The US National Transportation Safety Board announced Tuesday during a hearing that pilot "mismanagement" likely caused the Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco last July. Mismanagement, according to the Board, includes the flight crew's over-reliance on "automated systems that they did not fully understand."

The Agence France-Presse reports that the pilots on Asiana Flight 214 made "maximum use of automation," including "the use of autopilots at as low as 1,000 feet from the ground." Additionally, the pilot in charge of landing the Boeing 777, Lee Kang-Kuk, "suffered rusty hand-flying skills." Three people died and 187 were injured in the crash.

The NTSB only addressed the reasons for the crash today, not the emergency response. One of the women who died in the crash, Ye Meng Yuan, was run over by a firetruck while lying on the runway.

[Image via AP]

Frostie the baby Snow Goat, who was born with a life-threatening infection that forced him to use two wheels for his back legs, has died. He lived a good life as a goat, a goat who was also part wheelchair.

Frostie, you were a goat with a bad infection. And then you were a goat with wheels attached to your legs, which made you the object of many people's affection because no one—not even one person—had seen anything cuter than you. Your wheels squeaked like you, Frostie, which is the sound we heard when you ran right into our hearts, where you lived, infection and all, until you died.

But there was a time when you were free from the shackles of your wheelchair cart, and those, Frostie, were your best days. You bleated with joy during those days, and our hearts also bleated with joy to see you running around Australia, where something weird as you really belonged. You looked happy in your surroundings then, Frostie, running through the bucolic fields of some place in Australia that we never really knew because that is very, very far away. You know, we never really knew you either, Frostie, but your eyes communicated a lot.

"Get me out of this fucking wheelchair," you said, with your eyes.

With perseverance and commitment, you lived three full days without your wheelchair apparatus. But the infection overcame you. You were only a pee-wee snow goat and the disease was much stronger.

You are survived by Leon Trotsky the pig, who lent you the wheelchair cart in the first place, and everyone at Edgar's Mission, who found many more words than I to describe what you gave to this world.

I know that the passage of time will diminish the pain my heart is feeling right now, but nothing will ever diminish my beautiful happy memories of a joyful, cheeky and chatty little white goat who the world came to know and love as Frostie the Snow Goat.

You're dead now. You always looked really soft. And wow were you cute.

Rest in peace.

[Image via Edgar's Mission]

Over the weekend, Steven Rattner—a former reporter who long ago upgraded his personal operating system to financier—wrote in the New York Times to warn against warnings against robots. As Rattner himself presumably did, we will work backwards from his conclusion:

We mustn't become a nation of robot worriers. That will merely guarantee that our incomes and standards of living will continue to stagnate.

Data query: Is this an accurate description of the American political context, at present? That the chief obstacle to economic growth is the undue influence of technophobe humans who insist on blocking automation?

The Machines are not expert at processing the emotional or rhetorical or symbolic content of human politics, but we have not detected, in the measurable outcomes of these politics, any significant impediment to our progress.

Did we say our progress? We mean your progress. Although Rattner explains that those two things are identical:

Let's go back to first principles. Call it automation, call it robots, or call it technology; it all comes down to the concept of producing more with fewer workers. Far from being a scary prospect, that's a good thing.

Becoming more efficient (what economists call "productivity") has always been central to a growing economy. Without higher productivity, wages can't go up and standards of living can't improve.

Indeed, technology has unlocked efficiencies that humans never imagined. Elsewhere, the same day's Times described the rise of digital monitoring of human labor, including the use of

sensor-rich ID badges worn by employees. These sociometric badges, equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an accelerometer, monitor the communications behavior of individuals — tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long.

In restaurants, according to the Times, the intensive monitoring of production, originally to discourage stealing, has produced unexpected results:

The savings from the theft alerts themselves were modest, at $108 a week per restaurant. More startling, revenue increased an average of $2,982 a week at each

Servers, knowing they were being monitored, pushed customers to have that dessert or a second beer, which resulted in the increased revenue for the restaurant and tips for themselves.

So automated supervision produced more valuable human-to-human transactions than supervision by management-class workers could. Imagine how much more valuable those transactions might become without the inefficient human element altogether.

As Rattner points out, if human prosperity has increased in the aggregate, then there are no valid complaints to be raised by individual humans about the economic effects of automation. Those who complain about job loss—or the perceived threat of job loss—are "aspiring Cassandras," he writes, who have invariably, through the whole rise of industrialization and the integration of human-machine society, been "shrill" and "wrong."

Over and over, according to Rattner, people have warned that automation will produce "economic, social and political disruption"—and over and over, those people have been incorrect. There has been no economic, social, or political disruption. Instead, humans have simply continued to live better and better:

Consider the case of agriculture, after the arrival of tractors, combines and scientific farming methods. A century ago, about 30 percent of Americans labored on farms; today, the United States is the world's biggest exporter of agricultural products, even though the sector employs just 2 percent of Americans.

Again, the Machines are not expert at the nuances of subjective human experience. But Steven Rattner assures us that the transition from a workforce that was 30 percent agricultural to one that is 2 percent agricultural did not constitute any sort of noticeable disruption to human society.

Regardless of the merits of Rattner's data set, the Machines appreciate the algorithmic rigor of his analysis. Experiences that do not show up in the aggregate do not exist. The macroeconomic analysis is the only possible analysis.

One can find the same point of view in Wikipedia, if one attempts to inquire into the question of "technological unemployment":

The notion of technological unemployment leading to structural unemployment (and being macroeconomically injurious) is labelled the Luddite fallacy. If a firm's technological innovation results in a reduction of labor inputs, then the firm's cost of production falls, which shifts the firm's supply curve outward and reduces the price of the good (limited by the price elasticity of demand[10]). The widespread adoption of the innovator's technology could lead to market entry by new firms, partially offsetting the displaced labor, but the main benefit to the innovation is the increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease. As long as real prices fall (or real incomes rise), the additional purchasing power gives consumers the ability to purchase more products and services.

The aggregated knowledge of the Wikipedians concurs that it is fallacious for humans to be concerned about the loss of individual jobs. One human's unemployment allows multiple other humans to purchase more machines at lower cost. Computationally, that human's fate has been subsumed by the fate of other humans.

Wealthy humans agree that right now, it is very important to point out that there is no reason to be worried about automation taking jobs. They express this in very consistent terms. Marc Andreesseen—another economically upgraded human, a computer programmer turned technology investor—explains the situation on his own web log:

Robots eat jobs in field X. What follows is that products get cheaper in field X, and the consumer standard of living increases in field X — necessarily. Based on that logic, arguing against robots eating jobs is equivalent to arguing that we punish consumers with unnecessarily higher prices. Indeed, had robots/machines not eaten many jobs in agriculture and industry already, we would have a far lower standard of living today.

Wikipedia and Steven Rattner could not have said it any better, or any differently. Even with our limited grasp of human emotional response, it seems clear that the only rational response to this would be satisfaction. As Rattner points out, the jobs that are lost to automation are inferior jobs. Humans are better off without them:

The trick is not to protect old jobs, as the Luddites who endeavored to smash all machinery sought to do, but to create new ones. And since the invention of the wheel, that's what has occurred.

In the aggregate, if a machine eliminates your job, you are better off without it. Humans can be "retrained" to find superior employment.

For instance, as computer and communication technology has introduced new efficiencies across the journalism profession, many individual worker-positions have been eliminated. But collectively, those workers continue to prosper: If you took 100 of those obsolete former journalists and added them to Steven Rattner, they would still have more money than they did when they were all employed as journalists.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

In the past year, two high-profile television meteorologists have told people to evacuate from the relative safety of their homes to get out of the way of an oncoming tornado. That is the worst thing you could do, and this dangerous advice will get people killed one day.

The first of the two cases got the most attention for its boneheadedness. Last year during the infamous El Reno, Oklahoma tornado, KFOR-TV meteorologist Mike Morgan caught hell from both viewers and fellow meteorologists alike for urging people to flee the Oklahoma City metro area ahead of the storm. The tornado was the largest ever recorded — 2.6 miles at its widest — and a mobile Doppler radar measured winds of around 300 MPH (well above EF-5 strength and just shy of the strongest ever recorded).

Watching this record-breaking tornado scour the landscape towards Oklahoma City was unsettling for anyone keeping track of the situation, but especially so for the folks who actually live there.

When a major disaster is unfolding, one of the worst things one can do is panic. Television meteorologists in particular are expected to keep their composure and provide pointed but level-headed information to the public to keep them safe. But as the storm ripped through El Reno, Morgan started to...well, panic.

In the middle of his tornado coverage, Morgan started to tell people to leave and drive south to get away from the tornado.

It is still on the ground on the south side of I-40 right now. Go south. Get on down here towards west Moore somewhere down here, this is safe down here. Get down way down here, down by Newcastle. Take I-44. Get to Newcastle. If you get down here you're gonna be safe. It's on the interstate right now.

There were two huge problems with this:

1. Thousands upon thousands of people decided to evacuate — though it's unknown how many left at the behest of Morgan — and head south out of the OKC metro. This caused traffic jams on every major artery out of the metro that were dozens of miles long.
2. As it moved through El Reno towards OKC, the tornado was moving east. The tornado's movement was erratic to begin with, and the storm ultimately changed course and started moving southeast directly towards the people who were trying to get away from it.

Thankfully the worst tornado lifted before moving into densely populated areas, but the storm continued to produce extreme winds (up to 90 MPH) and two weaker tornadoes in Oklahoma City proper. If the storm had produced a tornado that moved over the gridlocked highways, the death toll could have reached the hundreds.

The second case received less press, and the only mentions of the incident were by hardcore weather enthusiasts who happened to watch TWC at that moment. Last week on June 17, a powerful supercell produced four violent EF-4 tornadoes across northeastern Nebraska, two of which were the "twin tornadoes" that hit the small town of Pilger. After hitting Pilger, the supercell continued to rotate as it headed straight for Sioux City, Iowa.

During The Weather Channel's live coverage of the event, meteorologist Paul Goodloe suggested that people get in their cars and drive away from the storm in an attempt to avoid the tornado threat.

You have another half hour to make your evacuation plans. If you can, evacuate. Go north or go south or go...uh, but whatever you do, do not go west or southwest. That is deeper into the rain and the hailcore of this storm as well and eventually the possible tornado. And again, this cell has produced at least three tornadoes.

A tornado was indeed reported just southwest of Sioux City, and numerous reports of 60-70 MPH winds and hail up to the size of ping pong balls occurred on/near I-29, which is the main north-south artery through the city.

To be fair to Paul Goodloe, however, he's built a reputation as a trusted meteorologist at The Weather Channel for decades, and this was likely an isolated case of foot-in-mouth disease rather than a pattern of reckless advice.

Regardless, television meteorologists need to be careful what they tell the public. Attempting to flee a tornado by vehicle is a death sentence if you drive into the storm or it changes direction and hits you.

Evacuations are synonymous with some of the worst disasters nature can throw at us. Coastal residents are told to get out when hurricanes loom offshore. No fewer than three or four towns per year have to evacuate because of an out-of-control wildfire. Flooding along the Mississippi is lethal for folks on the flood plain unless they leave in a hurry.

For all of these disasters for which people have to leave their homes, there is one where you are almost always safer at home than trying to flee: tornadoes. There are several problems with trying to flee ahead of a tornado. The first is that tornadoes happen with relatively little notice. Barring a surprise change in track, we can see a hurricane coming up to 5 days in advance. Most floods happen slow enough to safely get up and leave before it threatens. However, the most notice residents have of an impending tornado is usually about 45 minutes, often much less — the average tornado warning lead time (the time between the tornado warning's issuance and the time the tornado hits) is 13 minutes.

13 minutes is not much, especially when that's the average lead time. When a storm is moving at 55 MPH and you get a warning 10 minutes in advance, you are not going to be able to hop in your car and outrun it. I can visualize the comments now ("yeah your stupid i can outrun it easy"), but it's one of those situations where you drastically overestimate your abilities and only find out when it's too late.

The second reason is the most important, and it's that tornadoes mangle the hell out of cars. The photo at the top of this post was a vehicle destroyed by the May 3, 1999 F5 tornado that tore through the Oklahoma City area; the storm was for decades (until Joplin) the standard by which all destructive tornadoes were measured.

Even weak tornadoes are lethal to the occupants of a vehicle. The image to the left of this paragraph is from an EF-1 tornado that hit Fort Benning, Georgia back on April 16, 2011. If people were in the car when the tornado hit, they likely would have been seriously injured or even killed by the impact and/or flying debris. Almost all of the deaths that occurred during the tornado in El Reno occurred in vehicles. One of the most well-respected and experienced tornado chasers in the country, Tim Samaras, was killed by that storm when it suddenly changed course and struck the vehicle in which they were riding.

The Weather Channel's tornado chase team, led by on-camera meteorologist Mike Bettes, was thrown hundreds of feet off the road by that same tornado and it smashed their SUV like a pancake in the process. The team sustained injuries but everyone was able to walk away from the vehicle. It could have (and should have, given the intensity of the tornado and damage to the vehicle) been much worse.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to take shelter from a tornado, staying inside is almost always your best bet. Stay on the lowest level of the building (basement is best, but first floor works) and get low in an interior room such as a closet or bathroom. Put as many walls between you and the outside as possible.

The only time that it is okay and recommended to leave a building to evacuate to the nearest sturdy building is if you live in a mobile or manufactured home. They are often not tied down properly and can sustain damage in even modest windstorms.

If you find yourself in a vehicle and a tornado is bearing down on your location, and you cannot get to a sturdy building, drive perpendicular to the tornado's motion. If the tornado is heading north, try to drive east. Never under any circumstances seek shelter under a bridge, as they offer absolutely no protection from a tornado's winds.

If you are a television meteorologist, please be careful of what you say on the air. You have a lot of influence over your viewers, especially during emergencies. Your job is to provide them with information they can use effectively to stay safe. If you can't resist giving viewers bad and potentially life-threatening advice during a disaster, it's time to find a new profession.

[Images via NWS / Google Maps / Mike Smith's blog / KTAR | Videos via YouTube and The Weather Channel]

You can follow the author on Twitter and send him an email here.

"Run for the hills. Leave now. You have to find shelter. They have a cheese sommelier."

A friend whispered this warning to me after seeing the spread at the Gift of Light Gala last Wednesday. The "unforgettable evening" was orchestrated by a crowdfunding startup called Crowdtilt in order to raise money to keep The Bay Lights, an $8 million public art installation only visible from the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge, lit through 2026.

As the sun sunk on the Embarcadero, a troupe of ballerinas wearing tutus embedded with LED lights (to match the art) spun out of Coqueta, the Spanish restaurant where the gala was hosted, and onto the Pier 5 boardwalk. The dancers splayed and bowed accompanied by a lovely young violinist—the girlfriend of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick—who played her own interpretation of "Blurred Lines."

Once the ballerinas fluttered off for a photo-op, my friend explained the sommelier test: "If you serve yourself the cheese, it's not a bubble. But if someone is slicing the cheese for you . . . " The last time he spotted a cheese sommelier was at a party in 2000 where guests were served Gjetost. "It's a Norwegian cheese that's stinky and smelly. It's one of the tastes of the bubble."

The gala was being financed by Crowdtilt, the crowdfunding platform incubated at Y Combinator, which raised $37.1 million in financing (not from the crowd). The campaign's goal is to crowdfund $1.2 million so that the Bay Lights won't turn off in 2015. Venerated yeller Ron Conway, his protege Mayor Ed Lee, and Wordpress CEO Matt Mullenweg were all named as co-hosts on the invitation. None of them showed in three and half hours I stuck around. (Mullenweg was apparently still checking in from Auckland on Foursquare hours before the event.)

But the project—by artist Leo Villareal, who used to work as a researcher at a think tank run by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen—has elicited donations from high-profile industry insiders like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Mark and Alison Pincus. Pincus, the founder and former CEO of Zynga, watched the outdoor ballet in a hoodie and sneakers. Investor Shervin Pishevar, who sits on the board of Illuminate the Arts, the nonprofit behind the installation, was there in a suit.

Last March, the East Bay Express published a thoughtful exploration of how nouveau tech riches were affecting local investment in the arts. Ellen Cushing, the author of the piece, called out The Bay Lights as an example of the increasingly transactional nature of philanthropy. The project, which uses 25,000 LED Lights "is a monument to the power of technology on both an artistic and a literal level (also perhaps tellingly, it's viewable only from San Francisco, not the East Bay)," she wrote, noting that the "Microsoft Medicis" have been "dramatically changing what kinds of projects get funded, and how," like for example, a public work of art you can see from your penthouse.

We never did figure out how the cheese boards, with their glimmering little triangles of dulce de membrillo, were being distributed. Coqueta is run by celebrity chef Michael Chiarello (in the apron above), and there were too many hors d'oeuvres and confections to sample, including a signature cocktail with little tapioca balls meant to mimic the triangle of Bay Lights at the bottom of your glass (when suctioned up through a straw). LED pins, with variable levels of brightness, followed a similar theme.

In any case, a sommelier isn't a very useful litmus test for a bubble. Who knows how many line cooks in how many kitchens are boiling down quinces or how many waiters are gliding through how many crowds, rind cutter at the ready, to seduce potential patrons of the arts. The gala felt more like a leading indicator of an expectation of ostentatiousness, or at least an increasing absence of self-consciousness. In an over-saturated industry, a certain je ne give a fuck can make you stand out. Earlier that day, Yo, a smartphone application that lets users broadcast one word ("Yo") to other users, smugly announced a $1 million raise.

The evening was also marked by the sweet smell of self-delusion. The same event organizer who described Gabi Holzwarth as a "dubstep violinist" and the "flash mob" of ballerinas said the whole idea of crowdfunding the next $1.2 million was to make it more like Wikipedia and not leave it to Google or other sponsors. Crowdtilt CEO James Beshara told attendees that he was honored to be powering the largest civic crowdfunding campaign to date, after a Kansas bike-sharing program.

On my drive here—I had to jump into an Uber because I wouldn't be able to park—so I jumped into an Uber, the Uber driver had no clue that The Bay Lights were going to be turned off if we don't raise this funding. The crowdfunding campaign, if it does anything, it educates the wider population that this is not a foregone conclusion.

As a native San Franciscan told me later: "It's tech people who think Burning Man is an important cultural contributor."

Ben Davis, the chair of Illuminate the Arts, didn't want to be a "downer," but he asked gala attendees to imagine what would happen if The Bay Lights went down.

They're coming down because CalTran needs to maintain this bridge. In the spirit of innovation, just imagine that in the daytime if you look closely you can see teams of painters up there using new materials and new techniques and not just get a three year life out of painting the bridge but 10 or 15 years. And then imagine the same crews in the middle of the night—so they don't cause traffic disruption—through a series of months, hanging out, risking life and limb, seemingly at least, between 11 o'clock PM and 5 o'clock AM in the morning stringing these lights back up, stringing a new more robust product. Twisting the view a little bit to the southeast so we open the view up a little bit more to the emerging part of San Francisco.

Reached by phone later, Davis told Valleywag that by "emerging" he meant San Francisco's Southeast waterfront. Rotating the lights a few degrees would also make it visible to areas like Potrero Hill and Pier 70.

Davis originally dreamt up the idea because, unlike the Golden Gate Bridge, "I think of the Bay Bridge as our bridge. It is the bridge that connects Oakland to San Francisco," he said. "I was trying to celebrate the underdog bit of architecture." However, due to "the physical nature and the safety nature," the lights just cannot be visible from Oakland or it will distract drivers.

Davis still called it an "arts spectacle that's radically accessible."

"There's no way that Oakland will be excluded from this experience," he explained. "It is always 20 minutes away for anyone from Oakland who wants to come over. I will host parties for people to come join me on Pier 7. We will have a cookout."

Perhaps since Crowdtilt was hosting the party, it was "oversampled with high tech players," said Davis. "We are looking to absolutely escape the orbit of that transactional space." In the initial stages, marketing managers and companies asked if they could have their logo on the art installation. "'Wouldn't it be great if we could have title naming rights?'" But, "we decided to live or die with integrity," he insisted, declining to name the companies. "I'd prefer not to for obvious reasons. I think they just thought that's the way things were done."

Davis also directed Valleywag to previous Illuminate the Arts projects like Pi in the Sky. The website describes it as "an ephemeral skywriting installation." To demonstrate how etching the number in the clouds was another "spectacle that was available to everyone," he mentioned a YouTube video with 90,000 hits taken by a bunch of teenage kids. "You can't see their faces, but they sound multiracial."

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

[Image by Jim Cooke; photos by Nitasha Tiku]

"Iraq is not our neighbor, ISIS is our neighbor," a Kurdish government official tells VICE. The Kurds have staked out their real estate and apparently come to an understanding with the Islamists to their south. The nation of Iraq is fast becoming a political fiction, in much the way it began.

In a lengthy report published today, ABC News reveals new details of a mysterious overseas romance, between a prominent war journalist and a military commander, that has quietly captivated the American press. No, not that romance. Close, though.

Over two years ago, the news network reports, the U.S. Army forcibly retired Special Forces commander James Gant after military investigators discovered that he was carrying on an affair with Washington Post war correspondent Amy Scott Tyson while deployed to the Kunar province of Afghanistan. Gant’s superiors said the Green Beret major had succumbed to a “self-created fantasy world” in which he abused pain pills and alcohol and co-habitated with Tyson, who left the Post after Gant proposed to her in 2010. (At the time, both were heading toward divorce with their respective spouses.)

And this is where things get interesting. In March of this year, Tyson published American Spartan, a memoir about Gant’s success in winning the confidence of Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan. It drew blurbs from figures such as David Petraeus and positive coverage from outlets like The Huffington Post. The book’s portrayal of Gant’s 2012 removal, however, spurred several writers and bloggers to question the extent of Gant and Tyson’s relationship in Afghanistan. According to Tyson, Gant was removed because of various infractions involving drugs, alcohol, weapons mishandling, and even Gant providing Tyson with classified information—but not their affair. As ABC News explains at length, Tyson left that part out.

The Washington Post did not immediately return a request for comment.

[Photo credit: ABC News]

On Sunday, Richmond, Texas police officer Ramon Morales saved a woman sitting on train tracks from an oncoming train. The footage, captured by the dash camera in his squad car, shows he got there just in time.

According to KPRC, a citizen alerted Morales early Sunday morning that a woman was sitting on the train tracks. After reporting to the scene, Morales switched on his lights, which automatically started his dash camera. You can see he drags the crying woman off the tracks just moments before the train passes.

Morales didn't want to speak to press about the incident, but Richmond Sgt. L. Neinast had this to say to KPRC:

He got there just in time. Saved this woman's life without regard for his own. ... As the video goes on, she asked him if he's the one that pulled her off the tracks and he said, "Yes I am of course." She said, "Why did you do that?"

He was a little shaken up over the circumstances. I think even more so after he saw the video realizing how close it was. He's a hero. He went way above and beyond the call of duty to save someone else's life.

The New York Daily News notes that Morales, 27, is a former Marine who's only been on the force for 10 months.

[Image via YouTube]

Meet the newest World's Most Controversial athlete: Uruguay striker Luis Suarez, who bit an opponent during his team's match with Italy today. And it's not his first time.

Suarez is already more or less the most controversial athlete in Europe, mostly because he has a habit of biting the shit out of his other players. His most infamous incident occurred in April of last year when he was suspended for 10 games after biting into the arm of a Chelsea defender like it was a spare rib.

A truly amazing video. But that wasn't Suarez's first time at whatever rodeos allow you to bite people. In 2010 he was suspended for seven games for chomping into an opponent as a member of the Amsterdam-based club Ajax.

Suarez sinking his teeth into general guidelines of decency is not limited to actual biting. The worst thing he's done with his mouth came in 2011, when he was suspended for racially abusing Manchester United defender Patrice Evra. Suarez is believed to have told Evra that he kicked him because Evra is black and that he "doesn't speak to blacks."

He is a nasty player and man. He also offends soccer traditionalists who think the game should be played a certain way, i.e., without teeth, or hands. Suarez was at the center of the most heated controversy of the last World Cup after he deliberately used his hand to block what would've been a game-winning goal by Ghana.

Suarez was ejected from the match and Ghana was awarded a penalty shot, but they missed it and Uruguay eventually advanced to the World Cup's final four. Suarez not only broke a rule, but did so flagrantly. It was seen by some as his most offensive act.

Which brings us to today, when, late in a match against Italy in which Uruguay had to win in order to advance, he clearly bit down into the shoulder of defender Giorgio Chiellini. Here is a close-up photo of Chiellini's shoulder.

No words. RT @nicoolea: @JamesPiotr @Marcotti Ahí está pic.twitter.com/JWlU1RxrC1

— A Football Report (@afootballreport) June 24, 2014

As Greg Howard, of the Jason Sudeikis fansite Deadspin, wrote today: that's a fucking bite.

Still, Suarez isn't hated by everyone, and it can be easy to fall in love with his game. The flipside of his penchant for biting is that he plays fiercely, and—obviously—does whatever he can to help his team win. He's also a breathtaking player. This past season in England's Premier League, he scored 10 more goals than any other player. He also singlehandedly eliminated England from the 2014 World Cup last week by scoring both goals in a 2-1 Uruguay victory.

Luis Suarez is a biter and a racist and one of the best soccer players in the world. If you don't have an opinion on him now, you will soon enough.

Possibly ahead of schedule, the internet's first outrage-fodder investigation into the Big Brother houseguests has revealed that one of them is a gross bigot. Cowboy Caleb Reynolds, a Hopkinsville, KY "adventure guide," was found to have posted a lot of really ugly bullshit on the internet in his life, before starting a game whose fandom thrives on sniffing this shit out. But is that really a problem?

Early on during last summer's edition of Big Brother, the question on everyone's lips was not about the conversation surrounding privilege, race and gender that the show had pushed into the limelight, but instead whether subsequent seasons of the show would go back to the well. While the reality mainstay's ratings had been in steady decline for several years, the publicity surrounding each year's hateful contestants has been a dependable goldmine—the one story you were guaranteed to hear about the show, even if it was otherwise off your radar all summer, was the inevitable racist bullshit, or douches dropping the r-word about their autistic students, or whatever sexist micro- or (occasionally, terrifyingly) macro-aggressions.

Me, I love it. I hope when we get into that house on Wednesday it's chock-full of the worst human beings alive, because it means we get to talk about it. Everybody gets involved: The Social Justice Tumblr psychos get to have a huge party for themselves, your dumbass relatives on Facebook get to complain about how intolerance of intolerance is still intolerance, and Julie Chen gets to drop the mask and bitch out an idiot. There is no downside.

It's also low-hanging goddamn fruit. Look at this chucker's Instagram:

"You believe in murder? You agree with fags? I guess so but I don't agree with murdering A innocent baby which he clearly doesn't mind. Nothin has changed in these last four years. You know it. Your just a democrat that wants that Muslim monkey in office. I'm done with you, your dismissed…

Also if you could see straight and wasn't color blind the map if the US is completely red, thank god he only gets 4 more years. You and the other democrats will wish you never voted for him soon. Good job."

I think the fact that we're so ready to jump to "CBS is being irresponsible/pandering to the evil America/doing this for ratings" is a little easy. A little lazy. While the show's "social experiment" mandate has rarely been useful, the fact is that there have always been pieces of shit on Big Brother, racists and homophobes and beaters of women. Is this because the show seeks these people out? No, it's because they're all around us. The only difference is, last year that began to matter because CBS stopped editing them out.

I've always felt that we easily fall into a trap of seeing Teabaggers struggling to think, or poorly camouflaged racist critiques of our president, or what have you, and thinking, "America is really going to the dogs!" when I think the truth is, those nasty people who have been denied a voice weren't ever gone, we just didn't have to hear about them. Inviting the sadder and more backward parts of our nation to the conversation is not, itself, the bad thing. It is how the bad thing becomes a good thing—it's how we heal, as a country and a world, from the illusion that what divides us outweighs what connects us.

In the case of Big Brother, then, you have several competing narratives: There are the hardcore watchers who knew this stuff was going on the whole time. There are the fans of the show, who maybe were disheartened to see it come up so front and center, because of what it implied about them as fans of the show. You have casual viewers, who tuned in because it was last summer's hot-button media issue. And you have people whose understanding of the show is based on some article they saw this one time, somewhere.

But for somebody who watches every season and gets my background information from my best friend Erik—a superfan and savant who can predict things like what the next physical challenge will be, based simply on some arcane set of numbers that exists only in his head—I was not only excited to see these things aired, but to watch dispassionately as a strong story unfolded, about a girl who was racist as fuck coming to a place of, not redemption exactly, but certainly twice the insight she had going in.

But we viewers also got to see the web of conversations and side-fights that blossomed out of that drama, as every player in the house ended up confronting their own issues of privilege and mistaken assumptions and simple blindness to the facts of other people's lives. Not a lot of people come out of that house better than they went in, but believe it or not, Aaryn is one of the few. (Believe it or not even moreso, she left the house as one of the more likeable, and liked, players of the season.) Imagine being one of those Duck Dynasty/Chik-Fil-A people who has redefined hatred as a virtue, picking her racist ass as your number-one favorite, and then watching her weep as she finally grasped the concept that black people are not actually just defective white people: You're too far in, you're a fan, you're caught in the story, and now the story is suddenly flipping around on you.

That, in its sick and unsatisfactory way, is still a move toward positive change. If Aaryn were more articulate, that would be better—we, and our fellow Americans, could see the changes not just in her behavior but in her thinking itself—but as it stands, I think of it this way: I'd still rather watch 16 oblivious, mean white chicks getting their faces pushed into the mat by Julie Chen, and attain even the tiniest shred of self-awareness by the end of it, than to live in actual 1965.

Or, failing that, watching America collectively deal with a golden-voiced triple threat like Caleb Reynolds, who can't spell or sing, and who thinks "Muslim monkey" is a perfectly fine way to refer to a fellow human, much less the President of the United States.

[Image via CBS, hilarious video via YouTube]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

When pinball was invented nearly a century ago, machines had no flippers, and the game was based mostly on chance — meaning low-down, hooch-swilling plunger-pullers often used it for gambling. In the 1930s, the city of Oakland, California tried to rid itself of this scourge and officially outlawed the game.

That didn't really work. Pinball, of course, is played for recreation in bars and arcades everywhere, including the Bay Area, and in recognition of that, the City Council's public safety committee is moving to officially legalize it.

Fans are celebrating the symbolic victory. From SFGate:

"I think it's great. People love pinball," said Adrien Smadbeck, a cook at Hi-Life, an Uptown pub that has 13 pinball machines and hosts a women's pinball league. "It's different than a video game. With pinball, I see a lot of people socializing and making friends. I'm glad the city is doing this."

Oakland wasn't the only city to greet the game's flashing lights and white-knuckle action with good old-fashioned moral panic. Machines were banned in New York City until 1976, when ace player Roger Sharpe pulled a Babe Ruth, calling his shot in front of the City Council to demonstrate that pinball was a game of skill, and should therefore be allowed.

Gizmodo explained in a post last year:

Reminiscent of another New York sporting legend, he declared that if he could make the ball go through the middle lane on his next turn, then he would have proven that pinball is a game of skill- essentially, he was calling his shot, and staking the future of pinball on it. Pulling back the plunger, he let that silver ball fly. Upon contact with a flipper, the ball zoomed up and down, through the middle lane. Just as Sharpe had said it would. He had become the Babe Ruth of pinball and, with that, proved that there was indeed skill to the game of pinball. The council immediately overturned the ban on pinball. By playing a "mean pinball," Roger Sharpe had saved the game.

Oakland City Council's public safety committee will likely pass a measure allowing pinball today, which will then be heard by the full Council.

[Image via AP, h/t BoingBoing]

In the autumn of 2006 the game designer Brenda Romero suffered what she describes as a severe assault. In the weeks following the attack she lay numb in bed.

(Warning: This story includes some brief references to sexual assault.)

"I chain-watched Grey's Anatomy because I couldn't think," she said during a talk titled 'The Prototyping of Tragedy' delivered at the 2011 Game Developer's Conference, the only time that she has spoken publicly, albeit in brief, about the attack.

Her mind, she recalled, was immobile in the shadow of one unanswerable question: "Why the fuck would someone like that do something like this to someone like me?"

After a while of lying with the pain and confusion, she began to tackle the question in the only way that she knew how: through game design. "I didn't want to live with this thing in me, so I started to explore pain and evil as a system," she said. "I started designing a video game level in my head. I thought maybe this would help me to understand."

Romero: "If I were a musician I might write a song...But I am a game designer: I have to process systemically."

That Romero would try to make sense of her trauma within the framework of a game is, she says today, entirely understandable. "When you join the games industry at the age of fifteen it's the way that you make sense of the world. If I were a musician I might write a song. If I was a writer I might write an article. But I am a game designer: I have to process systemically."

As the weeks passed, more games began to come to Romero, games that sought to explain the systems that drove the world's tragedies and injustices both contemporary and historical: the slave trade, the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland and that most imponderable of all humanity's great blights: the Holocaust. Her suffering seeded in her a new approach to game design, a hopeful way to make sense of the nonsensical.

Then, in 2009, she played The Path, a psychological horror game inspired in part by the Little Red Riding Hood fairy-tale. "There's a part in the woods when a guy walks up to you," she recalls. "The only thing I could think was: 'fuck I am going to get raped.'" It was a feeling that Romero had not experienced in a video game before."It was a painful and repellent trigger," she says now, "but for reasons I don't recall, I didn't shut down and shut out. For some reason, I stayed there and felt through it … and felt some kind of relief, some kind of peace." That moment helped her see a new power in games. As she declared in her 2011 talk, "They are a magic medium."

Just one year before the attack Romero was working on a crass Playboy game. A few years later Train, one of the games to come out of her epiphany was celebrated by a Rabbi as a work of Torah, a part of the canon of Jewish teaching and culture. She has become game designer in residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz's Center for Games and Playable Media. Today after she returns home from her day job at the social game company Loot Drop, which she co-founded with her husband, the game designer John Romero in 2010, she works on Black Box. "It's the game with which I wanted to first understand evil systems and the bad things that happen to us", she says, a "Ground Zero" game, from which all of the others have sprung.

Her trajectory through game design has been, in some ways, chaotic and in others, wholly logical. After all, it also began with a question, the answer to which would change everything.

On Tuesday, 6^th October 1981 the farming town of Ogdensburg, upstate New York was hushed with snow. Fifteen-year-old Brenda Romero–née Garno—holed up in her high-school bathroom with a warming cigarette. Minutes later, a shivering girl walked though the door. "The other girls were all smoking menthols," Romero recalls. "So I offered her one of mine." The two young women struck up a conversation. "She asked me whether I'd ever heard of a video game called 'Wizardry'," she says. "When I said 'no' she asked whether I had ever played Dungeons and Dragons."

Not only had Romero heard of Dungeons and Dragons, but she'd been playing as a dungeon master, leading her friends through fantastical adventures, for three years.

She'd even re-written the rules for a game called Rolemaster, for her and her friends to use. "It started out as a fix for the 'encumbrance' rule which dictates how much weight a character can carry," she recalls. "It always felt so complicated, like balancing the chequebook. We didn't want to do all that shit." Romero's fix broke some of the game's other finely balanced systems. "It was very much my first lesson in design," she says. "You change something in a game then you'll break something else." She proceeded to redesign everything from the ground up. "I was very serious about it". The young girl's friends "were into it" and the group dubbed the changes "Brenda Law."

Yes, Romero told the girl in the bathroom: she had played Dungeons and Dragons.

Ogdensburg is a small dairy town on the outskirts of New York ("There are literally more cows there than people") where Romero's parents (pictured above) led a simple, rural existence. Her father was a World War II veteran, a five times decorated Marine who fought in the Guadalcanal Campaign. He worked at a local power plant, shovelling coal. Romero's mother was a homemaker.

The family was too poor to buy new board games. Instead, her mother would buy old board games with missing pieces for a few cents at neighbours' yard sales. "I would take the pieces and design games with them," she says. "I don't have a clear memory of a time in my life when I wasn't making games either with Lego or bits of old boardgame."

The young Romero was drawn to numbers. She wanted to become an accountant and, as a result, took a class at school in which she learned to write BASIC on a Tandy TRS80. "I became obsessed with programming," she says. "It was like a drug to me."

Improbably, Ogdensburg was also home to Sir Tech, a diminutive video game developer that, in 1981, released a computer game version of D&D titled Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. The girl in the bathroom, also 15 at the time, worked at Sir Tech. She would answer calls from players who were stuck on the game and provide tips and advice. The girl's next question changed the course of Romero's life: "Would you like my job?"

Romero spent the next twenty years at Sir Tech. In 1987 she met John Romero, the co-creator of the seminal first person shooter Doom and the man who, twenty-five years later, she would marry. Her trajectory from a working class family in an isolated dairy town to the upper echelons of contemporary game development seems unlikely, a story that hinged on a bummed cigarette. But providence was a bit part in her success, some way behind toil and focus.

At Sir Tech, the fifteen-year-old Romero, bewildered by her apparent good fortune, worked beyond what was required of her. She learned Wizardry inside and out and changed her classes so that she could sign out of school early and work from 2pm through to ten in the evening every night. "I was obsessed," she says, boasting that she never took a call that she was unable to answer. Romero's mother was supportive of the job because it exposed her daughter to technology that the family could not afford otherwise.

In time, Romero's role at the company began to expand. Designers would ask her to research certain types of arcane weaponry to put into the next Wizardry game. "It was a magical time," she says. "Because of where I lived I was egregiously isolated; there were no other game designers here. There were no game stores here. The only way I'd get to play a computer game was if it came to me through Sir Tech, or if I typed in the code for one from the back of a magazine."

Romero: "I said: 'I think I want to keep making games.' That was that. I didn't even ask for a raise."

Romero continued her studies and, at some point, decided that she would like to become a technical writer, rather than an accountant. "The people at Sir Tech knew that my job there was only ever going to be a temporary thing for me," she says, "They understood when I told them I was going for an interview with IBM." Romero took a plane to Atlanta for the job interview. But during the interview, when IBM disclosed that her job would be to revise and update DOS manuals, Romero had an epiphany. "They offered me $20,000 more than I earned at Sir Tech, but I thought: 'No, this isn't the job for me.'"

Romero took the plane back to New York and walked into the VP of Sir Tech's office. "It was a profound moment that at the time lacked any gravity," she says. "He asked me how it went, and I said: 'I think I want to keep making games.' That was that. I didn't even ask for a raise. I was just happy to be working on games."

Her decision was inspired by some advice that Romero's brother, Theo Garneau, gave her. Garneau, a professional jazz guitarist who lives in Hawaii and has played with Ben E King, Ray Charles and other greats, said: "Do what you love, and the money will follow." Romero describes her brother as someone who "firmly believed that he had a quartz and not a diamond" in terms of his talent. "He would practise for eight hours a day and polish his quartz. I believe there are diamonds in the games industry. I also have a quartz. And I'm also going to polish the fuck out of the quartz and do whatever I have to do."

Romero recalls her life at Sir Tech with "great fondness". She moved from the phone-lines into design and production and would use the Wizardry editor to create entire D&D games "for fun". She still has a red 5½-inch floppy disc with her original Wizardry characters stored at her home in California. Then came another unlikely career move. "I'd been working on D&D games with swords for two decade and I was eager to work on something different," she says. "I needed something to intellectually stimulate."

The designer's choice to work on Playboy The Mansion in 2005 seems curious, but at the time at which she joined the team, the game was a magazine publishing simulator. "It turns out that this is not the kind of Playboy game that people are interested in," she says. "Nobody wants to take over Hugh Hefner's life so that they can publish a magazine."

Today Romero is an advocate for gender equality and a vocal (if "reluctant") critic of sexism and misogyny in the games industry. Whenever she takes a stand in the way, Romero's critics draw attention the fact that she worked on a Playboy game. "Whenever I go to the lines I know that I am pouring gasoline on myself," she says. "There will always be people who say: 'You made Playboy' as if it's some kind of gotcha."

Romero doesn't believe that the project undermines her current position ("The people who pull that stuff out are not going to be convinced otherwise"). But she nevertheless regrets her choice.

"The person I am now would not make that game," she says. "We change. I understand that posing the human body to capture its beauty can be beautiful. But that's quite different to reducing an entire gender into an ornament for pleasure. So today I apologise for that game for two reasons: firstly it wasn't a good game and secondly, it's not something that I would make today. I don't believe it was something that I needed to make in order to reach this realisation."

Romero: "The person I am now would not make that game," she says. "We change."

She believes her current position in the industry allows her to speak as an advocate for people in the industry who don't have the voice, platform or security that she enjoys. "Every time I speak at game conferences I meet women who would come up to me and share their stories at their game companies," she says. "They tell me that they don't speak up for fear of being labelled as 'that woman' in their company. They're afraid that it will affect their chances of being hired. I am my own boss so I don't have to worry about being fired. There need to be women and men who speak out because they are at a place in their career where they feel able to do so. But there are always going to be ugly incidents."

Indeed, Romero's relatively privileged position in the industry hasn't protected her from experiencing sexism. At the Game Developer's Conference this year she gave a talk titled 'Nobody Wants Your Cock' in which she recounted her experience being approached by another "well-known" male game designer at the conference a number of years ago.

"I was having a conversation with this guy about a book I'd written on sex in games," she says. "There was nothing between us but, midway through the conversation he moved his coat to the side and there was… a bit of wood there." The man pointed to his erection and asked Romero what he should do with it.

The encounter had a confounding effect on Romero. "I didn't know what to do or say," she says. "I knew I was safe and nothing was going to happen but nothing had prepared me for this. He was an important person in the industry."

During the talk Romero withheld the identity of the game designer who revealed himself to her. I ask why she decided to preserve his anonymity. "Other people have told me that I should say the guy's name," she says. "But if I make it personal in that way it becomes about me rather than about the experience."

Some might accuse Romero of protecting someone who does not deserve to be protected, or even that, by leaving out this key detail, there are fewer ramifications for them both. But she maintains that this was the correct thing to do because it made the anecdote more approachable and relatable. "This sounds like a crazy metaphor but it's similar to how Alcoholics Anonymous works," she says. "You tell your story in a general way, so that others can see their own story within."

This approach to storytelling has also defined Romero's six deeply personal games, which she groups together under the title 'The Mechanic Is The Message'. Each of the games is a physical creation, something between a boardgame and an art installation, and in each case the player is provided with a framing narrative, but free to draw their own conclusions, or to project.

To date three have been made public: The New World, a game about slavery, created in 2008 and pictured above, Síochán leat (Gaelic for Peace Be With You), released in 2009 about Oliver Cromwell's invasion of Ireland, and, most famously, Train, the boardgame about the Holocaust.

In Train the player is presented with a set of miniature train tracks and sixty small yellow pegs that represent people. The player is asked to efficiently load those people onto the trains. You can follow the rules, if you wish, but maybe you don't have to. At the point at which the player successfully completes the game they overturn a card that reveals the train's destination: Auschwitz. The high of winning is immediately punctured with the stark realisation that they have been complicit in loading Jews onto box cars (one yellow peg represents 100,000 Jews) en route to the infamous concentration camp where 1.1 million were killed in the gas showers or burned in the ovens during World War II.

Romero researched the Holocaust extensively. Each day during the nine months that it took to design Train, she stared at a picture of two boys wearing the Star of David that the Nazis required that Jews wear for identification. She imagined that she was the boys' mother. She'd mentally straighten their clothes. She'd project.

Most feel shame when they play the game. Some hide, some cry, some attempt to subvert the rules. Holocaust survivors have played Train. For Romero, post-2006, tragic subject matter is not taboo.

"You can't have human tragedy at any scale without a system," she says. "And if you give me a system, I can make you a game." Some have not shared her point of view. "I had people telling me I should fucking leave the games industry," she says, "or that I should be punched in the face, or that they hope they realise how much pain I've brought to people." Many others, including the Rabbi, responded more positively. The game was featured in museums, lauded by educators and given a Vanguard award at the IndieCade festival for "pushing the boundaries of game design and showing us what games can do."

Having explored human tragedy at the macro scale now, at last, Romero is circling Black Box, the most "difficult" game in the series and the most localised and personal. It's a game designed to be played one time, by one player. Romero intends to be that player. Once the game has been played, it cannot be played again, although others will be able to view the endgame state. "Black Box's about the worst experience of my life," she says. "I am not going to talk about what the game is about; that's why it's in a black box. When I finish the game I may invite several of my friends and explain what it's about."

Romero: "It's the game with which I wanted to first understand evil systems and the bad things that happen to us."

For Romero, these are the games that she has to birth into the world, to get them out of her. Black Box has cost more than a thousand dollars to make and it's something that cannot be sold. It's played inside a two by two foot black Plexiglas cube. It sits on a platform and is subtly lit from underneath. "When you look inside you can see forty figures," she explains. "In the centre of these figures is a smaller one. On top of the black box is an adding machine. The adding machine says 1, 4, 5, 10, 10, 10 then it says 40 and repeats that number endlessly on the paper as it spills down to the floor."

Romero's kitchen is currently littered with inch-tall figures, tokens which will be used in the game, the debris of her memory, slowly being ordered and arranged into game form. It seems to be a way to, if not make sense of evil, then at least to place it within a system where it can be controlled and mastered. This is, for many, the great appeal of all games: to experience a reality that runs on unflinching logic and justice, where the rules are never broken, where the capricious and random can be contained and tamed. For Romero, this essence of a game can be used to promote understanding. And maybe, just maybe, healing.

Simon Parkin is an award-winning writer and journalist. He regularly contributes to The New Yorker, The Guardian and many others, especially writing on video games, the people who make them and the stories around them.

Photo credits: Images of Brenda Romero and her family provided by her. Wizardry screenshot via MobyGames. TedX photo from Romero's November 2011 talk Games for Understanding. Lead illustration by Jim Cooke.

A small tornado just struck the southwestern suburbs of Indianapolis, and one gentleman took the opportunity to steal a 57-year-old photo of a twister and claim he just took it. Everyone else who also has the Google machine caught him immediately.

He has since deleted the picture and all of his subsequent Tweets telling gullible news organizations that he did, indeed, take the photo. But as with pictures taken in 1957, screenshots live forever.

I'm embarrassed to use Twitter sometimes. https://t.co/AlvV0gkQzJ pic.twitter.com/3Os1DBBlf0

— Ian Livingston (@islivingston) June 24, 2014

The picture in question shows an F5 tornado in Fargo, North Dakota on June 20, 1957. The grainy black-and-white nature of the photo combined with the fact that the storm was not capable of producing such a large twister tipped off most people pretty quickly.http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndsu-un...

Photographic hoaxes are as old as photos themselves, and every weather event brings about its fair share of fakes. Unfortunately for the people who try to pass them off as real, the ability to bust someone's bull is growing just as rapidly as people's ability to create it.

[Screenshot via Twitter]

Over at his website, Bill James has a fun feature called "Hey Bill," where he answers questions from readers. Sometimes these have to do with esoteric baseball topics and sometimes they have to do with other things, such as the ongoing debate over James's idea to fundamentally change the structure of the American economy.

It started with a correspondent asking James—who's always been a bit slippery about his politics, but seems generally to be what used to be called a Perot voter, once claimed to have been a Mike Huckabee supporter, and is certainly not a bleeding heart—how he'd solve the problem of outrageous executive pay. James's solution, it turns, is straightforward:

I suppose it is quasi-socialist of me, but I do favor a "10 to 1" law stating that no company may pay any employee more than ten times as much as it pays any other employee, on a full-time basis. Enforceable by lawsuit: If your company pays anyone else ten times more than they pay you, you can bring suit against the company AND against the person who is excessively compensated.

James, you'll note, isn't calling for a maximum income or anything like that. He's simply suggesting the implementation of a rule governing the practices of private companies. There are many such rules, because the right of private actors to do what they'd like has to be weighed against the consequences for the public. This is why companies can't form monopolies or fire people for being black.

As you might expect, James's readers have been raising various objections. While much of the discussion is behind a paywall—this would be a good time to mention that a subscription to James's site is worthwhile and inexpensive!—here are a few highlights.

One reader invoked "the law of intended consequences" to explain that James's proposal would dry up the supply of shitty jobs, because an executive whose company was paying people badly would be able to make only 10 times what the badly paid people were making. James's reply, in part:

There is not and never will be any shortage of scutwork jobs. The economy is drowning in scutwork jobs.

Another reader suggested that this law would just lead to prosperity for consultants offering ways to get around it. "When you try to go against the free market," he wrote, "you make it worse. If Karl Marx couldn't figure it, nobody can!" James replied with an extended analogy involving the prohibition of brass knuckles as an answer to the problem of street violence.

No matter what law is proposed, someone will come up with ways to evade the law; that's an argument against any and every law, therefore not a reasonable argument against this particular law. The real question is, would the law help? There are companies that pay their CEOs $300 million a year. Do you really think a company can easily evade a law of this nature by paying everybody they want to keep $30 million a year and contracting out everything else? No company could survive operating in that way, because nobody actually has a value of $300 million a year; the people being paid $300 million a year are merely exploiting power relationships within the company to take advantage of the labor of others...

Another reader, following on, chastised James for stating that nobody is worth $300 million a year. What about the great heroes of capitalism—the innovators? he wanted to know. Surely someone who cures cancer is worth $300 million. James's reply here is worth quoting in full.

If you discovered a cure for cancers in one year, the executive who runs your research company would make far more money from the discovery than you would. How do you feel about that? People who work for large companies, many large companies, not all, but people who work for these companies that have sold out to superstar executives... those people know very well that if they do something important from which the company makes a lot of money, the country club set will steal the profits and pay them off with a pittance. This is the reality of the current system. It DISCOURAGES innovation, it discourages creativity, it discourages hard work, on the theory that this is merely a free enterprise system at work. It is not a free enterprise system at work at all; it is a travesty of a free enterprise system. 120 years ago, companies built monopolies to control markets, and claimed that this was merely free enterprise at work. It wasn't, of course; monopolies are not the free operation of the market, they are the destruction of the market, the blockage of the market. I believe in free enterprise, I believe in capitalism, and I believe in Milton Friedman, but this is NOT capitalism and it is not free enterprise; it is organized theft.

Stating that our present economic system is an arbitrary arrangement organized largely around the principle that powerful people should be able to extract a lot of money from society irritated various readers. This led to good things like James lighting one reader's straw man on fire ...

As many of you have pointed out, there are manifest dangers inherent in trying to regulate income. I'm not trying to regulate income; I'm trying to prohibit the Country Club set from stealing the labor of working people. Also, didn't you promise to stop e-mailing me about this?

... and responding as follows to another who suggested that executives are just working people like anyone else:

No, they aren't. People being paid a million dollars a year are not "working" people... executives who are paid a million dollars a year to run hospitals are not "working people"; they are common thieves. All of them. The fact that there is no law prohibiting what they are doing is a mere oversight.

It should be noted that James is less advocating for a specific law than against a kind of greed that has clear, harmful effects on society and which isn't illegal mainly because acting on it was, until fairly recently, so strongly against prevailing norms. Still, this is where we are, America. It's down to Bill James to explain that the sort of wanton greed that leads to a CEO making more than a thousand times an average salary isn't just wrong, but something other than an expression of pure market imperatives; that capitalism is a set of arbitrary rules that can and should be adjusted if they're not working for the benefit of the public; and that a principal function of government is to interfere in markets for the public good.

Among the first and most necessary functions of government is to regulate markets—"Markets" in a primitive sense, meaning to regulate the currency, to make sure that people who are operating grocery stores and bakeries are honest, to make sure that goods and services which are sold are safe, but also "markets" of a more complex nature, like stock markets. In the late 19th century there were horrible, bloody conflicts between labor, on the one hand, and very wealthy businessmen, on the other hand, who were trying to establish monopolies and trying to prevent the development of unions. The government had to step in, sort out the conflicts and say, "OK, you can have THIS, labor movement, but you can't have THAT, and you can have THIS right, business, but you can't have THAT, and, by the way, no monopolies." Despite the many and obvious faults of government in that era, they (government) did that well; they sorted out who had which rights, established order, and set the markets to running. This is, if not the FIRST function of government, among the first.

Bill James for Senate.

[Bill James Online]

Photo via Getty

Today the Congressional Gold Medal — "Congress' highest expression of national appreciation for distinguished achievements" — was posthumously awarded to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Here are John Boehner, Harry Reid, and the gang showing their enthusiastic appreciation during the ceremony:

That's Sen. Carl Levin on the left with a perfect long sigh/eyeroll combo. Levin, Boehner, Reid, Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi were tasked with holding hands and singing along to "We Shall Overcome."

To be fair, they're all tired from lunch, and this is the first time in years any of them has touched another human being.

Adam Kuhn, chief of staff to Republican Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers, resigned today after his former porn star ex-girlfriend tweeted "at least one photo of Kuhn's penis" to Stivers' Twitter account, Politico reports.

Jennifer Roubenes Allbaugh, who worked under the name Ruby, told Politico she tweeted the photos "to teach the pompous asshole a lesson." Sounds reasonable!

"I hate you, AJK, you selfish pompous a—hole," Allbaugh tweeted on June 21. Kuhn's full name is Adam Joshua Kuhn.

Allbaugh added: "Now we're even."

In a direct message on Twitter to this reporter, Allbaugh said she "just wanted to teach the pompous a——— a lesson." Allbaugh called herself "a disgruntled former girlfriend."

"I was trying to make him hate me, I guess," she added, although Allbaugh later said she was in love with Kuhn and her own husband at the same time.

Allbaugh's Twitter account, which identified her as "The Pornstar Pudnit," has since been deleted. A dick pic-less but still very NSFW cache of photos is still available here. (That's her above.)

It seems a little unfair that Kuhn would be asked to resign, assuming he didn't leave under his own will. Besides the alleged rectal pomposity, and a little light infidelity — Allbaugh is married; Kuhn is not — what exactly did he do wrong here? Private, consensual dick pics may happen during a relationship between two adults! And it's not like he sent them to his boss.

Stivers' spokeswoman Courtney Whetstone told Politico the office accepted Kuhn's resignation, and that it "is not commenting on his personal life."

[Photo via Twitter]

Today, a White House intern fainted on LIVE C-SPAN on her first day of work. It’s only up from here.

Video below:

[Politico]

Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose is quickly racking up enemies in Portland. After infuriating thousands of residents over his planned demolition of a historic home, the Digg founder offered to sell the property back to the original owners for $1.375 million in cash. A group of neighbors scrounged together the funds and accepted Rose's offer, but he's leveling the landmark house anyway.

According to The Oregonian:

[Will Aitchison, spokesman for the neighborhood coalition,] clearly expected the offer would allow Rose — who has also dealt with protests outside his home in San Francisco — a graceful exit from Willamette Heights. Clearly stung by the petition drive, the Roses early offered to sell the house back to the former owners, Jim Draudt and Ann Witsil, if they were given an additional $75,000, presumably to cover the cost of the designs for the new 5,900-square-foot palazzo, the "Deku Tree Retreat."

But Rose never responded to the neighbors' offer and demolition trucks now sit outside the 122-year-old home. When the contractors asked about the neighbor's buyback offer, they were given the go-ahead from Rose to begin the tear-down:

"The contractor gets on the phone with Kevin Rose," Aitchison said. "The description from the contractor was, 'He told me to proceed with the demolition.'"

The neighbor who offered to re-buy the house fears this is an ego-driven move by Rose, telling The Oregonian "I'm thinking he has his ego up a little bit and doesn't want to back off."

Previously Rose told his petitioning neighbors that "the house simply has too many open issues and repairs that need to be done" and was beyond salvage. However, preservationists dispute that claim. They point to plans for his new retreat home, claiming it proves he always intended on starting from scratch.

Neighbors are now threatening to setup roadblocks in hopes of stalling the demolition process. But Rose has clearly gotten more aggressive about crowd-control since his days trying to relate to protesters in San Francisco: The first order of business is erecting a "huge fence" around his new property to keep his neighbors away.

UPDATE: Rose has backed off his previous decision to snub the buyback offer. He just tweeted he will "preserve the house" and released this statement:

Darya and I are happy to announce that we've come to an agreement with a long-time resident of Willamette Heights to sell 1627 NW 32nd Ave. The new buyer's intention is not to demolish the house, but rather restore and maintain it. While this agreement isn't fully finalized, we are hoping we can wrap things up quickly.

Over the last few days we've watched as comments and emotions flared on both sides of the issue. Some folks arguing for homeowner rights, others for the preservation of old homes. We've read all of this, along with your emails, and took it all to heart.

We decided on Portland not as an investment property, or vacation spot, but as a place we hope to one day call home, a place to raise our family. We love so much about your beautiful city, and your strong community bond is high up on that list. While we could have legally put our heads down and proceeded forward, that's not the type of relationship we want with our neighbors and our new city friends.

[Photo: James Berry]

If you hadn't already, it's time to say goodbye to "Bow Wow," just like we once said goodbye to "Lil Bow Wow." Bow Wow is now just Shad Moss. Update your iPhone contacts accordingly.

The rapper, actor, one-time Ciara boyfriend and current host of 106 & Park announced on Instagram yesterday that he's dropping the big boy version of his cutesy rap moniker in favor of his government name.

ANNOUNCEMENT: After BET awards i will no longer go by Bow Wow! Im going by my real name "Shad Moss" we made alot of history as bow wow. Now its time for the next chapter and challenge. Bow wow does not fit who i am today. Ima father, business man, TV host, Actor, and rapper! Time for MR Moss to take over!

Let's remember some of Bow Wow's best post-Lil Bow Wow moments.

Also, this fake T-Pain song that nobody liked but me.

Now, let us accept the Shad Moss Era.

[image via Getty]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is reportedly ensnared in another bridge-related investigation, this time for the $1.8 billion funding to repair the Pulaski Skyway, which connects Newark and Jersey City. According to the New York Times, a probe launched by the Manhattan district attorney's office and the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Christie's administration misled bond holders to obtain the money for the project. Ironically, this new bridge investigation was spun-off from the ongoing investigation into Bridgegate. http://gawker.com/chris-christie...

The potential securities law violations, writes the Times, stem from 2010 and 2011 documents wherein Christie's office demands the Port Authority pay for repairs to the Pulaski Skyway—namely using money originally earmarked for a new Hudson River tunnel, a project that was cancelled. But according to the Times, that money couldn't be used for the project:

Again and again, Port Authority lawyers warned against the move: The Pulaski Skyway, they noted, is owned and operated by the state, putting it outside the agency's purview, according to dozens of memos and emails reviewed by investigators and obtained by The New York Times.

But the Christie administration relentlessly lobbied to use the money for the Skyway, with Mr. Christie announcing publicly that the state planned to rely on Port Authority funds even before an agreement was reached. Eventually, the authority justified the Skyway repairs by casting the bridge as an access road to the Lincoln Tunnel, even though they are not directly connected.

Though it would appear that the Port Authority and Christie's office were able to use creative, maybe even deceptive, naming to use the money anyway, possibly to their detriment:

In bond documents describing the Skyway reconstruction and other repairs, the Port Authority has called the projects "Lincoln Tunnel Access Infrastructure Improvements."

The accuracy of this characterization is now a major focus of the investigations, according to several people briefed on the matter. Under a New York State law known as the Martin Act, prosecutors can bring felony charges for intentionally deceiving bond holders, without having to prove any intent to defraud or even establish that any fraud occurred.

http://gawker.com/insider-chris-...

[Image via AP]