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Police Say Mom Filmed As Son Set Himself On Fire

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Police say the mother of a 16-year-old boy stood by with a video camera while her son covered his bare chest in nail polish remover and lit himself on fire to make a "Fire Challenge" Facebook video.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department charged Janie Lachelle Talley, 41, on Aug. 6 for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, after social services were alerted to the viral video.

Police released the following statement regarding the July 29 stunt:

The mother of the victim was present and aware of what her son doing and facilitated the recording.

Talley's son apparently suffered only minor burns to his chest and neck.


Ferguson, Missouri, August 13, 2014

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Nate Silver, Inspired by Ferguson, Tells Idiotic Arrest Story

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Nate Silver, Inspired by Ferguson, Tells Idiotic Arrest Story

Nate Silver, a man frequently hailed as the future of journalism, gave a master class this evening on How Not To React To The News That Doesn't Involve You (Ferguson edition). In short, don't make it an occasion to tell the story about That Time You Were Arrested (as a white man) and the cops were actually nice and let you eat a burrito.

Just... don't do this.

Ferguson Disgrace: Police Fire on Unarmed Crowds, Attack News Trucks

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Ferguson Disgrace: Police Fire on Unarmed Crowds, Attack News Trucks

Today in Ferguson, following the arrest of two journalists police continued their all out assault on the liberties and rights of the town's citizens. Here's the latest update on what we know so far.

On Saturday, police in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed an 18-year-old unarmed man named Michael Brown. Since then, protests have taken place throughout the town, which has a population of around 21,000. For those wondering what was going in Ferguson on Wednesday it might have been hard getting information. Many of the major networks were not airing live coverage of anything. Add to that journalists who were actually trying to report on the scene were being rounded up, blocked from the town or just outright arrested.

Via the I Am Mike Brown livestream KARG Argus Radio, viewers watched as police fired rubber bullets into crowds of unarmed citizens. We watched as police advanced on a group of peaceful demonstrators. I Am Mike Brown livestream reported police were demanding that they turn off their cameras. "Because they don't want witnesses," the reporter said. This definitely echoes the experience of Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly, who was arrested earlier in the day after a SWAT team invaded the McDonald's he was working out of. When he took a photo, an officer demanded to see his ID. Last I checked, taking a photo was not something that required an ID in this coutry. Reilly was then assaulted and arrested, along with Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery.

The scene from I Am Mike Brown's live stream grew incredibly tense. Crowds of people were standing in the street, with their hands above their head. The police began firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. The crowd did not provoke them. The police took the first shots. The police continued firing as the crowd retreated into a residential neighborhood. The police continued firing into the neighborhood without regard for property or personal safety of the residents.

Unfortunately, the I Am Mike Brown livestream has gone in and out over the evening.

Here's more footage of the assault on the crowds:

Ferguson is also a no-fly zone now, which is chilling to say the least. Police were definitely on a mission to shut down news reporting in the city. Police threw tear gas at an Al Jazeera news truck, where reporters were attempting to set up a live feed:




I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that so far, the only ones in this situation who have killed someone are THE FUCKING FERGUSON POLICE DEPARTMENT. This is how they respond when their citizens, their own community, stand up and ask them to answer questions about the shooting of an unarmed teenager. Their response is exactly: "Fuck you, don't you dare question our authority." But with guns and armored vehicles and threats and tear gas instead of words. Goddammit.


Redditors have assembled the latest news from the region; I strongly suggest everyone check it out. This is how the police have responded to questions about their actions so far:

To those who don't understand the importance and power of social media, think about this. Think about who was bringing you the news from Ferguson. News outlets such as MSNBC broadcast live streams from other sources, because they were shut out of the region by police. The police shut down the free press, to hide their actions, like cowards. Citizens, armed with cameras, smartphones and other devices used Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Vine, Instagram and more to show what was going on in their community and hold police accountable the actions they were trying to hide.

As of now, there are no live streams left. This is terrifying.

There was a lot more that happened that I was not able to get to on my deadline. If we have missed anything here, please share in the comments below.

If you see tweets from journalists, witnesses or other victims, please share them here in the replies to this post.

Image via Getty.

Celebrity Hunks Commit Unspeakable Acts on Heartbreakers

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Investigation Discovery's hunk-studded miniseries Heartbreakers premiered last night, with Antonio Sabato Jr. and Christopher Knight battling for Tracey Gold's love in one of the strangest true crime shows my eyes have ever witnessed.

It's like some young fire-starter at ID pitched the idea, "Everyone loves to laugh at crime reenactments. So let's give 'em what they want: some waaay over-the-top crime reenactments in goofy costumes, with iconic throwback hunks playing the killers! It'll be amazing." ('Amazing' said with that particular note of disdain it took on somewhere after 2005.)

And then one of the veteran ID development execs was like "Let me get this straight: you want to make a comedy about real murders?"

"Not a comedy," the fire-starter amends quickly. "We'll be careful about that; no one will be cracking any actual jokes... But it will still be hilarious."

And so we have the sensibility of Heartbreakers, a show that looks like Strangers with Candy and has its tongue firmly in its cheek, yet is portraying the grisly deaths of real people. It's an interesting tension, because to be real we've all been laughing at these kinds of cheesy crime reenactments for years. But the show being this in on that particular joke sort of sours the laughter.

There's a line in Susan Sontag's essay Notes On 'Camp' that maybe sums it up: "One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying." Heartbreakers tries to negotiate being campy without being blatantly insensitive and sort of fails in both respects. The joke became untenable when actual grisly crime scene footage was mixed in with Christopher Knight's Foghorn Leghorn imitation.

Look, it literally hurts not to give a gushingly positive review about any show that involves dreamboats like the cast of Heartbreakers, a roster of legitimate legends:

And credit where credit is due, an army of eagle-eyed thrifters must have crafted these stunning ensembles with such skill and care:

Celebrity Hunks Commit Unspeakable Acts on Heartbreakers

Celebrity Hunks Commit Unspeakable Acts on Heartbreakers

Celebrity Hunks Commit Unspeakable Acts on Heartbreakers

Still, if I or someone I loved was murdered, I don't know if I'd want a narrative of that tragic end involving jokey Growing Pains references. But maybe an irreverent tribute is better than no tribute.

[Videos, images via ID]

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. What are you watching tonight? What are we missing out on? Recommendations and discussions down below.

Lawsuit Claims Google Wrote Down Plan to Steal Idea on Some Post-Its

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Lawsuit Claims Google Wrote Down Plan to Steal Idea on Some Post-Its

Some complaints are a morass of technical jargon and legalese. Others read like the makings of a zany crime-comedy by Steven Soderbergh. One new lawsuit filed against Google for copying the technology to compress video and audio files falls into the latter category, due primarily to allegedly incriminating Post-It notes accidentally handed over to the victim.

Comic potential aside, the claims are far-reaching, alleging that Google used trade secrets to "enhance the streaming and downloading features of virtually all Google services," reports The Recorder. That list includes YouTube, AdSense, Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Chromecast, and many more. The allegations also involve top Google executives, including former sales boss Nikesh Arora and Megan Smith. It will likely provide a fount of schadenfreude for every startup that ever alleged that Google used acquisition talks to pilfer their inventions.

Lawsuit Claims Google Wrote Down Plan to Steal Idea on Some Post-Its


In a press release, the plaintiffs Vedanti System Limited (VSL) and Max Sound noted that they filed two suits against Google. Max Sound acquired the licensing rights to data transmission technology originally owned by VSL Communications. One lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court, is related to trade secrets. The other suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, accuses Google of willful patent infringement. Both complaints are now embedded below.

According to the patent complaint, the problem began in March, 2010 when VSL's CEO met with Arora to discuss "licensing or acquiring" VSL's patented technology for digital video streaming. The filing also says that Smith, then Google's vice president of business development, signed an NDA in order to discuss VSL's technology. And that if VSL's patent portfolio met a certain requirement, Laura Majerus, part of Google's in-house counsel, then Google would "seek to buy the technology or to acquire VSL."

(Arora, who recently left for a plum position at the tech conglomerate SoftBank, was Google's highest-paid executive in 2012, with a compensation package of $51 million.)

The suit says that when negotiations between VSL and Google "stalled" and "terminated," Majerus shipped materials back to VSL pursuant to the NDA. Those materials were allegedly crawling with incriminating Post-It notes. The complaint claims that one Post-It said Google should "try" to destroy email evidence, one that said Google worried its infringement might be "reckless," and one that said Google should consider a "design around" or face litigation:

Lawsuit Claims Google Wrote Down Plan to Steal Idea on Some Post-Its

Lawsuit Claims Google Wrote Down Plan to Steal Idea on Some Post-Its

The returned VSL material, it should be noted, included a working VSL codec for Google to test and analyze, copies of patents and patent applications, and a chart comparing their inventions to existing standards.

When VSL's CEO Alpesh Patel met with Arora in 2010, it was with the understanding that Google's video tech " was in desperate need of improvement." The Recorder reports:

Sure enough, Google in 2010 had begun to amend its preexisting patent applications and to file new applications using VSL's technology, according to the complaint. In 2012, VSL noticed that the video quality of Google's Android operating system and other Google software had significantly improved. In June, VSL staff analyzed Google's publicly available code and discovered it contained VSL trade secrets.

Lawsuit Claims Google Wrote Down Plan to Steal Idea on Some Post-Its

I reached out to Google. A spokesperson said "We've got no comment on the complaint." Welp, in that case, please leave your casting recommendations in the comments.

Complaint against Google for patent infringement


Update: This post has been changed to clarify that the plaintiffs filed two separate lawsuits, both the patent infringement one and the trade secret suit. Sorry for any confusion.

Trade Secret Complaint against Google

To contact the author of this post about these lawsuits or other infringement allegations, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Shutterstock.com]

Ferguson Police Chief: "We Need Everyone to Calm Down"

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Ferguson Police Chief: "We Need Everyone to Calm Down"

At a press conference today, Ferguson, Mo. Police Chief Thomas Jackson addressed the days of violent protests that have roiled in the city and escalated Wednesday evening, when police officers reportedly fired tear gas and rubber bullets on protesters and journalists. "What's happening now is not what any of us want," Jackson said. "We need to get everyone to calm down, bring some peace to this."

Jackson said that he has spoken with leaders from the local NAACP chapter and from the Justice Department on how to move forward with future protests.

"We want everybody to be able to protest, we know they're going to protest, we want to facilitate their ability to protest—because it's a constitutional right—so we're working with these leaders to try and put this together," he said.

When asked about officers' militarized approach to policing protesters, Jackson told reporters, "There is gunfire, there is firebombs being thrown at the police. I understand that what it looks like—is not good." He went on, saying, "The whole situation is not good at this point. That's why there's several meetings going on right now to evaluate tactics, how we approach this."


http://gawker.com/tear-gas-grenades-and-arrests-on-fourth-night-of-unre-1621469863

Jackson called on protesters to "stop the violence" and that police "don't want to have any violence" on their part. "We want this to be peaceful," he said.

"It's going to be a long process," Jackson said. "We need to have everybody to tone it down."

Reports from Wednesday night's protest have said that police initiated violence with some protesters. Jackson did not directly respond to a reporter's request for an explanation or a rebuttal.

"We have a basic obligation to allow people to get to their homes and businesses and to drive up and down the roadways," he said.

And despite multiple reports from the scene last night, Jackson seemingly denied that any of the protesters (or journalists) were harmed. "We can only have a part of town be closed down for so long before we have to open it back up, without physically hurting anybody. And that's why we're using these less lethal tactics," he said.

But after being asked whether he felt satisfied with the police response to protests, he attempted to walk back his answers.

"What I'm satisfied with is that we haven't hurt anybody—nobody's got injured or killed. One police officer did get hit with a brick and actually broke his ankle and one other officer was injured," Jackson said. "But in general, I mean, with the chaos that's going on right now, I'm at least happy nobody's gotten seriously injured."


http://gawker.com/watch-conflicting-statements-about-mike-browns-murder-p-1621414491

Two journalists, the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post's Ryan J. Reilly were arrested by police last night; an Al Jazeera crew was hit with a tear gas can and rubber bullets in an area away from protesters. When asked to explain why those journalists were arrested and attacked, Jackson replied, "I don't know."

"Why is the media becoming a target?" one reporter asked.

"The media's not a target," Jackson answered. http://gawker.com/president-obama-nows-the-time-for-peace-and-calm-in-1621635608

Jackson closed the press conference by describing the situation in Ferguson as "a powderkeg," saying, "That's why we're going to try to facilitate the protest tonight and we hope that the protesters will recognize that we are trying to facilitate, to help everybody bring this down—bring all the tensions down."

[Screengrab via NBC News]

Farrah Abraham Now Working as a Stripper for "Research"

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Farrah Abraham Now Working as a Stripper for "Research"

Backdoor Teen Mom Farrah Abraham is reportedly working as a dancer at an Austin, Tex. strip club, but she swears it's not what it looks like. She took the gig for "research" purposes, "in the same way Jennifer Aniston researched her role as a stripper."

Except it's only kind of the same, because while Aniston was doing research for a major motion picture, Farrah's experience at Palazio Gentlemen's Club is preparing her for ... something. It's not entirely clear what.

"It's how I get the information to write my books and do my movies," she told E! News. "Unfortunately, I'm not free to talk about what those future projects may be. But I'm interested in hearing all the women's stories. And while I'm doing it, I'm getting paid. I'm getting paid to play a role and get informed."

A source at the club told E! that Farrah Superstar has been getting informed "on all three stages, the main stage and two side stages," and she's not half bad at it.

"She was definitely not shy and looked like she knew what she was doing," E!'s source said. "She was wearing a nude thong and bejeweled bra. She wasn't awkward at all and was actually quite good."

In the non-stripping part of Abraham's career, she's playing "an evangelical do-gooder" in the slasher flick Axeman 2: Overkill. It's definitely the kind of role that requires extensive, lucrative research at a strip club.

[H/T The Blemish, Photo: Getty Images]


What Happens To Golf After Tiger?

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What Happens To Golf After Tiger?

By the time Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy won the 96th PGA Championship on Sunday, his second major in as many months and fourth overall, the man whose mantle he seems poised to assume had long since left the property. In 36 holes at Valhalla Golf Club, near Louisville, an ailing Tiger Woods scarcely threatened par, much less the leaders, missing the cut by five strokes. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of his disastrous performance was that few would have expected anything more out of him.

As Woods's layoffs and losses pile up, each new start takes on the sense of an ending. He missed the Masters in April and the U.S. Open in June following a microdiscectomy for a pinched nerve in his back, and the six years since his last major championship victory have also seen him sidelined for spans of eight months (left knee, June 2008-February 2009); four months (tabloid scandal, December 2009-April 2010); and three months (left knee, May-August 2011). Yesterday, in an announcement posted on his website, Woods removed himself from contention for a Ryder Cup captain's pick, reporting that he will not to return to competition until his own World Challenge tournament in early December.

It's sad to write, but so far in 2014 the greatest golfer of his generation has entered eight events, finished four, and placed no higher than a tie for 25th. We always knew, I suppose, that Woods's dominant career would not go on forever, but the end of his reign atop the sport has never seemed so imminent.

What was Tigermania, anyway? It was, at the start, just another word—the name bestowed on a media frenzy that briefly overtook the Thai press in February 1997. Two months before his historic Masters victory inaugurated an Age of Tiger that only now is approaching its close, Woods traveled to Thailand, his mother's birthplace, for the Asian Honda Classic. "Five national television channels covered his midnight arrival live," according to the Agence France-Presse, "and newspapers gave him front-page treatment with banner headlines proclaiming 'Celebrated Homecoming.' Not even President Bill Clinton and Queen Elizabeth II, who carried out state visits last year, got that kind of coverage." He received a royal decoration and a $480,000 appearance fee. Someone in the government even floated the idea of offering him Thai citizenship.

But in the years since, years that correspond closely with my own life as a fan, "Tigermania" has come to encompass a set of assumptions about Woods, sports, and stardom that goes beyond the size of his galleries or the quality of his play. The received wisdom has it that Woods is not only a transcendent figure but also a transformative one, an athlete whose otherworldly talents opened golf to the masses, and thus brought about a seismic shift in the sport.

Transcendent and transformative are not synonyms, however. Indeed, conversations with golfing insiders and a closer look at data related to television ratings, tournament purses, participation, and equipment sales reveal a more complicated picture of Tigermania's causes and consequences. Woods's singular brilliance was not the sole factor in professional golf's lucrative boom of the past two decades, nor has his iconic presence benefitted all sectors of the sport equally. The modest reality of Woods's influence hardly lives up to the mythos that surrounds him, and as golf stands on the cusp of a future after Tiger, the time has come to reckon with the difference.


In the beginning, Tiger said, "Hello, world," and Nike saw that it was good. Fresh off winning his third consecutive U.S. Amateur title, in an instant-classic 38-hole final, Woods announced his decision to turn professional at the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open with words that seemed charmingly wide-eyed. But when his grinning, halting, "Well, I guess 'Hello, world,' huh?" became the biographical highlight reel of Nike's "Hello World" ad campaign, which debuted the following day, Woods proved himself a master of the media as well as of the links. Nike, which signed Woods to a $40-million, five-year contract that summer, carefully deployed Tiger's "transformative" brand from the first—"There are still golf courses in the U.S. I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin," the television spot noted—and his father, Earl, sold this "Chosen One" narrative to anyone willing to buy it: "Tiger will do more than any other man in history," the elder Woods told Sports Illustrated in 1996, "to change the course of humanity." (Nike declined a request for comment.)

Nike's second Woods campaign, developed by the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, similarly framed him as the standard bearer for a new generation of golfers (and, by extension, consumers), set to fuel participation and profit for decades to come. "I Am Tiger Woods" resembled nothing so closely as a music video, featuring a racially and ethnically diverse series of boys and girls on city streets and ragged municipal courses coolly reciting the titular tagline. The company's star endorser, the ads implied, would be an entree into untapped markets and progressive social change. But rather than revive a moribund, lily-white sport, as the narrative shaped by Nike and promulgated in the media might suggest, Woods's turn as golf's leading man seems to have had less influence on participation than the prosperity of the late Clinton era. In fact, according to data reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, it was another country club pursuit with American stars that witnessed the more significant surge in popularity during the early years of "Tigermania." Between 1995 and 2000—at the height of the rivalry between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, and concurrent with the professional debut of the Williams sisters—the number of recreational tennis players increased 28.5%, from nearly 18 million to nearly 23 million, while the number of recreational golfers increased only seven percent, from 23.7 million to 25.4 million. Recreational golf's growth after Tiger burst onto the scene was not especially remarkable even by the sport's own standards. Compared with the three-percent increase in participation between 1990 and 1995, the actual "Tiger effect" fell short of the rapturous expectations: Woods was a prodigy, not a prophet.

Greg Nathan, Senior Vice President of the National Golf Foundation, a nonprofit trade association that delivers market research to more than 4,000 member courses, clubs, and businesses, agrees with this assessment of Woods's contribution to amateur participation.

"Tiger Woods' effect on recreational golf has been marginal," Nathan wrote in an email. "People play golf because they like the activity, not because Tiger is an all-time great golfer, a compelling personality and global sports icon."

Rand Jerris, Managing Director of Public Affairs for the United States Golf Association, cautions that participation data is a blunt instrument for assessing the state of the sport, stressing the need to focus instead on cost, time, access to the game, and environmental sustainability in order to make the golf product as consumer-friendly as possible.

"It is a much more complicated... system than simply focusing on participation," Jerris said. "Committed golfers are more excited about golf, they're actually playing more golf, than they ever have in the past."

Of course, from the time he first slipped on the green jacket in 1997, to the peak of his dominance in 2000-2001—a period in which he won four consecutive major championships, the so-called " Tiger Slam"—to the saga of his last major triumph, at the 2008 U.S. Open, Woods did in fact bring significant attention to the sport.

"It's not an original idea on my part, but I wholeheartedly agree with this: golf had always been a niche sport, golf had never been a mainstream sport, and he made it a mainstream sport," Jason Sobel, Senior Writer for GolfChannel.com, told me. "There have been some things in the Tiger Woods era that have happened, with regards to popularity of the game and drawing in the masses, that may never happen again."

When examined closely, though, the relationship between popularity and participation, which remains one of the top-line metrics tracked by the sport's leading organizations despite Jerris's counsel, seems to depend mainly on broader economic indicators. The 54% jump in golf equipment sales between 1990 and 2001, for example, when revenues approached four billion dollars, mirrored the 46.5% increase in consumer expenditures on all sporting goods products during the same period, according to Census Bureau data. Even if we attribute the entirety of the difference to "Tigermania," Woods's impact on the recreational game appears, if not insubstantial, far less important than it has often been made out to be.


The theoretical prospect of a sudden collapse in the sport's appeal, along with a string of disappointing reports on course closures, corporate earnings, and participation declines, has led to recent predictions of "the coming Tiger crash." The fact is, though, that recreational golf has already returned to Earth from the stratosphere of the early 2000s. In 2005, which World Golf Foundation CEO Steve Mona described as the "high water mark," 30 million golfers played nearly 500 million rounds and spent approximately $5.2 billion on golf equipment and apparel. By 2011, 25.7 million golfers (-14%) played 463.1 million rounds (-7%) and spent $5.1 billion.

"Golf participation has stabilized at 25 million after a period of erosion exaggerated by the recession," Nathan wrote in a follow-up email critical of the media's "pendulum of negativity" with regard to golf. "The overwhelming majority of those participants are solidly committed and will be retained... People who are committed to golf don't just quit the game." He added that the sport must become "more approachable, more inviting, less stuffy, and more fun" in order to attract the 25 million non-golfers who describe themselves as "very" or "somewhat" interested in playing golf.

What Happens To Golf After Tiger?

Tiger Woods, 2006.


Economics are important, and upswings or downturns in three key sectors— employment, home values, and investment portfolios—are an indicator of golf's success, Mona told me. In this, he echoed the USGA's Jerris, who emphasized that the sport's fortunes have fluctuated with the broader economy since the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression.

"Here's what we know from 100 years of data about golf," he said. "The only real metric that matters in determining participation in the game is household income."

While Jerris, Mona, and Ted Bishop, president of the PGA of America, all described golf's exclusivity as a "misperception"—80% of golf courses in the United States are accessible to the public, and the median green fee is an affordable $26—income, and therefore class status, is a workable proxy if you're trying to determine whether golf appeals to someone. This may explain why the sport's rarefied image remains so tenacious, even among regular players.

According to one source, a TaylorMade employee familiar with HackGolf—an online platform launched this year by the equipment manufacturer and the PGA of America, which invites the public to comment on golf's frustrations and offer possible solutions—70 to 75% of the site's 2,500 users identify as avid golfers. Of these, one of the most frequent complaints is that golf is elitist and expensive. (Among users who identify as non-golfers, the intimidation factor—learning the swing, the rules, the etiquette, and the proper apparel—constitutes the most significant hurdle.) Despite predictions that Woods was poised to "democratize" the sport, the past two decades have witnessed little change in golf's negative associations, as the governing ranks roll out yet another fleet of initiatives designed to solve the problem.

"There's a disconnect," Sobel noted, between recreational golf's "niche" status and professional golf's "mainstream" popularity.

"With Tiger Woods sidelined for now, I think we're seeing more a correction to the norm," he said. "If we lose a few percentage points of people who play golf, or lose a few courses that close each year... First of all, that's not losing everything, hardly. There's always going to be an industry there. Secondly, I just don't see how it correlates with watching golf on the most elite level. They're not one and the same."

The PGA of America's Ted Bishop concurs.

"You've got two types of golf in this country: you've got golf at the elite level, and you've got golf at the recreational level," he said. "There's certainly a lot of overlap between the two, but there's a lot of people who watch golf at the elite level that don't play golf, unfortunately."


In retrospect, predictions of a revolution in the sport's recreational ranks, orchestrated by Nike's stylish ad campaigns and echoed in reports like the Philadelphia Inquirer's, from 1997— "Tigermania: Is Golf Prepared for This Flood? Already, An Influx of New Faces Has Begun"—seem hasty at best.

Following Nike's lead, golf industry leaders and the sport's governing bodies vigorously pursued new participants with programs designed to expand the game among underrepresented demographics, including youth, people of color, and women. In a sport which held one of its premier men's events, the PGA Championship, at Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., as recently as 1990—where, founder Hall Thompson told the city's Post-Herald newspaper that summer, "We don't discriminate in every other area except blacks"—the commitment to minority outreach that accompanied Woods's stardom amounted to a substantial improvement. (After the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned to picket the tournament and corporate sponsors threatened to withdraw more than $2 million in television advertising, the club admitted local black businessman Louis Willie, Jr. as an honorary member.)

Among the initiatives that cite diversity as a central piece of golf's success is The First Tee, founded in 1997 to introduce kids and teens to the sport by providing instruction, golf course access, and youth development. Since then, according to PGA Tour executive vice president of communications Ty Votaw, The First Tee has served more than 5 million young people, and the Tour has initiated a $100 million campaign to increase that number to 15 million total by 2017. However, while 49% of participants in The First Tee are from minority groups, the World Golf Foundation's Steve Mona said that broader measures of minority participation have yet to reflect this fact.

"I firmly believe that you will begin to see the results of The First Tee manifest themselves," Mona told me. "We haven't seen it, and, again, income is the biggest indication of participation in golf, more than ethnicity and gender... We want golf to look like America looks. Are we there? No, we're not. Are we making strides to get there? Yes, we are."

Edward S. Wanambwa, senior editor of African American Golfer's Digest, believes that diversity efforts have fallen short when it comes to disrupting golf's traditional barriers to entry.

"To a certain level, it's still a good ol' boy sport, and women specifically have been left on the fringe," Wanambwa told me. "African Americans probably play more than people realize, but they're playing at the muni, at the public golf course. There's a certain mindset in the powers that be in golf that, 'We want to keep a certain person away from the golf course. We want to keep that pedigree.' I think that the governing bodies could do more to grow the game."

What Happens To Golf After Tiger?

A youngster learns from Jon Yarwood, 2010


Symbolically at least, Woods's unique background actually has helped attract interest from those too often "left on the fringe" of the sport, according to Wanambwa.

"I go out to the golf course, and I see black golfers with all Nike clubs, Tiger Woods hats," he noted. "He's still a source of pride, he's still a source of hope, because he's the only thing that we've had."

But with regard to quantitative indicators, Woods's impact on minority participation in golf, even during the relatively prosperous years when "Tigermania" ostensibly flourished, was no more impressive than his impact on overall participation. NGF statistics from 1997, as reported by USA Today, reveal that African Americans then comprised approximately three percent of the total golfing population, with Asian Americans an additional three percent. By 2003, when the Diversity Task Force of Golf 20/20, an industry growth initiative, commissioned the NGF to compile another study of minority golf participation, African Americans constituted six percent of the total and Asian Americans four percent. (Latinos, unmentioned in the 1997 data cited by USA Today, made up between four and five percent of the total golfing population in 2003.) Far from "transformative," Woods's effect on participation among those most often excluded from golf has been, at best, middling—in part, Wanambwa suggested, because Woods has long chosen the safety of a micromanaged public image over the risks of engaging tough questions about the structural economic and racial factors that continue to limit diversity in the sport.

"Tiger, to me, doesn't identify himself as an African American," he said. "I'm not sure whether it was a Nike thing, when he came out with the term 'Cablinasian' [Woods's label for his mixed racial/ethnic background]. It's the fact that Tiger doesn't embrace it. He's not going to take a stand on any controversial issue that faces African Americans ... I feel that he's fallen short of being able to throw the rope back over the fence and pull in another minority golfer."

Indeed, from the outset, the soaring poetry of "Hello, World" and "I Am Tiger Woods" sat uncomfortably alongside the utilitarian prose of the profit motive. Presentations on "Marketing to the Emerging Fan Base" and "The Diversity Task Force" given at Golf 20/20 annual conferences in 2002 and 2003, respectively, described untapped minority interest in the game in terms of black "spending power" and "brand loyal" Hispanics, of "quantifying the opportunity" presented by the "best customer upside," of "marketing strategies," "diversity targets," and "managed growth."

"Payback," as the Diversity Task Force summarized its findings, "will be significant."

A 2010 study by the National Golf Foundation, the most recent data available, suggests otherwise, counting just 1.4 million African American (5%), 1.1 million Asian American (4%), and 3.2 million Hispanic American golfers (12%), or 5.7 million total (21%), among an overall golfing population of 27.1 million. (According to NGF Dashboard, "comparisons between the 2010 study and the 2003 study are invalid" because of methodological differences, but the 2003 study was explicitly designed "to establish rates and baselines" by which diversity initiatives could be measured.) Whether or not you consider Woods duty-bound to do more for minorities in golf, whether or not you are unsettled by the executive director of The First Tee, the U.S. regional marketing manager of Nike Golf, and several other prominent figures in the game attaching their names to a PowerPoint in which "diversity" is largely a matter of dollars and cents, the fact remains that golf has failed to fulfill the democratizing promise of "Tigermania" as imagined in the late 1990s.

"You really haven't seen any increase in diversity participation since [Woods] came to the forefront, which is really disconcerting," the PGA of America's Ted Bishop said.

Far removed from the halcyon days of Earl Woods's prediction that his son would "do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity," Nike's approach to marketing Tiger has narrowed to the space between his ears. With total minority participation in golf seemingly stalled, the bold promise that we all might be Tiger Woods appears scarcely more credible than one of Earl's messianic visions. A flaw in the data, a missed opportunity, a consequence of combining grassroots development efforts with corporate newspeak, or all of the above: The "transformative" moment, such as it was, may well have passed, and we're reduced to wondering if even Tiger Woods can be Tiger Woods. Upon his return from a four-month post-scandal layoff in 2010, Nike released a 33-second black-and-white spot apparently designed to resuscitate his image through repentance. As the famed golfer stares into the camera, his stoic, burdened face suggesting the passage of time more forcefully than any victory montage, Earl, who died in 2006, speaks as if from beyond the grave. "I want to find out what your thinking was. I want to find out what your feelings are," he intones. "Did you learn anything?"


When asked why he robbed banks, Depression-era criminal "Slick Willie" Sutton famously replied, "Because that's where the money is." In golf, the closest equivalent to a vault filled with cash is a Tiger Woods lead on Masters Sunday. All 10 of the highest-rated final round telecasts in golf's major championships since 1977 have occurred at The Masters, and of these Woods was the winner in the top two: his 12-stroke victory in 1997 attracted fully 14.1% of all households with a television in the United States, and his completion of the Tiger Slam in 2001 drew 13%. (He finished tied for fourth, fifth, and tied for sixth in three of the others.) In truth, then, what we really mean by the term "Tigermania" is not an influx of golfers but an infusion of money. For the networks, the sport's leading organizations, and for the infinitesimal fraction of players who succeed at the professional game's highest levels, the confluence of Woods's star power with the expanding economic footprint of sports television has brought a massive financial windfall—one that appears poised to outlast the presence of Tiger himself.

Though parsing the niceties of Nielsen ratings is more complicated than it may appear, viewership numbers bear out the notion that Woods is the foremost driver of interest in golf on television. Take the mean number of Saturday and Sunday viewers of weekend Masters telecasts since 1977, compiled from Nielsen data by the website TV by the Numbers. In the 14 years before Woods's 1995 debut (1981-1994), CBS' coverage averaged 9.4 million viewers; in the 14 years after (1995-2008), Woods's non-victories averaged 10.6 million; Woods's four wins averaged 13.5 million. Similarly, his U.S. Open win in 2000, in which he led by one, six, 10, and 15 strokes after each round, drew a four-day average of 8.24 million viewers, higher than any playing of the tournament since 1987. Nor is the "Tiger Effect" limited to the majors. When Nielsen compared weekend ratings from Woods' 2007 tournament appearances to the same tournaments in 2008, while Woods recovered from season-ending knee surgery, the average decline in millions of viewers was 46.8%.

When Woods plays, and especially when he's in contention, he clearly provides a significant boost to golf's TV ratings. Even so, it's easy to overstate his purportedly enormous individual importance—and the purportedly dismal consequences of his absence—by focusing on year-to-year comparisons rather than long-term trends. Viewership of golf's marquee tournaments has decreased less, over time, than analogous events in other sports. For example, the weekend average of 8.6 million viewers for this year's Masters, the lowest since 1993, constituted a seemingly precipitous 54% decline from the tournament's 1997 peak. But the declines from most-watched to least-watched World Series (1995, 2012 —56%), NBA Finals (1998, 2007 — 68%), and Stanley Cup Finals (1997, 2007 — 72%) in roughly the same period are even worse. (Only the Super Bowl, a media juggernaut of almost nonsensical proportions, appears immune to the vagaries of competition.)

What Happens To Golf After Tiger?

Tiger Woods wins the Masters, 1997


More importantly, the overall downward trend in television viewership among golf, baseball, basketball, and hockey since the late 1990s suggests that both celebrations of "Tigermania" and lamentations of its demise are shortsighted. Remember, Woods came to prominence in a cultural landscape that now seems prehistoric. In 1997, E.R. was the top show in primetime, weekday circulation of the printed New York Times was 1.1 million (it's now less than 700,000), and just 36% percent of adults used the Internet. In that less fractured media context, an athlete of such skill and charisma as Woods or Michael Jordan might attract what could sincerely be called "mass appeal," but the phenomenon of the "transcendent" sports figure, much less the "transformative" one, has since become increasingly rare. It is not to deny Woods's greatness to say that his star power was a necessary but insufficient condition for "Tigermania" to take hold. As much as he made the boom in golf on television, the boom in golf on television made him.

Though the sport is unlikely ever to replicate the circumstances that turned Woods's finest hours into ratings bonanzas, GolfChannel.com's Jason Sobel notes that golf, which has endured periodic transitions between major figures since the days of Bobby Jones, may already be in the process of discovering Woods's successor.

"You may be seeing the beginning of the next great player in the game, and you just don't know it yet," he said, using the example of Hideki Matsuyama, the 22-year-old Japanese who won The Memorial Tournament in May. "It takes time to grow superstars in the game... It doesn't matter how the Tour markets its players. Sure, they can make the younger players look hip and cool, but what it really comes down to is winning."

The PGA Tour's Ty Votaw agrees that men's professional golf will discover the next household name, though no one is likely to match Woods's appeal.

"Every ten to fifteen years, a new face emerges on the same basis that captures the imagination of the public to varying degrees," Votaw said. "No one's done it more than Tiger, admittedly."

Ratings, which are key to the television rights contracts negotiated periodically by the networks, the PGA Tour, and each of the four major championships, translate into earnings—and the Tiger years have been a time of plenty. From a $300 million, four-year agreement before 1997, PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem landed a $2.95 billion contract for 2007-2012, and the current nine-year deal is reportedly even more remunerative. Last year, in a move that sparked controversy, the United States Golf Association ditched longtime partners ESPN and NBC to ink a 12-year, $1.1 billion agreement with FOX Sports—which has never televised golf—to broadcast the U.S. Open and other USGA events beginning in 2015.

While Votaw acknowledges that Woods's presence in a given tournament spikes interest, he challenges the suggestion that the golfer is the sole arbiter of the Tour's success in recent years.

"No one is bigger than the game itself," Votaw said, citing substantial growth in prize money and charitable giving at tournaments Woods rarely or never plays. "The sport itself is in a very good position in terms of sponsorship, in terms of consistent television viewership, and in terms of attendance."

No one at the networks is going to be reduced to robbing to eat, either: when it comes to non-majors, at least, the PGA Tour sells 65%-75% of the advertising to their sponsors, with broadcasters responsible for the rest. According to a New York Times report from 2010, before the PGA Tour's most recent network television deal, ad revenues for golf on network television amounted to $621.6 million in 2008, and a recession-affected $557.9 million in 2009. (Both CBS Sports and FOX Sports declined my request for an interview, a representative for the latter saying that it was "premature" to comment with the details of FOX's golf coverage yet to be determined.)

Revenues from television rights profoundly shape the financial health of golf's leading organizations. In 2011, tax-exempt PGA Tour revenues amounted to $973 million, while championships accounted for 75% of the PGA of America's total revenues for 2012 and 73% of the USGA's total revenues for 2013.

"When you consider the fact that the PGA of America exists for all of our members and apprentices, but we can't exist without our spectator championships, the fact that Tiger Woods is a four-time PGA Champion and multiple Ryder Cup team member is very important," Bishop told me on this point. "From a competitive standpoint, he's been the man."

Among those profiting most handsomely are the sport's top male professionals. PGA Tour purses, which are determined by television rights and title sponsorships, were already on the rise before Woods's professional debut, increasing from a combined $46.3 million to nearly $70 million in 1996, then skyrocketed to more than $279 million by 2012. Endorsement contracts, licensing fees, and other off-course earnings have followed suit. In 1996, the ranking golfer on Forbes' annual list of highest-paid athletes was Arnold Palmer, in eighth place with $15.1 million in earnings; no other golfers made the top 20. On the magazine's most recent list, from 2013, three golfers featured in the top 21: Woods (first place, $78.1 million), Phil Mickelson (seventh place, $48.7 million), and Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy (21st, $29.6 million).

"The overwhelming majority of recreational golf is not a reflection of the super-elite lifestyle or what most folks see on TV every weekend on the PGA TOUR," the National Golf Foundation's Greg Nathan wrote in an email.

The effect of the Great Recession makes it somewhat difficult to separate structural changes from cyclical booms and busts, but the 2011 Golf Economy Report, produced by SRI International for the World Golf Foundation and Golf 20/20, is telling for the differences it reveals among the recreational and professional sectors of the golf economy. Between 2005 and 2011, revenue from golf facility operations—including everything from the bucket of range balls you use to warm up, to green fees and cart rentals, to the hot dog you buy in the clubhouse after the round— decreased from an inflation-adjusted $31.8 billion (in 2011 dollars) to $29.9 billion. Similarly, revenue from equipment and apparel sales declined from an inflation-adjusted $6 billion (in 2011 dollars) to $5.1 billion. In that same period, tournament revenue—including television rights fees, corporate sponsorships, ticket sales, and merchandise at PGA Tour, LPGA, USGA, and PGA of America events in the United States—outstripped inflation and outran the recession, rising from $954 million in 2005 ($1.1 billion in 2011 dollars) to $1.2 billion in 2011. Total player endorsements rose from $265 million in 2005 ($300 million in 2011 dollars) to $320 million in 2011.

Willie Sutton couldn't have imagined money like this.


The DSM-IV defines a manic episode as "a distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood." While the members of the press who coined the word "Tigermania" in 1997 are unlikely to have considered the phenomenon in clinical terms, elevation, expansion, and irritability seem an apt description of golf in the years since: immensely profitable but prone to bouts of anxiety, optimistic and creative but easily distracted. Though suggestions of the game's impending demise are overstated, Woods's dominance has had important consequences for golf, not all of them unalloyed blessings.

The story of "Tigermania" is, in the final analysis, a tale of two sports. On the one hand, amateur golf seems healthy but static. The total number of recreational golfers at present is reminiscent of the mid-1990s, while the racial/ethnic diversity of participants has remained disappointingly flat. The one-time glut of golf facilities has been reduced. Rounds played, always subject to variations in the weather, are on the upswing from their post-recession nadir; sales of equipment and apparel, though far from exceptional, are not disastrous. Golf still attracts three to four million "new trials" each year, according to the National Golf Foundation's Greg Nathan, and still scares away many by requiring four or five hours for eighteen holes. Golf is, as ever, both tremendously difficult and tremendously addictive, a game for a lifetime that must sometimes be set aside to go about actually living.

On the other hand, the glitzy world of men's professional golf continues to bask in Tiger's glow, at least in the upper echelons. And with the advent of decades-long rights agreements, the PGA Tour, the USGA, and the PGA of America are likely to insulate themselves from any tumble in golf's television ratings as the sport searches for its next superstar: the Tour's current cable and network contracts end in 2021, the USGA/FOX agreement is locked in until 2027, and NBC's contract to broadcast the Ryder Cup, which is organized by the PGA of America, runs through 2030. (Indeed, the wave of extended, high-priced television rights agreements in all sports, from PGA Tour golf to the Olympics, shows few signs of subsiding.) "Tigermania" brought unprecedented amounts of attention and money to the Tour, the players, the governing bodies, the networks, and the sponsors, and a significant portion of that attention and money has been lavished, in turn, on charities, nonprofit organizations, and initiatives designed, as the sport's common parlance has it, to foster "the growth of the game."

As laudable as The First Tee, "While We're Young," Play Golf America, Get Golf Ready, HackGolf, FootGolf, and other efforts may be, the intended impact on the top-line measures, number of golfers and rounds played, is still in the future. Indeed, as the PGA of America's Ted Bishop told me, it is only recently that the sport has begun to acknowledge and combat the fundamental challenges to expanding participation by turning to amateur players for advice.

"Rather than come up with these 'Growth of the Game' initiatives and force feed 'em down the throat of the consumer, we figured it was time to listen to them," he said. "A lot of it was spurred by the fact that we weren't seeing any growth in the sport, and we felt like we needed a different approach."

The World Golf Foundation's Steve Mona agrees, citing an attempt, beginning five or six years ago, to repair the "fragmented" nature of the sport's governance by consolidating resources on the most successful programs.

"Very candidly, difficult times will cause people to band together better than prosperous times," he said.


Perhaps because I grew up in New England, where winter scarcely weakens its grip before the final putt falls, Masters Sunday features prominently among my golfing memories—never more vividly than the one that marks, for me, the last days of golf in the era before Tiger Woods. On that April weekend in 1996, with the opening of our home course still a month away, my father, my brother, and I headed to Waterville Valley, in New Hampshire's White Mountains, for a few days of skiing. Though much of the trip involved seeing who could sit longest in the snow banks around the hotel's heated indoor/outdoor pool before retreating to the water's warmth, my brother and I had become interested in golf the previous summer, after Dad set us loose with a shared collection of cut-down clubs, and so mornings on the slopes segued into afternoons relaxing in front of the Masters telecast on CBS. As we piled into the chairlift that Sunday, Greg Norman, his generation's most frequent victim of Augusta heartbreak, led rival Nick Faldo by a seemingly insurmountable six strokes. By the time we returned from the trails, in search of cheeseburgers, Cokes, and The Shark's back-nine victory lap, Norman had already coughed up most of his advantage. We watched him squander the rest in a dim and crowded pub, enveloped by mournful silence.

When the Masters concluded this spring, with Bubba Watson besting Jordan Spieth by three strokes, Sunday's final round was the first without Tiger Woods since Norman's collapse—yet another hinge point at which one period in golfing history seemed to be ending and the next seemed poised to begin. The theatrics of Watson and Spieth's back-nine duel, like Rory McIlroy's dominant major championship victories, Rickie Fowler's newfound consistency, and Sergio Garcia's recent resurgence, have reminded me that each of the game's superstars started out as just another golfer, struggling to hone his swing on the range. There will be no "next Tiger Woods," but neither will there be an imminent crash in television revenues or an amateur exodus from the game or a collapse of the equipment market or any of the other doomsday scenarios floated in the media, though modest corrections are likely to continue on all of these fronts as golf comes down from its manic episode and returns to something like equilibrium.

What there will be, I suspect, is regret.

Lost in the exuberance of the Woods years was the understanding that no one athlete, however iconic, can change the rules of the game. That Tiger neither succeeded in dismantling the sport's economic and racial barriers to entry nor single-handedly created the thriving "product" that is elite professional golf should only be surprising if we unthinkingly accept Woods's "transformative" brand as inextricable from his "transcendent" prowess—if we imbibe the myth of the star turn rather than consider its complicated reality. In the end, the fact remains that between 1996 and 2012, years in which Woods won 14 major championships, 74 PGA Tour events, and 10 Player of the Year awards, years in which the game's top professionals, sponsors, broadcast partners, and leading organizations benefitted handsomely and secured their prosperity for the foreseeable future, golf succeeded in adding an anemic net total of 300,000 players (1.2%) and 12.1 million annual rounds played (2.5%). By and large, the sources I spoke to in the course of my reporting adamantly opposed the notion that this constitutes a failure on the part of industry groups and the governing bodies, and each, not without reason, offered optimism for the sport's future. Yet the evidence points, at minimum, to an opportunity squandered. As it turns out, the question is not whether golf will survive the end of "Tigermania." The question is why, after Tiger, the sport won't be better off.


Matt Brennan is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in several publications, including L.A. Weekly, Medium, and New Orleans' alternative newspaper, Gambit. He contributes regular film and television criticism to Slant Magazine and Indiewire's Thompson on Hollywood! blog, and tweets about what he's watching @thefilmgoer. He lives in New Orleans.

Image by Jim Cooke, photo via Getty

Hackers Seize Russian Prime Minister's Twitter Account

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Hackers Seize Russian Prime Minister's Twitter Account

As sneaky as Russia's spooks are, they couldn't keep hackers from commandeering the Twitter account of Dmitri Medvedev, Russia's former president and current prime minister, and tweeting a mock resignation and sundry other jokes in the longtime Putin ally's name.

It was the work of "Russian hacking collective" Shaltay-Boltay (which is apparently Russian for Humpty-Dumpty), according to the BBC:

The Russian-language feed, which has more than 2.5 million followers, was also filled with tweets denouncing the country's president, Vladimir Putin.

The impersonator wrote that Mr Medvedev would be pursuing a new career as a freelance photographer.

The hackers also weighed in on the Ukraine crisis through Medvedev's account:

Shaltay-Boltay, which claims to be allied with Anonymous, has been a pain in Russia's double-eagled butt for some time, publicly dumping private emails from Kremlin insiders and pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.

According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the hackers tweeted a bunch of other stuff from Medvedev's account, including a bitchy message for President Vladimir Putin, using his diminutive nickname.

"Been wanting to say this for a long time," the tweet read. "Vova, you're wrong!"

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Will Finally Step Down

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Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Will Finally Step Down

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will finally step aside in favor of his rival, Haider al-Abadi, according to the Associated Press. Four senior Shiite lawmakers told the AP that "Maliki has agreed to endorse Haider al-Abadi as the next prime minister following a meeting of Dawa party members in Baghdad."

Maliki, who had refused repeated requests to step down, is expected to announce his decision and his support for Abadi during a speech to the public tonight.

[Image via AP]

Too Little or Too Much or Any or No Salt Will Kill You

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Too Little or Too Much or Any or No Salt Will Kill You

Salt: good? Bad? Both! It will kill you no matter what you do.

For decades now, the "accepted" medical advice on recommended salt intake has fluctuated like a bobblehead doll, and the media's alarmist coverage has fluctuated right along in lockstep. (Christ, a scroll through the Gawker.com/salt page will show you enough contradictory advice to condone and/ or forbid putting anything at all into your mouth, and swallowing it.) Fortunately for all of us—especially "we the media," who hit a real slow patch this time of year—there is a huge new study out about salt consumption. What do you need to know? From the Wall Street Journal:

The new study, which tracked more than 100,000 people from 17 countries over an average of more than three years, found that those who consumed fewer than 3,000 milligrams of sodium a day had a 27% higher risk of death or a serious event such as a heart attack or stroke in that period than those whose intake was estimated at 3,000 to 6,000 milligrams.

The findings are clear: eating too little salt could kill you. Also, here is another perspective, from Science Daily, about the very same study:

More than 1.6 million cardiovascular-related deaths per year can be attributed to sodium consumption above the World Health Organization's recommendation of 2.0g (2,000mg) per day, researchers have found...

These new findings inform the need for strong policies to reduce dietary sodium in the United States and across the world."

The findings are clear: eating too much salt could kill you.

Immediately increase and decrease your salt intake, or prepare to die.

[Photo: Flickr]

Fans Think Rupert Grint Is Ed Sheeran, Because Maybe He Is?

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Fans Think Rupert Grint Is Ed Sheeran, Because Maybe He Is?

According to Rupert Grint, fans can't tell if Rupert Grint (English red-headed white male) and Ed Sheeran (English red-headed white—WAIT) are one person or two people. Is the answer out there?

Rupert Grint, Ed Sheeran. I guess the first clue is that they have two different names. Ed Sheeran, Rupert Grint. Rupert Grint, Ed Sheeran. Rupert Sheeran, Ed Grint. Ed Ruped. Ruperd Greerant. Hmm. Here's Grint explaining the situation, in a recent interview with Match of the Day Magazine:

"People think I'm Ed Sheeran. They compliment me on my music career and I just play along with it! It's never too bad, you get the odd person staring at you but it's pretty manageable."

Huh. "They compliment me on my music career and I just play along with it [because I must, being Ed Sheeran as well]"? Hard to say!

What do you think? One person, or two people? If anyone knew, I'd think the fans would know, and it certainly seems as though the fans are as unsure as anyone.

Maybe Taylor Swift knows?

[images via Getty, h/t DailyMail]

Fox News Bashes Ferguson Protesters for "Forgetting MLK's Message"

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Fox News Bashes Ferguson Protesters for "Forgetting MLK's Message"

In covering the Ferguson, Mo. protests against the police killing of Michael Brown, Fox & Friends decided to ignore the problems with a heavily-armed police force marching against civilians and criticize the protesters instead.

"Forgetting MLK's Message," read the chyron during a Thursday morning interview with Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece, Alveda King. According to her, the problem is that Al Sharpton has riled up a bunch of "rioting" protesters—no mention of the fact that police have been equipped with armored vehicles, wooden bullets, riot gear, and a huge supply of tear gas.

Fox's Brian Kilmeade agreed with King's that the protesters weren't "nonviolent" enough, and lamented that "There doesn't seem to be a leader to step up, like your uncle and dad did."

Last night, hundreds of unarmed people chanted "hands up, don't shoot," before police hit them with tear gas and rubber and wooden bullets. A St. Louis alderman, Antonio French, was reporting from the scene via social media. He was arrested.

[H/T TPM, Photo: Fox News via TPM]

De Blasio's "Don't Resist Arrest" Plea Doesn't Cut It

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De Blasio's "Don't Resist Arrest" Plea Doesn't Cut It

Yesterday, just shy of a month after Eric Garner was choked to death by an NYPD officer on Staten Island, Mayor Bill de Blasio sent a message to New Yorkers, in the event that they come into contact with the cops sometime soon: stop resisting.

"When a police officer comes to the decision that it's time to arrest someone, that individual is obligated to submit to arrest," de Blasio said at an event marking the expansion of an anti-gun initiative. "They will then have every opportunity for due process in our court system."

The mayor, the New York Post notes, was commenting on a remark police commissioner Bill Bratton made on The Brian Lehrer Show earlier this week: "What we're seeing . . . over the last several months [is] a number of individuals just failing to understand that you must submit to an arrest, that you cannot resist it. The place to argue your case is in court, not in the middle of the street."

The drum gets beaten whenever there's a high-profile case of police violence: Let the cops do their job, and everything will be OK. Mike Brown struggled with cops, police in Ferguson, Missouri say, and maybe he'd be alive today if he hadn't. (Witnesses tell a different story.) The LAPD claims that Ezell Ford, the latest black man to be gunned down by the cops, was resisting too. (One observer said Ford was lying on the ground, complying with orders, when police unloaded multiple bullets into his body.)

But this line of argument places blame for police violence on its victims, not its perpetrators. If Eric Garner had only owned up to the loosies he was allegedly selling and put his hands behind his back, it says, he wouldn't have died. But what about the mentally ill man EMTs said they had to physically protect from Brooklyn cops who were beating him senseless as he lie handcuffed to a stretcher, physically incapable of resistance? Or Tamon Robinson, who was killed after an NYPD cruiser ran him over because he picked up a few rocks. Or Ehud Halevi, a homeless man who was brutally beaten, nightsticked, and pepper-sprayed—then charged with assaulting a police officer—for sleeping in a Crown Heights cultural center where he'd been given permission to sleep?

What about Ramarley Graham, the unarmed teenager who NYPD cops shot and killed in front of his grandmother, inside of his own house?

Every one of these men, save Ehud Halevi, is black. "Stop resisting. Due process will be served," as if a black person in New York, or Ferguson, or Los Angeles, has any reason to believe that it will be. As if an arrest is a walk in the park, and if you're innocent, you'll be able to laugh it off like Nate Silver did.

Is it in your best interests to resist arrest? Almost never. Should you do it? Probably not. But for de Blasio and Bratton to issue a call like this, at a time like this—after Garner's death, as cops tear-gas journalists and initiate violence with protesters 1,000 miles away in Ferguson—displays a certain tone-deafness and unwillingness to engage with the real issue.

After Bratton and Al Sharpton gave vastly different public remarks regarding Garner's death, veteran New York police reporter Murray Weiss published an anonymously-sourced report claiming de Blasio would rather remove Bratton from his position as commissioner than lose Sharpton's support, and by extension, that of the "constituency that catapulted him into City Hall." The voters who elected the mayor—on a platform of police reform—surely felt some temporary relief at this refutation of the top cop.

Yesterday brought de Blasio's outraged response: "I have a high-pain threshold when it comes to untruths being told in print, but this is ludicrous. It's inappropriate. It's idiotic. I don't know how many times I've said we have the finest police leader in the Untied States. And I believe that in my heart. I think Bill Bratton is doing an extraordinary job."

[Image via AP]


Wyoming Politics: Tea Party Dick Doctors, Hitler Misquoters and Ghosts

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Wyoming Politics: Tea Party Dick Doctors, Hitler Misquoters and Ghosts

Cowboys can't really afford to be stupid.

The nature of the job–and yes, it is still a job in many parts of the west–is such that a single dumb decision can wipe you out for the year, if not for good. It's not enough to be able to throw a lasso and ride a horse (most use pickups or ATV's the majority of the time anyway). A cowboy must be a pragmatic combination of business owner, veterinarian, day-laborer, meteorologist, accountant, EMT, outdoor survivalist and mechanic, among other things.

An even disposition, a working knowledge of Spanish and the ability to communicate effectively with everyone from bankers and lawyers to the guy who shovels shit out in the barn is helpful, too.

The state of Wyoming prides its cowboy heritage. It's right there on their license plates, and at the 50-yard line at the University of Wyoming's War Memorial Stadium. The Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne is one of the biggest in the world, and working cattle ranches still cover a good chunk of the state's sprawling and beautiful landscape.

So it's a bit bewildering why a state full of people for whom intelligent, do-it-yourself pragmatism is as much a survival tool as a philosophical outlook have consistently terrible—or just plain weird—candidates for public office.

Some, like GOP gubernatorial candidate Taylor Haynes, a retired rancher and urologist who is looking to open up the state's national parks—including Yellowstone and Grand Teton—up to timber and mining development, and who says he'll jail any federal officials that dare to enforce federal laws in the state of Wyoming for "impersonating a law enforcement officer in Wyoming," have gotten a fair amount of attention for their constitutionally-illiterate brand of lunacy.

But as primary election day approaches, still more problematic candidates are coming out of the woodwork.

Take, for instance, Wyoming House candidate and Tea Party leader Charles M. Cloud, who is steadfastly against the idea of early childhood education, but appears to be all for gratuitous and factually-incorrect Hitler references.

Cloud is challenging GOP Rep. David Northrup for the Wyoming House District 50 seat from the Bighorn Basin, home to the state's most active Tea Party organization (they had none other than conservative guitar hero, legendary pants-shitter and statutory rape-enthusiast Ted Nugent perform at their most recent gathering a few weeks ago). Northrup previously defeated Cloud for the seat in 2012 by less than 100 votes.

According to the Casper Star-Tribune, Cloud called out Northrup in a debate on Wednesday over Northrup's support of a measure that would study (but not implement) pre-kindergarten programs for children ages 0-3.

"First of all, the 0 to 3 thing should scare people because I remember Hitler was the one that said, 'Give me a child until he's 3, and he will be mine forever,'" Cloud said. "And I, sir, want to educate my own child from 0 to 3. I do not want the state."

If this is the case, then Cloud's child may be doomed in terms of his education—because Adolf Hitler never said that. In fact, nobody really ever said that. It's a misreading of a quote incorrectly attributed to Soviet leader Vladmir Lenin that researchers say was actually generated in the 1950's by either longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover or Ezra Taft Benson, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under President Dwight Eisenhower.

That's right–it's a compound fuck-up of a Cold War-era anti-Communist propaganda message.

Anyway, Cloud also reportedly called Northrup "stupid" and "spineless," but according to the Star-Tribune he did acknowledge that he may have misquoted the leader of the German Third Reich, which is somewhat ironic on many levels–especially given that Hitler's anti-intellectual views on education actually dovetail nicely with the notion that early childhood education is a bad idea.

"I will have no intellectual training," Hitler once wrote. "Knowledge is ruin to my young men."

But as fascinating as Cloud's views on education and Hitler may be, at least it can be said that he is an actual human being who definitively resides in this realm of existence.

That's not necessarily the case for one James "Coaltrain" Gregory, from parts unknown, who is challenging incumbent U.S. Senator Mike Enzi in the August 19 GOP primary.

According the Jackson Hole News and Guide, nobody has ever actually seen, met or even heard about the mysterious "Coaltrain"—including anybody in the Teton County GOP establishment.

"Oftentimes Republicans who are interested in office come to me to talk," county chairman TR Pierce told the News and Guide. "They say, 'I'm James "Coaltrain" Gregory and I'm thinking about running,' and I say, 'Tell me about yourself, why are you running?' But I've never met James Gregory."

State election officials say that Gregory filed to run for office on May 20 using the state's online system, paying the $200 fee with a credit card.

But beyond that and a Jackson Hole post office box, Gregory remains a complete mystery—as attempts to contact him through the phone number and email address provided to the state when he filed to run for office have gone unanswered.

"I think he must be a kook," said one GOP official of the eerily absent Gregory.

In my mind I like to think of Gregory as a troubled spirit trapped between worlds, wandering through the halls of Congress trying desperately to attach a rider to a defense authorization bill that will free him from his eternal purgatory.

But I imagine that most folks in Wyoming probably don't care one way or another. After all, in a state full of tea partiers, national park-hating penis doctors, anti-education Hitler misquoters and road-melting supervolcanos it can be hard to get too worked up over a Republican ghost named "Coaltrain" running for the U.S. Senate.

Cowboys have to be pragmatic about things like that.

Image via AP

Missouri State Troopers Will Take Over Policing in Ferguson

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Missouri State Troopers Will Take Over Policing in Ferguson

The Missouri State Highway Patrol will take control of policing protests in Ferguson, Mo. from the St. Louis County Police Department, Governor Jay Nixon announced today.

The news comes after widespread criticism of the ways in which demonstrations relating to the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police have been handled in the area. "We are going to have a different approach and have the approach that we're in this together," patrol captain Ronald Johnson said at a press conference this afternoon. "I understand the anger and fear that the citizens of Ferguson are feeling, and our officers will respect both of those."

County police will remain active, but state troopers will be tasked with heading up the security effort, Nixon said. The governor called for "a different tone" on the ground, ABC reports, and said that the name of the officer who shot Brown should be released. "I would hope that the appropriate release of that name, with the security around it if necessary...be done as expeditiously as possible," he said, adding that law enforcement has the "methods and abilities to do that."

[Image via AP]

Don’t Ask BuzzFeed Why It Deleted Thousands of Posts

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Don’t Ask BuzzFeed Why It Deleted Thousands of Posts

On Tuesday, Gawker reported that BuzzFeed had quietly removed from its site nearly 5,000 posts in April, a discovery the viral news conglomerate’s editor-in-chief refused to address before publication. Now BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti is explaining—or trying to explain—why his site disappeared those articles.

In an interview with Slate’s Will Oremus, Peretti “insisted that the purge was not the blatant breach of journalistic ethics that it might seem” and argued that “BuzzFeed began as a tech company, not a media company.”

But Peretti doesn’t account for the fact that BuzzFeed carried out the secret purge in 2014, years after it pivoted from a content laboratory to a real media company. As Oremus explains:

Retracting a story is viewed as a serious blow to one’s journalistic credibility—and to do so without notifying readers is a cardinal sin. Retracting four thousand posts without telling anyone is simply unheard of.

Peretti’s response? “We probably could have communicated better, or handled it better.”

In other words, the deleted posts are a P.R. headache, rather than an indictment of the site and its culture. (One of Peretti’s justifications for removing the posts was that they were “not worth improving or saving because the content [wasn’t] good.”)

At the same time, Peretti tries to lay down some principles: All of the deleted posts, he tells Oremus, predated BuzzFeed’s hiring of editor-in-chief Ben Smith, who came on from Politico in December 2011 to build out the site’s reporting operation and implement proper sourcing standards.

Is this timeline true? As counter-evidence, Oremus points out a widely-maligned staff-written article titled “What’s the Deal With Jazz?” that disappeared after it was published in February 2013. However, when asked about this post in particular, BuzzFeed spokesperson Ashley McCollum had a convincing explanation. “The author of that post, who no longer works here, deleted it without notifying anyone,” McCollum said in an email to Gawker. “It has been reinstated and an editor’s note has been added.”

In a nod to its updated policies, the note reads:

This post has been reinstated after it was brought to our attention that the author deleted it, against our editorial standards.


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

Image credit: Shutterstock

Thursday Night TV Will Be Marrying Itself at Burning Man this Summer

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Up tonight we've got classic Frank Herbert standup routines, we've got Sisters With and Without Voices, there's true confessions, mysterious teleporting children, and the solar plexus.

At 8/7c., after a new Adventure Time and the Regular Show finale, you should probably watch Defiance because it's fantastic. Just unbelievable this season. I don't know if I've mentioned that ever before. There's also The Quest, which I thought I would watch or at least think about from time to time, but instead I just forget it exists until the time it takes to write this thing up every Thursday.

At 9/8c. there's the fourth season premiere of Braxton Family Values, new Dating Naked and Project Runway, the Gang Related finale, the two-hour Last Comic Standing finale (where title becomes reality!), Rectify, another Extreme Guide To Parenting on Bravo, and of course Big Brother.

While both players on the Block this week—after Zach fucking ruled it on POV last night because he is a champion among men and the greatest person ever to be filmed by a camera—are fan favorites, it's not really that stressful, because guess what: Whoever leaves is immediately coming back. So frankly, you should be rooting against Donnie (even more than rooting for Nicole) at this point: He's way more likely to win whatever ginned-up way they have to get him back in the House, due to being a goddamn angel from Heaven right here on Earth, and plus it would break the gross streak of women getting evicted, each and almost every week, for no real reason.

At 10/9c. there's Sharkageddon obviously, because Discovery Channel is a sucker of balls and blower of sharks, the next Honorable Woman on Sundance and Garfunkel & Oates on IFC, the finale of a show that has apparently existed for at least two months called NY Med, another dose of Married/You're The Worst on FX, and a double premiere of ID's new show Worst Thing I Ever Did.

What's the worst thing you ever did? Just kidding we don't know each other like that.

There's also the season two premiere of SWV Reunited, which interests me more than it might because of the small teleporting blonde child in this video, in addition to everything else going on in the video, who has been a huge part of my life this week in various coincidental ways that Jung would call a synchronicity that I need to pay attention to. That, and the movie The Battle Of Algiers, are the main ones that I can't seem to escape right now. Perhaps it is merely the bitch Supermoon at work, at her skyward loom, and next week I'll just go back to constantly running into random Dune references like back in July. "Tell me of your homeworld, Usul" is not something you want to see coming out of a fortune cookie.

Tell me of your homeworld, mysterious Blonde Child (With Voices).

Then at 11/10c. it's the second Black Jesus, stupid-ass Discovery's still on their Shark After Dark kick, and but on Showtime it's the second 7 Deadly Sins. And don't you know it's gonna be about LUST. That certain feeling, we all know it. Morgan Spurlock knows all about it. I hope it's just various angles on his beautiful candle-lit face, just breathing softly and talking in a low voice about Lust. But not his actual personal thoughts, because he's kind of a monster inside of himself like any messiah; more like, telling us sexy things from the works of Anaïs Nin and... whoever. Jean M. Auel? I don't know.

I don't know any porns, I don't read books like that. Heck on that. I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine, but below the neckline, Dollar Sign. Right around the solar plexus (LexisNexis), my Tropic of Cancer (Tiny Dancer), is apparently where I get my kicks. Essessdoubledoubleyouyouvee.

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. What are you watching tonight? What are we missing out on? Recommendations and discussions down below.

Anonymous Made the Stepmother of Its Doxed "Cop" Cry

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Anonymous Made the Stepmother of Its Doxed "Cop" Cry

Everybody knew there would be repercussions if "Anonymous"—or whoever runs the now-suspended @TheAnonMessage Twitter account—released the name of the police officer it thought killed Michael Brown and turned out to be incorrect.

Well that is what happened, and here are the repercussions: A 48-year-old handicapped woman crying on the porch of her home.

Yamiche Alcindor of USA Today went to the St. Louis-area home that Anonymous said belonged to Bryan Willman, who it named as the Ferguson police officer who killed Brown. This is what she found:

Kathie Warnack, 48, started quietly crying when she learned that Anonymous had released the name of her stepson.

The St. Louis resident said her stepson is a 32-year-old police dispatcher in St. Ann, Mo., and before that a manager at a dollar store. He has never worked as a police officer — not in Ferguson or anywhere else, she said.

Her stepson also doesn't live at the address released by the group and rarely comes over, Warnack said.

"Wow, this is not good," said Warnack, as she began to cry on the steps of her home, which sits along a busy road.

"I guess I'm going to have to sleep with my gun and put cameras on the house," she said. "Now I have to defend myself and I didn't do anything wrong."

Warnack is disabled by a birth defect that means she has an artificial left leg and less than five misshapen fingers on each hand.

As pointed out on Twitter by Adrian Chen, another Anonymous member revealed that @TheAnonMessage was not sure if the name he eventually released was the actual identity of Brown's killer but decided to do so anyway.

Internet hacktivists have done plenty of tangible social good in the last few years, but the amorphous nature of groups like Anonymous mean that screw-ups like this are unavoidable. Unfortunately, enough of the latter will eventually suffocate the former.

[image via Getty]

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