), forearm tats, Hitler Youth haircut. Closed shoes, always. When hipster is ubiquitous, hipster becomes bro. Let that sink in.
Job: Says he's a "writer," is actually in advertising.
Drink of choice: IPA (because let's be honest: if you're rich enough to live in most parts of White Brooklyn, you're rich enough to afford fancy beer)
Habitat: Dive bars, farmer's markets, bike paths
Hobbies: Gentrifying, reading the New Yorker on the train, openly smoking pot on the sidewalks of Bushwick (totally untouched by law enforcement) while bemoaning the fact that pot is illegal.
Secret shame: Really gets into March Madness and/or the Stanley Cup. Didn't think Mitt Romney was really that bad a candidate.
Celeb brospiration: Oddly enough, it's Adam Levine.

The Miami Bro

Uniform: Casual club wear. Sunglasses perched on forehead. Gym-hewn pecs.
Job: Real estate, or dad's company.
Intoxicant of choice: Vodka and Red Bull. Molly.
Hobbies: Hitting the gym. Starting sentences with the word "Bro" or "Man," which is pronounced in Miami like "Meng."
Habitat: Beach. Unnecessarily shiny cars idling for no reason. Yacht, though not necessarily his own.
Secret shame: Owns zero books and three Pitbull CDs.
Celeb brospiration: Enrique Iglesias

The Great Plains Bro

Uniform: Jeans, tee shirt (sometimes sleeveless), cowboy hat (or very weathered baseball cap), truck. Yes, you wear a truck. It's your penis's exoskeleton. Everyone knows that.
Job: construction administration, car dealership, agriculture. Anything, really.
Drink of choice: Budweiser
Hobbies: Hunting, fishing, talking about hunting and fishing.
Secret shame: Says he doesn't hate gays, just "disagrees with their lifestyle," but actually deep down kind of actually does hate gays.
Celeb brospiration: Kenny Chesney

The Silicon Valley Bro

Uniform: Ill-fitting business casual clothing from Uniqlo, hair gel
Job: "In tech."
Intoxicant of choice: Anything they can get their hands on at Burning Man.
Hobbies: Tinder or any other app that might lead to a hookup
Secret shame: Has no investors, zero funding, and doesn't know how to code.
Celeb brospiration: Jesse Eisenberg

Don't see your particular bro varietal on here? By all means, please do add in the comments below.

Image by Jim Cooke and Sam Woolley.

The Army published new regulations Monday regarding how women can wear their hair when in uniform, and women are already up in arms. Specifically, thousands of minority women who say the service is discriminating against "ethnic" hairstyles.

So far, more than 7,000 people have signed onto a White House petition asking the Army to reconsider those changes, part of a larger update to the branch's grooming and appearance standards that was detailed Monday in the Army Times (emphasis added):

The update to Army Regulation 670-1 was published Monday, and among the rules are clarifications for Army-appropriate hairstyles. For example, the Army does not allow twists or multiple braids that are bigger than a quarter of an inch in diameter. The reg also bans dreadlocks of any style, and cornrows must be uniform and no bigger than a quarter of an inch.

Twists and dreadlocks have been prohibited since 2005, but the regulation at the time did not clearly define the specific hairstyles, Army spokesman Paul Prince said.

...Leadership training released in mid-March, published before the reg was official, includes photos of a number of unauthorized hairstyles, several of which are popular among black women.

Soldiers who violate the regs can be brought up for "non-judicial punishment," anything from extra duty or an informal reprimand to a reduction in rank and pay.

The Army's new codified standards seem to bring it in line with similar rules set up by the Marines late last year , which banned locks, twists, buns, and braids as examples of "HAIRSTYLES CONSIDERED TO BE FADDISH OR EXAGGERATED AND THUS NOT AUTHORIZED FOR WEAR IN UNIFORM." But the Marines are... different, in that they already cede a much larger share of their individuality than soldiers for a very different mission and ethos.

The Army's new push doesn't jive for soldiers like Georgia National Guard Sgt. Jasmine Jacobs, the White House petition's creator, who wears her hair in twists and tells the Army Times that she's "at a loss now with what to do with my hair":

Jacobs said twists are the go-to style for black female soldiers going to the field because it "makes it easy to take care of in the field," she said.

Her hair is naturally thick and curly, making it impossible to pull into a bun, Jacobs said.

"Most black women, their hair doesn't grow straight down, it grows out," she said. "I'm disappointed to see the Army, rather than inform themselves on how black people wear their hair, they've white-washed it all."

...The changes are "racially biased, and the lack of regard for ethnic hair is apparent," she further states [in the petition].

The Army's move—announced by Sgt. Major Ray Chandler, a white man—is slightly tone-deaf, given that the service just relaxed beard and turban standards for male soldiers on the basis of their faith.

As with that move, the new debate over womens' hairstyles will probably reinvigorate conservatives who just wish all these people would shave their heads and bleach their skin, because America loves nonconformity, as long as you explore the myriad ways there are to be a white dude.

[Photos via DOD]

On Monday, 250 UPS drivers reportedly lost their jobs for participating in a 90-minute walk off to protest the dismissal of a 24-year employee and union activist.