Some foods, like pizza, are good hot, and still good cold. Other foods are okay hot, but are not good cold. This is a list of the latter group of foods.
The other foods I can think of are okay cold.
[Photo: Flickr]
Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.
In the wake of protests over police violence against black men, many civil rights activists are calling for a high-tech solution: strapping wearable body cameras to cops. The idea is to hold police accountable for unnecessary violence. But the history of police body cams reveals that the devices have often had the opposite effect.
On the afternoon of March 1st, a band of Los Angeles Police shot a homeless man. Video of the incident was captured by both a witness armed with a cell phone, and by body cameras strapped to the officers. Despite the evidence, what actually happened on Skid Row before police shot Charly Keunang remains a matter of dispute. How it went down depends on who you ask — and, more importantly, on whose video you're watching.
The civilian shot video from a short distance away, and the footage shows officers circling Keunang before a physical struggle erupts. Keunang is thrown to the ground. Officers struggle to contain him. He's resisting but subdued. He's not going anywhere but he hasn't been cuffed. Then after some yelling, three officers open fire.
From this perspective, the story doesn't look too good for the LAPD. Sure, Keunang was resisting, but was he such a grave threat that he needed to die?
The answer to that question hinges on what the officers saw. The LAPD hasn't released police body camera footage captured at the scene because it's evidence in an ongoing investigation. That's consistent with policies nationwide, and the footage will almost certainly be released eventually—but could take up to a year or possibly even longer.
The LAPD has kept a tight gag on the investigation, but in a news conference the day after the shooting, LAPD police chief Charlie Beck said, "It appears officers acted compassionately up until the time when force was required." According to the official LAPD line, Keunang attempted to grab a gun from an officer during the altercation.
So we have two pieces of footage, and two stories. A civilian saw a gang of cops killing a poor black man on the street. But police saw a suspect trying to grab their guns.
This is going to be a crucial test case for body camera footage. It's also the first to crop up following the widespread social unrest over the shootings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner. Perhaps the most concrete demand came straight from the family of Michael Brown. On the evening a grand jury failed to indict the officer who shot him, Brown's family implored supporters, "Join with us in our campaign to ensure that every police officer working the streets in this country wears a body camera."
At the time, there was a prevailing feeling that the witness testimony in the Mike Brown case had not uncovered the truth of what happened the afternoon Brown was shot. If only we'd had a record of the event, we would know for sure whether Brown had really attacked Officer Darren Wilson before the shooting, or if Brown had been executed after throwing up his arms in surrender. (In a pair of investigations, the Justice Department both cleared the killer cop of the shooting and found that the Fergusson Police Department was rotten with racism.)
On December 1st, President Obama proposed $75 million
As a test case for the supposed social benefits of the technology there couldn't be a more symbolically-loaded city than Los Angeles. Nearly 25 years ago, four LAPD officers were acquitted for the savage beating of Rodney King, despite a damning camcorder video that captured the assault. Since then, civilian video has proven largely ineffective in convicting police of brutality—or even indicting them for possible crimes. And yet many people believe that civilian footage shows police violating the civil rights of people on the ground. Eric Garner's death is the perfect example of this problem. Garner's friend got video of the police choking him to death, but the officers were never indicted, despite public outcry.
Body cameras, we're told, will change the game. But if you look back at how this tech has been used in America so far, we already know what's going to happen to the officers who shot Charly Keunang in Los Angeles: Nothing.
Police body cameras are a national issue today, but they've been in use in departments across the country for over five years. The technology's evolution from an untested product to mainstream staple got its first real-world test on November 11th, 2009, in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Officer Brandon Davis and his partner arrived at the home of Eric and Connie Berry to investigate a domestic disturbance. Connie opened the door for the officers. When they entered, they found Eric sitting at the dining room table holding a Taurus 45 caliber semi-automatic handgun. The officers demanded repeatedly that Berry drop the weapon. When Berry didn't comply, Officer Davis shot him twice, killing him.
The whole encounter was captured by a camera mounted to the side of Officer Davis's head. The footage is hazy and disorienting; you hear the real urgency and fear in the voices of Officer Davis, Connie Berry, and Eric Berry. There's definitely something wrong. But it's also not the kind of solid evidence you might expect. You can sort of see Berry with his gun, but it's frankly too dark to make much of anything out.
Sixteen days after the shooting, local prosecutor Daniel Shue declined to press charges in the killing, citing the footage as abundant evidence that the use of deadly force was justified.
The case is remarkable because footage from a camera was used to exonerate an officer. But what most people don't realize is that the death of Eric Berry also helped to launch a new technology. Taser, the manufacturer of camera that got Officer Davis off the hook, lit up its publicity machine in the wake of the incident. The very next day, Taser pushed out a release about the case, paying special attention to the exoneration. What could have been a complex investigation full of contradictory statements was simplified by their new wearable cameras.
Shue, the prosecutor, is prominently featured in press release, which quotes Shue's report on the shooting.
"I must also mention my review of the AXON recording of the above detailed event," said Prosecuting Attorney, Daniel Shue. "This new technological tool recorded the entire incident by both audio and video. Though there are several third-party witnesses, as well as the officers' own recollections of some of the events leading up to the weapons discharge, this technology enabled this office to observe what happened with complete objectivity."
Of course, not everyone believed the case was so clearcut: Connie Berry would later go on to file a wrongful death suit against the police department. She lost, and her appeal in the case was denied last fall, just weeks before the Mike Brown and Eric Garner juries released their findings.
Officer Brandon Davis, however, became something a poster boy for the technology. He's prominently featured in a short marketing video about the Berry shooting, which emphasizes the speed with which Davis was exonerated. He was back on the job just 72 hours after the shooting! In another sell sheet, he's pictured wearing the camera on his head next to a quote: "I loved the multiple mounting options of AXON Flex. The integration with Oakley makes it cool and comfortable. This is a system officers will want to wear."
Taser first showed its AXON body camera in June 2008, a year before the Berry shooting, at its annual Taser Conference; the company later showcased it at the Chiefs of Police Conference in November that year. The original design called for a head-mounted camera attached to a body-worn pack. The idea was that when an officer had an interaction with a civilian, they would switch the camera on. The recorded data would then be uploaded to Taser's cloud-based video storage platform Evidence.com, where it would be retained for a duration of time, depending on what local records laws demand.
The technology has gone through several iterations since the first camera, mostly to make it more comfortable for officers to wear. In addition to a second-generation head-mounted camera, Taser also offers a body worn model, which is the one that's used by the LAPD.
You probably recognize Taser as the company that makes the high-voltage shock weapon that's ubiquitous among police these days. According to Taser rep Steve Tuttle, body cams actually grew directly from the company's high voltage weapons. Taser had begun putting cameras in the shockers that would be activated automatically when the weapon was used. The footage could then be used after the fact to protect officers and police departments from lawsuits.
From the beginning, Taser has marketed its tech to law enforcement customers with the promise that they're a quick way get out of lawsuits. And the AXON body cameras were the next stage in that campaign. "The AXON is the next great innovative step in law enforcement technology," CEO Rick Smith said in a release in the fall of 2008. "It will help provide revolutionary digital evidence collection, storage and retrieval for law enforcement."
On an investor call the following summer, just as the company was getting ready to put the Axon cameras into production and start cautiously pushing them out into the world, Smith detailed just how the cameras fit into the broader Taser mission. On the street you tase people, but afterwards, you need to be able to show why you did it:
Well with the AXON's ability to record exactly what happened, we improve the legal performance of the agency and the court system. So now they're able to show an audio/video account of exactly what happened, recorded from the officer's point of view. So this allows the agency to better defend its officers actions, to rapidly dispose of false complaints, and to better prosecute criminal activity recorded into digital record.
A few sentences later, Smith also claimed that the cameras could be used for police reform. It could legitimately be used to bust police in the act of doing something wrong:
Well with AXON if the officers are doing something wrong, we're going to know that too. So it's actually going to help agencies better perform their jobs by not only improving the performance of their officers, but if their officers just aren't hitting the performance levels required, it's going to make it easier to make the change that I think everybody wants, which is get bad cops off the street, and let's make the good ones better.
To date, Taser has sold some 30,000 cameras to roughly 2500 agencies, under this logic. These cameras were always supposed to make the job of policing safer—for the the police.
Just a week before the Fort Smith shooting, which established the exculpatory powers of body cameras, the San Jose Police Department became the first to publicly announce it would be getting the cameras. The city did a pilot program in San Jose, but the city still hasn't fully invested in the technology. In fact, it would be years before big cities would get body cameras. In the first year after announcing AXON, Taser pitched the cameras at trade shows and at departments across the country. Taser rolled out pilot programs in towns where police chiefs expressed interest. The early adopters make Fort Smith look huge: Aberdeen, South Dakota; Lake Havasu, Arizona; Burnsville, Minnesota, and other small towns and cities.
Over time, these pilot programs produced many of the lightly-reported local success stories that helped Taser make its case for police body cameras. "The system proved to be very beneficial in the prosecution of crimes and the resolution of conflict," Captain Daniel McNeil told the Aberdeen News in South Dakota. After a brief test with the cameras, Burnsville, Minnesota decided to place a full order, citing the speed in evaluating and processing citizen complaints: "The AXONs are going to save us money," Police Chief Bob Hawkins told the StarTribune.
In short, police officials who'd splurged on the tech claimed that cameras provided departments with the technology to efficiently dispense with spurious complaints. For that reason alone, it was worth the investment.
The city of Rialto, California, a 100,000-person community about an hour east of Los Angeles, finally gave Taser the critical evidence it needed to move the technology forward. Rialto's police chief William Farrar has a long history of experimental police work, and a graduate degree in criminology from the University of Cambridge in the UK. He got interested in body cams while he was working on his degree—and he wound up using his own police force to study the effect of using police body cameras.
Under controlled conditions, Farrar studied how the presence of police cameras affected the nature of encounters between police and civilians. After outfitting the department with cameras, violent encounters dropped by 59 percent, while complaints dropped by 88 percent. Even police not wearing cameras also saw a reduction in violent encounters.
Illustration by Sam Woolley
It's hard to overstate the impact of this study on the progress of body camera technology. The case was widely reported, including several glowing profiles of Farrar in the New York Times. Police networks circulated the findings uncritically, as a kind of tacit endorsement of the cameras.
The study even entered courtroom decisions. In August 2013, US District Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered NYPD precincts to test the technology. The order was part of a ruling where she found the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk procedure discriminatory and unconstitutional. She cited Rialto as evidence that cameras could be helpful in reducing community tensions and fostering police reform.
By the time Obama proposed $75 million in federal funding for police cameras this past December, Rialto was cited in basically every news story on the topic. Taser rep Steve Tuttle says that the Rialto study marked a major turning point for Taser's sales as well. The technology really began to take off in the wake of Rialto's success.
Despite the Rialto study and several others, there's still not a broad body of data on how police body cams affect police behavior and community responses. The state of rigorous study of police body cameras is neatly summarized in a recently released working paper on the subject from the Data and Society Research Institute:
Little is known about the potential long-term impact of body -worn cameras. There has been no large-scale, systematic empirical research on their usage or implementation, and the evidence available today is based on small, local studies with limited generalizability.
The paper takes a close look at Rialto as well as a few other that have been performed so far. According to one of its authors Alex Rosenblat, the only really generalizable point is that cameras lead to a drop in complaints, partially because after people look at the footage, they see themselves and decide pursuing the complaint isn't worth it. Still, it's hard to make broad claims from the data because the contexts of all of the studies are so different. What's more, it hasn't been shown that cameras have a lasting effect after their initial roll out. Will the findings about reduced violence hold after people get used to seeing cameras everywhere?
Another problem is that the studies touted by Taser and law enforcement overlook many examples of how the technology doesn't really benefit citizens and how it might be abused.
Though many people are advocating body cameras in the service of police reform, it's worth remembering that these devices are still overwhelmingly used as a way of exonerating police. Police are very quick to release footage in shootings from Syracuse to Daytona Beach to Salt Lake City. All of these cases were deemed justified. There are dozens of such videos.
In fact, until recently, body camera footage has never been used to indict an officer.
On January 12th, 2015, officers Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez were indicted for the 2014 shooting of James Boyd. The whole shooting was captured on body camera. Boyd, a homeless, mentally ill man, was camping in the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. The officers arrived and told Boyd to pack it up and move it along. When Boyd refused, the officers called in scores of reinforcements. After being temporarily concussed by a light and sound grenade called a flashbang, Boyd made some threatening movements with some knives from his pockets. Officers repeatedly demanded he drop the knives. Then, in the heat of the moment, Sandy pulled the trigger.
Watching the video, it's clear that Boyd didn't need to die and that the officers weren't in any kind of imminent danger. In fact some contend that Boyd was in the process of surrendering when he was shot. There was absolutely a potential threat, but there were many options beyond killing Boyd.
Ultimately, the officers were indicted — and this case is indicative of how body cameras could help in the push for police reform. But as Rachel Aviv's excellent New Yorker investigation on police shootings in Albuquerque illustrates, the indictments only came after the problem of shootings in the city got so bad that the Justice Department swooped in and investigated the department for far-reaching abuses of power and use of excessive force.
Laura Ives, the Albuquerque civil rights attorney representing the Boyd family says, "Without the lapel camera, there is no case." Without the cameras, the police would have come back from the foothills and spun whatever story got them off.
The James Boyd case provides one example of police accountability that civil rights activists hope to see more of in coming years. It allowed the courts to punish officers that did things wrong. But despite the Boyd case, there's very little evidence that cameras are going to provide the kind of case-by-case accountability that angry people in the streets crave.
Still, there's almost no opposition to the technology from people on all sides of the law enforcement spectrum. "Why not have the footage?," argues Taser's Steve Tuttle. Tuttle's trying to sell cameras so his enthusiasm for the technology is understandable, but his sentiment is echoed by activists as well. Even the ACLU, an organization that is usually skeptical about the surveillance implications of widespread camera use, supports the technology. "People expect there to be video," ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley said.
And these perspectives feel right. Why not? Transparency and evidence are indisputably good things. With the right policies that ensure that the cameras are used properly and fairly, the social benefits could be tremendous.
The most optimistic reading of the technology I've heard came from Alex Rosenblat from the Data & Society center. "It's not useful to look at it as a way to punish specific officers," she said. "We should be asking how can we use the experiences recording on camera improve training."
I've been mostly critical of the technology so far because it doesn't ever lead to convictions of police officers. Surely some officers deserve conviction? It's unreasonable to suggest that the police never do anything wrong. But if punishment is unlikely, simply for reasons of systemic bias, maybe the tech can still lead to a slow march of reform, even if that's not quite as cathartic.
Laura Ives, the Boyd family lawyer in New Mexico, concedes that while seeking accountability on the individual level is important, "Not every mistake by an officer is unconstitutional and not every case is criminal, but you can certainly improve it."
Admittedly, police reform from body camera footage is an idyllic scenario, especially given our experience with the technology so far. It's very hard to manage these programs in such a way that the video is systematically collected, and readily available.
The New Orleans police department has deployed them, with mixed success. Data reviewed last year by the Department of Justice found that in of 145 incidents in which New Orleans officers equipped with body cameras used force, just 49 of those incidents had footage available. That should be seen as a colossal failure of transparency. Either officers weren't turning cameras on, or the footage was magically disappearing after the fact.
Even when footage does exist, it's not necessarily easy for a citizen to get their hands on it. Last year, CityLab tried to get a hold of San Diego police department footage, and the department flatly refused to hand it over. Part of this is a result of legitimate privacy concerns, and part is the sheer number of hours required to censor footage.
The fact is that police are more than happy to make the footage available when it makes them look good. But in cases where the police don't look quite as good, like the recent LAPD shooting, we aren't getting the transparency that the technology promises.
There is no denying that police body cams are already the future of law enforcement. If you live in the U.S., they are likely to be coming to your city or town, as more police departments roll out body cam programs. Will they prevent the next Michael Brown shooting, or at least get the officers involved indicted? History suggests otherwise. But we can always hope.
Top image by Jim Cooke
According to Wikipedia, Gigi Hadid
After Simpson posted this video of Hadid to his Snapchat account, one moment stood out—the moment she bends over and puts her nose right against a flat surface for a moment and then stands back up.
Here's a video of the moment in question:
There are all sorts of things that could be going on here instead of illegal drug use. Maybe she was snorting something else (an herbal remedy for a headache), or resting her chin because she has a bad neck cramp, or maybe she wanted to look very closely at a small bug. These are all possible scenarios, and your suppositions are, frankly, insulting to Gigi Hadid:
Besides for doing the supposed in general, I'd be an idiot to do that at a WORK EVENT in front of hundreds of people/press. I'm insulted.
— Gigi Hadid (@GiGiHadid) March 15, 2015
She was clearly at work, which appears to be standing next to a pool! She's not an idiot.
Natarsha Belling is an anchor for Australian television's Network Ten. On a broadcast apparently from this past weekend, she wore this green jacket. What does her neckline resemble? Some say "a dick."
[Image via Ruben Haywood/MTV UK]
Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .
Facebook just attempted to clarify what you are and are not allowed to share on Facebook without getting your account shut down. The company has gotten some bad press for treating a painting of a nude woman (art, man) the same way it treats hardcore pornography, and in a new blog post that absolutely nobody will read, Facebook says it's aiming to "[provide] more detail and clarity on what is and is not allowed. For example, what exactly do we mean by nudity, or what do we mean by hate speech?"
Well, as everyone knows, it's very easy to draw clear lines around categories of speech for the purposes of suppressing it. To help you better understand Facebook's rules, we've reproduced the text below, alongside the type of images that are allowed under the new rules.
We remove photographs of people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks.
So this should be okay:
We also restrict some images of female breasts if they include the nipple, but we always allow photos of women actively engaged in breastfeeding or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring.
This photo of a woman actively engaged in breastfeed should be fine:
We also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures.
Like this beautiful photo of "Womantaur," a fiberglass statue by artist Peter Keresztury:
Or this work of sculpture depicting the Queen of England's breasts by Italian artist Paolo Schmidlin.
Restrictions on the display of both nudity and sexual activity also apply to digitally created content unless the content is posted for educational, humorous, or satirical purposes.
So this Seedfeeder
As would this image of Donkey Kong's penis, which I find extremely humorous
Explicit images of sexual intercourse are prohibited. Descriptions of sexual acts that go into vivid detail may also be removed.
No explicit sexual intercourse here.
It has all been cleared up and these new rules should work well.
Photo: Shutterstock
Nearly everyone following the riveting HBO series The Jinx agrees that the documentary had at least something to do with the arrest of its subject, Robert Durst, on Saturday night. The one exception, it seems, is the LAPD, which is somehow claiming that Durst's arrest warrant was issued entirely based on evidence uncovered during their investigation and not because of anything from The Jinx.
"We based our actions based on the investigation and the evidence," LAPD Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese Albanese told the Los Angeles Times. "We didn't base anything we did on the HBO series. The arrest was made as a result of the investigative efforts and at a time that we believe it was needed…We're constantly looking at cold cases—this being one of them."
Never mind that Durst was arrested
The Jinx director Andrew Jarecki said earlier today that he turned over all information related to the case to police "months ago," though he hasn't yet commented on the LAPD's most recent statement.
Image via AP. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.
Fifty days after announcing she would produce a book in the next 500, Kristin Cavallari has provided evidence of her work on said book for the first time. Or rather, she has at least provided evidence that somebody has typed up some pages that may someday be a part of a book called Balancing on Heels by Kristin Cavallari.
Kristin posted the photo below with the caption, "Working away...can't wait for u guys to read Balancing On Heels [thumbs up emoji]."
Looks like the book will cover a LOT of topics.
This has been 500 Days of Kristin.
[Photo via Getty]
To mark Barack Obama's visit to his show last week, Jimmy Kimmel sent a Lie Witness crew out to Hollywood Boulevard again to see what unbelievable bullshit about the president people would, in fact, believe if faced with a camera and microphone.
It's good news and bad news from this new batch of suckers: It's a bummer that Biden lost his job over a tame "yo' mama" joke, but big congrats to the Obama family on their new, uncircumcised son, Marcus. I hear he's adorable.
Worth noting that Lie Witness is now testing the limits of its format by getting its victims to make up details of where they were when they heard the fake news, which they'll gladly do to avoid looking out of touch. Clam chowder indeed.
[h/t BioTV]
Few things will earn you a nastier, contemptuous snarl from a Very Serious Scientist than using that lowly, scum-based Fahrenheit scale for measuring air temperature. "Celsius is the proper form of measurement," they haughtily trumpet, "because everyone else uses it." Everyone else is wrong.
The vast majority of us use the air temperature as a way to determine comfort when we go outside. Aside from weather forecasting, we don't really use the air temperature for much else. Even when we do—the swimming pool closes when the temperature drops below a certain point, for instance—it still relates to how we perceive temperatures. Like it or not, humans are sensitive creatures; a small shift in the temperature can mean the difference between ultimate comfort, sweaty misery, or a frozen shiverfest.
The two temperatures that matter most in practical uses are the freezing point and the boiling point. Thankfully, we don't worry about the boiling point unless it's pasta night, so we really only ever have to deal with one temperature for anything not related to comfort or safety: 32°F. When water freezes, it has wide-ranging implications from plant survival to building maintenance to the simple ability to walk to the mailbox without slipping and busting your butt on the driveway.
Celsius is a scale, as Very Serious Scientists enjoy pointing out, that revolves around the freezing and boiling points of water. It's nice and even: 0°C is freezing and 100°C is boiling. "It just makes sense!" Sure! Since Celsius is based on water, it would make wonderful sense to use Celsius for the environmental temperature if we lived in water. Until we sprout gills and start flapping around the Gulf, we should use Fahrenheit for air temperatures.
There's an old, bad joke about the two scales that goes around Twitter every once and a while: with Fahrenheit, you're really cold at 0°F and really hot at 100°F; with Celsius, you're cold at 0°C and dead at 100°C. Outside of the polar regions and deserts, the typical range of temperatures stretches from -20°F to 110°F—or a 130-degree range—with daily readings clustered even tighter for most of us. On the Celsius scale, that would convert to -28.8°C to 43.3°C, or a 72.1-degree range of temperatures.
Fahrenheit gives you almost double—1.8x—the precision* of Celsius without having to delve into decimals, allowing you to better relate to the air temperature. Again, we're sensitive to small shifts in temperature, so Fahrenheit allows us to discern between two readings more easily than Saint Celsius ever could.
Scientists need to use a standardized scale so they can easily share and use data from around the world without having to waste time (or make an error) trying to convert variables back and forth. As with other hard scientists, meteorologists use Celsius for weather forecasting, but even the most hardcore Celsius advocates in meteorology still begrudgingly produce public forecasts in Fahrenheit and miles per hour.
The metric system does make sense for certain aspects of daily life. Measuring rain and snow in millimeters or centimeters is easier (and allows for more precision*) than figuring out inches and feet. Measuring distance makes more sense in meters (1000 meters = 1 kilometer) than feet (5,280 feet = 1 mile). Air pressure is better in millibars or hectopascals (mb or hPa) than inches of mercury (inHg).
However, just because some aspects of the metric system make sense doesn't mean we should use it for everything, and therein lies the problem: the Very Serious Scientists get even angrier when you pick and choose. Boo! Variety is the spice of life. I like my distance in meters, my wind in knots, my weight in pounds , and my temperatures in Fahrenheit. If we were doing a science project (or running complex weather models), I would understand using a standardized system, but we're talking about day-to-day life here where communication and an ability to relate is key.
Fahrenheit makes more sense for precision* and as a way of communicating air temperature in a way that relates to how humans perceive temperatures. The main argument for Celsius is that the United States is one of only three countries (the other two being Burma and Liberia) that use Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. When an argument comes down to precision* and communication versus the good ol' bandwagon, the former should always (but rarely ever does) win.
[Image: Ged Carroll via Flickr | Gladly corrected "accuracy" to "precision" as a commenter pointed out
You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.
The A-list cause du jour—the boycott of one Dolce & Gabbana international house of fashion, thanks to one of the designer's statements on gay adoption—is devolving into a hilariously arch Twitter flame war.
The difficulté began when designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana—partners in business, as well as former bedmates—gave a recent interview to Italian magazine Panorama, where they broached the topic of adoption and IVF in a, shall we say, indelicate manner. The offending quotes, via NPR:
In it, they said (translations via Britain's The Telegraph):
- "We oppose gay adoptions. The only family is the traditional one."
- "You are born to a mother and a father — or at least that's how it should be," Dolce said. "I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog."
- Gabbana: "The family is not a fad. In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging."
Skrrrrrt, said gay, married father-of-two Elton John, who immediately posted an Instagram message inviting other wealthy Instagram users to join him in boycotting the brand. Gabbana in turn posted several Instagram messages of his own, calling John a fascist and imploring onlookers to live-and-let-live, as it were.
In the meantime, other famous people are getting in on the feud while the feud's still hot. (Except poor Ricky Martin, who just wants every1 2 get along.)
These designers horrifying views are never in fashion. Their clothes are as ugly as their hate. #BoycottDolceGabbana
— Ryan Murphy (@MrRPMurphy) March 15, 2015
I'm delighted neither Dolce nor Gabbana @dolcegabbana are parents. They hate themselves too much to give a child love.#BoycottDolceGabbana
— Dan Bucatinsky (@danbucatinsky) March 16, 2015
Just round up all my Dolce & Gabbana pieces, I want to burn them. I'm just beyond words and emotions. Boycott senseless bigotry! #boycottD&G
— Courtney Love Cobain (@Courtney) March 15, 2015
Right on Elton and David http://t.co/qmORSvTnUe My D&G shirts are going in the bin- don't want ANYONE to wear them
— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) March 15, 2015
And the designers aren't without their own bombastic supporters:
"Elton John is a Taliban, he is using against Dolce and Gabbana the same methods used by Taliban against Charlie Hebdo," Italian politician Roberto Formigoni reportedly told the Telegraph.
But perhaps surprisingly—but perhaps not—the movement hasn't taken off beyond the feeds of millionaire Twitter: the intersection of people who both shop at Dolce and Gabbana and also care, even a little bit, what they think about anything, it would seem, is rather limited.
Image via AP. Contact the author of this post at gabrielle@gawker.com
Renters at the most expensive building in one of the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in the least affordable housing market
For decades the hulking former bank building at 190 Bowery in downtown Manhattan was stuck stubbornly sometime in the mid-1970s, covered in graffiti and oblivious to the remodeling happening around it. Recently, it was sold to a real-estate developer for $55 million,
Photographer Jay Maisel bought the 72-room building for $102,000 in 1966 and used it chiefly as a home for himself and his family. For much of that time, you'd be forgiven for assuming it was abandoned: there are few signs of life from inside, people rarely come in and out, and the accessible regions of its exterior walls are covered in a perpetually changing mosaic of wheat-pasted and spray-painted art.
Bucky Turco—ANIMAL New York editor-in-chief, full-time urban marauder, and my former boss—snuck into 190 Bowery on three separate occasions recently to shoot the below video and a slew of still photographs, documenting the old 190 Bowery before it is made over in the image of the cocktail bars and headquarters for poorly copyedited online gossip rags that surround it.
See the rest of the photos here.
Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.
Would you risk your life if you thought it might mean extending it? Would you die now if you thought you could be revived at some point in the future? Here are cases of people who went to extremes for immortality or their very own fountains of youth — and killed themselves in the process.
Top image: Crop from The Alchemist, In Search of the Philosophers' Stone by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.
Contrary to legend, Juan Ponce de Leon didn't really die searching for the Fountain of Youth, but some people have perished in the quest for extended youth and immortality. These aren't people who died in hopes of achieving spiritual immortality in some afterlife, but people who hastened their deaths in the hopes of extending life on Earth.
How do you preserve your body so you can help humanity in the distant future? A handful of monks, mostly practitioners of Shingon Buddhism, have turned to the nightmarish practice of self-mummification
Yes, it's horrible, but according to some traditions, the monk isn't treated as dead. Instead, the monk is viewed as existing in a deep meditative trance. Some believe that the monks who entered this "state" would be called upon in billions of years, when humanity would need them — and their bodies intact.
Alexander Bogdanov is a fascinating figure, even if you don't take into account his strange death. Bogdanov was a major player among the Bolsheviks, but Vladimir Lenin had him expelled from the party after the two men had a falling out. He founded the art movement Proletkult and developed a study of tectology, a precursor to systems analysis. He also believed that blood transfusions were the key to rejuvenation, and perhaps eternal youth
Bogdanov performed a number of blood exchanges, and reported improved health after each one — until the last one, that is. Bogdanov exchanged blood with a student who was suffering from malaria and died shortly later. It's not clear if the malaria was behind Bogdanov's death; Bogdanov and his students weren't familiar with blood types. The student, for the record, survived the procedure.
Elixirs of Life, potions and pills that could supposedly extend life — or even make the person who consumed them immortal — feature prominently in the history of imperial China. There were numerous alchemists who claimed to have perfected the formula, but in at least a handful of cases, their elixirs actually made the consumer's life much, much shorter.
Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of the Qin dynasty, died at age 39, likely from consuming mercury, which he thought would make him immortal. He even took the substance with him to the grave; it's believed that a moat of mercury encircles his tomb. That has greatly complicated plans to excavate his tomb.
There are a number of other emperors who supposedly died from poisoned immortality pills. Five T'ang emperors, for example, fell prey to these supposed elixirs of life, including Emperor Xianzong, who is said to have gone so mad from his medication that his eunuchs eventually assassinated him. And not all of these alleged victims of immortality died in ancient times. According to some sources, the Jiajing Emperor was taking mercury pills in an attempt to extend his life, which may have contributed to his death in 1567.
Although Henry II of France was married to Catherine de' Medici, his closest companion during his life was the widow Diane de Poitiers. It probably didn't hurt that Diane was known for incredibly youthful beauty, which she maintained well into her life. It also makes sense that a woman famous for her youthful appearance would go to great lengths to preserve it.
In Diane's case, this meant drinking a concoction made of gold chloride and diethyl ether, which apothecaries claimed could prevent aging. Sadly, the substance slowly killed Diane, who perished at age 66, having been banished from court after Henry's death. Recent studies of Diane's hair show evidence of chronic gold poisoning.
Diane, of course, is hardly the only person ever to die to maintain an illusion of youth. There have been cases of people who died thanks to lead-based makeup
Also, an odd bit of trivia: Diane (who was often associated with the Roman goddess Diana) had her own symbol, a trio of crescent moons. Coincidentally, it resembles the biohazard symbol.
Chinese alchemists were hardly the only ones who believed that mercury might be a key ingredient in the elixir of life. Western alchemists sought to create the Philosopher's Stone, a substance that many believed could rejuvenate human beings — and perhaps even make them immortal. Mercury shows up in a great many Philosopher's Stone recipes.
Of course, handling that much mercury could be hazardous to an alchemist's health. For example, Sir Isaac Newton, who was deeply interested in creating the Philosopher's Stone
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard was a respected physiologist and neurologist, but he did something toward the end of his life that tarnished his scientific reputation. He started injecting himself with extracts from the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs, claiming that it was a rejuvenating substance. Brown-Séquard did remain quite virile until his death at age 76, but most of his peers chalked any benefits from his "Brown-Séquard Elixir" up to a placebo effect.
Convinced that he had discovered a bona fide fountain of youth, Brown-Séquard gave his formula away for free to other scientists. Some people dubbed it a miracle substance, while others... well, other people got pretty sick. There was at least one recorded death from Brown-Séquard Elixir, although it's not clear if the fellow who died knew what his doctor was giving him. (According to news reports at the time, the doctor disappeared shortly afterward, and the going theory was that the dead man's friends murdered him.)
The most famous user of the elixir was probably Pud Galvin
There has been some debate as to whether terminally ill people who want their bodies cryonically frozen should be able to have themselves frozen pre-mortem. In the case of Donaldson v. Van de. Kamp, Thomas A. Donaldson asked the California courts to declare that he had a constitutional right to premortem cryonic suspension. (Donaldson died and was ultimately cryopreserved in 2006.)
While cryonics facilities wait until after legal death to preserve a body, some people have hurried the process along. On its website, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation describes the case of a client who called for advice on how to kill himself so that he could be cryopreserved immediately. Eventually, the client shot himself and was, indeed, cryopreserved. He died in the hopes that he might someday be revived and see the future. From Alcor's perspective, though, all he did was reduce his odds of revivification.
The federal government dropped charges against an accused National Weather Service hydrologist last week, five months after she was arrested and charged
Xiafen Chen, a hydrologist for the National Weather Service office in Wilmington, Ohio, was arrested by the FBI on October 20, 2014 on suspicion that she illegally accessed and downloaded "sensitive files" from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams. The database stores sensitive data about every dam in the United States, including information about their hydroelectric operations and any potential weaknesses in the structures.
Chen was indicted on four counts related to the alleged incident: one on theft of government property, one on illegally accessing a government database, and two on providing false statements to federal agents. If found guilty of all four charges, Chen could have faced 25 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Although not part of the indictments against Chen, prosecutors planned to tell the jury that she had accessed the files with the intent to feed sensitive information to a water official she met in China while visiting her parents in the country in 2012. Chen's attorneys argued that this was beyond the prosecutors' scope, as she was never formally accused of disseminating the data she was charged with accessing and downloading.
[Defense attorney Peter] Zeidenberg and co-counsel Thomas Zeno had argued in court and in filings that the government overreached in trying to tie Chen to a colleague in China and seeking to bring up that connection to a jury.
"They, originally, thought that this could be some kind of a case of espionage and it turned out that it wasn't," Zeidenberg said. "She never provided any information that wasn't public to anyone."
Defense attorneys argued that prosecutors shouldn't be allowed to present "background noise" evidence about China when the charges only addressed that Chen used a co-worker's password to access and download information from the National Inventory of Dams.
Chen further asserts that she "didn't provide restricted information to anyone and had legitimate reasons to access the website." The Wall Street Journal reports that Chen only sent the Chinese official information that was publicly available.
The WSJ article further states that it's rare for the Justice Department to drop charges they've filed against individuals, and after conversations with federal prosecutors, Chen's attorney is "confident that 'as far as the government is concerned, this matter is resolved.'"
The National Weather Service suspended Chen without pay when she was arrested in October, and she's actively seeking reinstatement to her position with the office in Wilmington.
[Image: NWS Wilmington, Ohio]
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Remember Mars One? The mega-hyped, one way ticket to go start a colony on Mars assuming it could get a ship and funding and capable colonists and training facilities and the major technological advances necessary to make it all happen? Surprise! According to one finalist, the whole thing is pretty much a scam.
In an article published on Medium's Matter earlier today, Dr. Joseph Roche, a professor at Trinity College's School of Education in Dublin and Ph.D in physics and astrophysics, spilled on some of Mars One's many potential pitfalls
You get points for getting through each round of the selection process (but just an arbitrary number of points, not anything to do with ranking), and then the only way to get more points is to buy merchandise from Mars One or to donate money to them....
In February, finalists received a list of "tips and tricks" for dealing with press requests, which included this: "If you are offered payment for an interview then feel free to accept it. We do kindly ask for you to donate 75% of your profit to Mars One."
At least they asked kindly.
What's more, for a mission presumably seeking four ideal human specimens to survive in an impossibly harsh environment, the selection process seems awful lax. According to Roche, what was initially going to be a several-day-long, in-person interview and testing process eventually got whittled down to a measly, 10-minute Skype call. And from the sound of it, they weren't even a particularly illuminating 10 minutes:
Roche said he then had a short Skype conversation with Mars One's chief medical officer, Norbert Kraft, during which he was quizzed with questions from literature about Mars and the mission that Mars One had provided to all the applicants. No rigorous psychological or psychometric testing was part of the appraisal. Candidates were given a month to rote-learn the material before the interview.
It certainly doesn't help that the TV production company, Endemol, which would supposedly have brought in $6 billion, is now totally out of the picture. So, uh, good luck with those media points, guys.
You can head over to Matter to read more about Mars One's vast and varied flaws. And if it still sounds like a good idea after that, we have a great timeshare opportunity we'd love to discuss with you. [Matter]
Contact the author at ashley@gizmodo.com.
The last tweet Anthony Hill sent read, "Never say never." Two hours later, around 2 p.m. on March 9, he was shot dead. Reports and video footage, captured moments before his death, spotlight Hill's erratic behavior: the 26-year-old Air Force veteran had been wandering The Heights apartment complex naked, crawling on the ground, knocking on doors, and hanging from a balcony. When approached by Dekalb County police officer Robert Olsen, Hill charged the officer despite Olsen's pleas for him to stop. Though Olsen, who is a seven-year veteran of the police force, was equipped with a taser, he fatally shot an unarmed Hill twice.
Hill battled with bipolar disorder. Bridget Anderson, Hill's longtime girlfriend, said he'd been medically discharged from the Air Force some years back. Anderson told the Associated Press that Hill, who was saw himself as mixed-raced, was "being treated by a VA doctor for bipolar disorder but stopped taking his medication a week or two ago because he didn't like the side effects."
Three days before, on March 6, Tony Robinson, a 19-year-old in Madison, Wisconsin, was also gunned down by police. When officer Matt Kenny arrived at 1125 Williamson Street—the police dispatch recording claimed Robinson was "outside yelling and jumping in front of cars" and that "Tony hit one of his friends"—a scuffle ensued between the two, and Kenny, perhaps feeling threatened, shot Robinson. He died that evening at the hospital.
"There's no doubt that we have to be clear about this: [Robinson] was unarmed," Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said to reporters during a press briefing the next day. "That's going to make this all the more complicated for the investigators, for the public to accept."
Reports later identified Robinson as having battled with attention deficit disorder, anxiety, and depression. And though he was arrested last April in connection to an armed home invasion in Madison, he was typically known as a "friendly, sweet guy" to those who knew him.
The history of how police have handled confrontations with the mentally ill is tangled at best, and the most recent incidents—Dontre Hamilton
Given these recent events, are police, and communities, doing enough to bridle fatal killings of the mentally ill?
Crisis intervention training (CIT), which originated in Memphis in 1988, is required for officers in most states, and the average training runs 40 hours. The program has two basic goals: to improve officer and consumer safety, as well as to redirect mentally ill individuals from the criminal justice system to the health care system.
Before a Senate subcommittee last spring, CIT experts from the National Alliance of Mental Illness pointed out that only 15 percent of police jurisdictions have fully functioning CIT programs. The common misconception is that CIT is based solely on training officers, but this is not true. As Ret. Major Sam Cochran, one of the foremost experts in CIT, told me, programs also require community partnerships and coordination between government systems.
"CIT is more than training" he said. "If you start with only one component in place, it will not be sustainable."
Cochran stressed the importance of communities needing to evaluate the lack of mental and behavioral health services in their area, and that mental breaks might, too, be rooted in other issues facing communities, like homelessness and job scarcity.
"CIT should not be drafted as a law enforcement program," Cochran said. "It should be drafted as a community program. It's an ongoing effort, and we need mechanisms in place that can continually address long-term and short-term issues."
In December, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's announced plans to overhaul the city's approach to dealing with the mentally ill. There are currently more then 5,000 mentally ill New Yorkers in city jails. And according to the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC)—a national nonprofit and mental health advocacy organization—there are roughly 400,000 mentally ill men and women housed in prisons and jails nationwide, and 35,000 in state hospitals.
But what of those who are never afforded the option of arrest, due process and, if convicted, prison or psychiatric care? What about the Anthony Hills, Tony Robinsons, Kristiana Coignards, Dontre Hamiltons, and Ezell Fords of America? In each case, the officer made a judgment call, a life-ending decision that, now, calls into question the training methods of local law enforcement across the country. Are police properly trained to detect and manage supposed offenders and criminals afflicted by bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or depression?
Between 2012 and 2014, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice found police departments in Portland, Cleveland, and Albuquerque engaged in "unconstitutional uses of force against people in mental health crisis." The reports, which concluded that these local law agencies were "underdeveloped" in crisis training, noted how officers were not "suited to effectively deal with people with mental illness."
In an email to Gawker, TAC explained its hope for suppressing state violence against the mentally ill:
The lack of treatment options for people with severe mental illness has meant that members of law enforcement are ending up as frontline mental health workers. When someone in the middle of a psychiatric crisis encounters the police, there can be potentially deadly consequences, especially if the police are not trained. We need to have a better trained police force but fewer than half the U.S. population lives in communities where the most basic methods of diverting people with severe mental illness from the criminal justice system are being used, according to our report.
Mental health courts are one option, they divert qualifying criminal defendants from jail into community-based mental health treatment. Crisis intervention teams are another option and consist of specially trained officers who respond to service calls involving mental illness. Both programs have consistently been found to reduce the arrest and incarceration of individuals with severe mental illness.
Second, we need to enact policies that allow people with the most severe mental illness to receive treatment before a tragedy occurs. The majority of U.S. states are in need of significant improvements to their mental illness treatment laws to protect and provide for individuals in psychiatric crisis. Improvements in this area will decrease tragic encounters between people with severe mental illness and law enforcement.
A 2013 joint report released by TAC and the National Sheriffs' Association, which assessed data on justifiable homicides between 1980 and 2008, found that "at least half of the people shot and killed by police each year in this country have mental health problems." It is a staggering statistic, and one, I would wager, most people are unaware of.
Just weeks ago, Zachary Tumin, the NYPD's deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives, tweeted: "People off their meds r losing it & wlking into police bullets." A social media storm ensued, and Tumin later clarified what he meant. But the damage had already been done. "These situations are fraught with risk for cops and the mentally ill," he told the Daily News. We train for it. We train hard for it, but the solutions are not simply police—we can't have cops trying to solve these complex problems. It takes training and it also takes services."
Here in New York City, De Blasio's proposal attempts to attack some of these "complex problems" facing officers. According to the mayor's task force, the city plans to open two "clinical drop-off community centers" that will examine behavioral health and offer short-term care, require all officers to undergo specialized crisis training that helps identify and deal with the mentally ill, and add 2,000 openings citywide to supervised release programs. But will that be enough?
One of the national police models for crisis training and dealing with the mentally ill is in Dallas, Texas. As highlighted by Dana Goldstein for The Marshall Project, officers "participate in 17 typical scenarios in which actors pretend to be in the midst of a mental health crisis. Mentally ill and intellectually disabled members of the community speak with the trainees in small groups, so that officers can get comfortable with a broad range of disabilities." But the program is not without its challenges. "[C]ops were taught how to use defensive tactics to arrest a robbery or burglary suspect—verbal commands followed by physical force," program coordinator Herb Cotner told Goldstein. "But how do they recognize when they're dealing with someone who is not a criminal? That the crisis is being driven by mental illness?"
In Atlanta, where Hill was shot, officers receive four hours of mental health training a month. According to WXIA Atlanta, the officer who shot Hill "received four hours of training on the use of his taser, three hours of crisis intervention skills" and, in 2009, "received 40 hours of training on crisis intervention that focused on dealing with the mentally ill."
Cochran said that successful programs—like those in Memphis, Virginia, and Florida where the number of people put in jail decreased, and officer injury rate saw a reduction in regard to crisis calls—leverage community partnerships with local and national mental health organizations, and offer late-night and weekend care to those in need.
"What about community mental health services that should be open at 10 p.m. or on weekends? Do we have those in place?" Cochran said. "We can do great training, but if we are not addressing the system issues, then we will still be met with challenges."
Yesterday, graphic footage of a Dallas cop shooting Jason Harrison was made public. Harrison, who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, is seen holding a screwdriver as he exits his home. As Harrison stands in the front door, police approach him, asking the 38-year-old to "drop" the weapon. Harrison, staggering forward, does not drop the screwdriver. The cops fire. Still alive, he falls to the pavement, holding onto the screwdriver, unable to move.
The cops, with their guns pointed at Harrison, yell, "Drop it!... Drop it! Put it down." But it is clear that he is unable to move, and no longer poses a threat to them. "Drop it, guy," an officer yells again. Harrison would later die.
The family currently has a lawsuit against the city, and released the video hoping it will prompt discussion surrounding police training and policy reform as it pertains to mentally ill individuals.
"This is a perfect video for the Dallas Police Department to use in training as an example of what not to do," Harrison's older brother Sean told the Dallas Morning News. "You don't yell at them—that only agitates them."
When I asked Cochran if he thought preventing another Ezell Ford or Anthony Hill incident was a matter of officers being more empathetic towards the afflicted, and if CIT helped, he answered bluntly.
"Yes, it does," he said. "CIT programs aren't perfect. I know what [officers] are walking away from when they leave the program—great training. But what are they walking into? If training programs and partnerships are fragmented, then we're just putting people in jail."
Or worse.
Days before Hill sent his last tweet, he wrote: "I am thankful to be something other than normal. I don't fight my circumstance, I embrace it. I love myself. Always #IAmBipolar"
[Image via AP]
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In a dark omen for the denizens of Idaho, thousands of dead snow geese rained down from the sky this weekend, seeding the state's fair plains with infected bird guts.
"Basically, they just fell out of the sky," Idaho Fish and Game spokesman Gregg Losinski tells Reuters.
Investigators, declining to comment on potential supernatural causes, attribute the 2,000-strong bird storm to avian cholera.
A Fish and Game press release assures readers, "Humans are not at a high risk of infection," but also contains a worrying combination of the words "eagles" "feeding" "infected" "birds" "carcasses" and "delayed incubation period."
According to Schmidt, "The important thing is to quickly collect as many of the carcasses as possible, to prevent other birds from feeding on the infected birds." In the case of Mud Lake WMA, biologists observed about twenty eagles in the vicinity of some of the carcasses. Because of a delayed incubation period it is uncertain where these eagles might be located, if and when the avian cholera affects them.
If the public observes dead birds, they are asked to call and report the location to the Upper Snake Regional Office at 208-525-7290.
Image via AP. Contact the author of this post at gabrielle@gawker.com
Scandal-prone Illinois Representative Aaron Schock is resigning from Congress, effective March 31, according to a statement Schock provided to Politico. It reads, in part:
The constant questions over the last six weeks have proven a great distraction that has made it too difficult for me to serve the people of the 18th District with the high standards that they deserve and which I have set for myself. I have always sought to do what’s best for my constituents and I thank them for the opportunity to serve.
Those “constant questions” revolve around Schock’s Downton
Politico reporter Jake Sherman initially broke the news on Twitter, where he wrote that Schock’s resignation came shortly after Politico “questioned mileage reimbursements” filed by his office.
According to documents Sherman and two other Politico reporters obtained under Illinois’ Freedom of Information Act, the Congressman “billed the federal government and his campaign for logging roughly 170,000 miles on his personal car between January 2010 and July 2014. But when he sold that Chevrolet Tahoe in July 2014, it had only roughly 80,000 miles on the odometer ... in other words [he] was reimbursed for 90,000 miles more than his car was ever driven.”
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