Jet jockeys gotta be able to see. I mean, once their jet gets off the ground, which the F-35 will, eventually, at some point in the next two decades, after 19 years and a trillion or so dollars in development. In the meantime, check out this boss helmet for F-35 pilots that costs about as much as a city in South Dakota.

They call 'er the "F-35 Gen III Helmet Mounted Display System (HMDS)... the world's most advanced biocular helmet-mounted display system," according to the company that hawks it to the Pentagon for $400K a pop. And it's, like, some super Lord of the Rings Jumanji Avatar magic carpet-ride shit:

The helmet sees through the plane. Or rather it helps the pilot see through the plane. When the pilots look down, they don't see the floor of the plane; they see the world below them. If the pilots look back, they see the sky behind them. Embedded in the skin of the aircraft are six cameras, and when the pilots move their heads to look in a particular direction, they are actually seeing through the corresponding camera, which sends an image to projectors inside the helmet that beam an image of the outside world on the helmet's visor...

"When the helmet's tuned correctly to the pilot's eyes, you almost step into this other world where all this information comes in," said Al Norman, an F-35 test pilot for Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor. "You can look through the jet's eyeballs to see the world as the jet sees the world."

And if the magic helmets work nicely in the as-yet undelivered and many-years-behind-schedule F-35 boondoggle, manufacturer Rockwell Collins hopes to hawk them to the Army for helicopter pilots. The Army has a lot of helicopters and helicopter pilots. That's a lot of baksheesh. Assuming, you know, the helmets work nicely. Which they haven't so far, according to the Washington Post:

Earlier versions were jittery when the plane hit turbulence. There was a latency in the video, which caused pilots motion sickness. The night vision technology didn't work as well as it should have. There was a "green glow" that obscured the pilots' view. Things got so bad that in 2011 the Pentagon hired BAE Systems to build a back-up helmet in case the one in development couldn't be rescued.

And Defensetech:

When a news team from the CBS News program, "60 Minutes," visited the Marine Corps station in Yuma, Ariz., a helmet malfunction caused a scheduled flight to be scrubbed, according to a Feb. 16 segment about the plane.

In case you're curious, the military currently uses smart helmets that cost about $243,000 per unit, courtesy of Boeing. But they have the added advantage of actually working in fighter jets that actually get off the ground. Proof of concept, motherfuckers!

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: FD97 D50A DE57 3943 4534 1A49 FA8B 74B4 A7A0 07BE

Three people were killed and eight more were injured when a van carrying two heavy metal bands crashed early this morning in northeast Georgia.

Georgia State Patrol officers told WSB-TV that the driver, who was uninjured, apparently fell asleep just after 7 a.m., causing to van veer down an embankment and crash into a tree. The accident occurred on I-85, about 65 miles northeast of Atlanta.

“The driver lost control, either by going to sleep or some other means, we're still investigating that. He left the roadway, travelled about 300 feet off the roadway and struck a tree with the passenger side of the van,” Georgia State Patrol Cpl. Scott Smith said.

The side of the van was ripped off, and three passengers were ejected. Of the eight people injured, three are in critical condition, and Fox 5 reports that two of the injuries are life-threatening. The three passengers who died have not yet been publicly identified.

The 12 passengers were all members of the metal bands Atlanta-based Khaotika and Huntsville, Ala.- based Wormreich. The bands, along with a third, Kult ov Azazel, were on their way to Atlanta for a show Monday night.

Cpl. Smith told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution that the band members “appeared to be in their late 20s or early 30s… from all over, from Virginia to North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, from all different states.”

Image via WSB-TV. H/T NY Daily News. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

With an odd sense of fanfare, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism last night produced a 13,000-word report on Rolling Stone's profoundly flawed account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, "A Rape on Campus," that was published last November. Their conclusion? Rolling Stone fucked up a lot.

Missing from Columbia's intense vivisection of the article, however, was a sense of responsibility: Whose fault was this crime against journalism, exactly? According to Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner, no one's, really. No one at the magazine, a baby-boomer favorite, will be dismissed for journalistic malpractice, even though Wenner loves to fire people for seemingly innocuous transgressions. Will Dana and Sean Woods, who edited the story, tried to resign in December, but were refused. Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote the article, will continue to write for the magazine. Wenner, quoted in the New York Times today, is blaming the victim.

The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s journalism process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

This is an incredible statement coming from a magazine publisher with 40-odd years of experience and three titles under his belt (Us Weekly produces some great journalism) who is known for his mercurial temper and preference for workplace fastidiousness (apparently he values clean desks over clean journalism). Sure, there have been instances of publications getting hosed by young, manipulative employees (Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass), but blaming a source because you did not investigate her thoroughly enough is astonishingly idiotic.

Here's what happened at Rolling Stone: pathological conflict-avoidance. Every workaround deployed in this story, from not securing the alleged rapist's name before publication to not interviewing the rape victim's friends, was put in place in order to avoid a difficult, uncomfortable situation. Underlying it all is sense of grand interpersonal failures. I'm not going to delve into writing Rolling Stone editorial fanfic, but it's fairly clear that something was awry between the personalities at play here. Whether it was regular workaday pressures—"Ahh, who has time to scrap the main gang-rape anecdote before deadline and get another?"—or something more insidious, whatever culture that bred this story is poisonous. And for Wenner, a rich, powerful 69-year-old man, to place culpability for his magazine's lapse on a twentysomething pseudonymous woman, well, that tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it?

Later in the same Times article, Wenner goes from blaming the article's source to blaming the article's author. A step in the right direction, maybe, but notice here how Wenner paints Erdely as a reckless woman on a mission to bring down the story's editor with her:

Ms. Erdely, Mr. Wenner said, “was willing to go too far in her effort to try and protect a victim of apparently a horrible crime. She dropped her journalistic training, scruples and rules and convinced Sean to do the same. There is this series of falling dominoes.”

"Convinced" is an interesting word choice here. Who was in charge of this story? Certainly not Erdely. Was Woods's editorial judgment neutered by her passion for rape victims, as Wenner indicates? Considering Erdely's side of the story, as depicted in Columbia's report, Woods was neither a careful, rigorous, thoughtful nor attentive editor. The domino fall should have stopped with him, but it did not, because of his failings—whether he did not stand up to Erdely, did not push her enough, or was inexperienced with the subject matter. Instead, he chose to work around the problem at hand, defusing a potential conflict with Erdely and severely damaging the credibility of her story.

Woods's lack of sensitivity and journalistic finesse is apparent in his boneheaded "apology:" "Ultimately, we were too deferential to our rape victim; we honored too many of her requests in our reporting," Woods said in the Columbia report. "We should have been much tougher, and in not doing that, we maybe did her a disservice." Maybe!

In another article in the Times today (today is honorary Rolling Stone Fucked Up day in medialand), Jonathan Mahler, a media reporter, hints that gender might have had something to do with the nuclear fallout of the article.

So what happened with “A Rape on Campus”? It is hard not to wonder if gender was a contributing factor. The magazine’s publisher and managing editor, and the editor of the article, were all men. Did that make them wary, consciously or not, of pushing back against a female writer’s account of a young woman’s rape?

I'll go one step further than Mahler. Yes! Gender definitely had to do with how fucked up this article was. Consider Rolling Stone. A fine magazine, if you're into the Black Crowes, war, and Matt Taibbi. Will Dana and Sean Woods have edited some wonderful dispatches from Baghdad. But as the Columbia report starkly shows, they were clearly entirely out of their wheelhouse when it came to Erdely's report, and instead of, maybe, I don't know, consulting with women, asking women for help, or trying to understand what was at stake, they just barreled on forward like they were still on General McChrystal's plane (it's worth noting that both the head of fact-checking at Rolling Stone and the fact-checker on the story were women, but any higher-level editorial decisions did not fall to them). It brings to mind Grantland's Dr. V disaster—this is what happens when people who think they know everything get too swept up in a story and lose sight of reality. It's very bad.

Rolling Stone's claim that it doesn't need to change anything institutionally is hilariously self-defeating. The ultimate fault of "A Rape on Campus" does not lie with a bad source, a bad journalist or a couple of bad editors. It falls on the empire's leader, Wenner, who should take full responsibility for the article, fire everyone involved, and then fire himself for being a dumb, sexist idiot.

Contact the author at leah@gawker.com.

Photo via Getty

Firing back at former SeaWorld trainer John Hargrove, who was featured in the 2013 documentary Blackfish, the theme park released a five-year-old cell phone video of a clearly drunk Hargrove shouting "nigger" to a friend on speakerphone.

The video's release follows the publication of Hargrove's critical account of his time as a SeaWorld orca trainer, Beneath the Surface, last month.

In the five-minute clip, Hargrove can be seen asking a friend to a recount a story where a group of black people apparently threw rocks at her when she was drunk. “So you definitely whipped around and you said, ‘What are you niggers doing throwing them rocks?’” Hargrove shouts into the phone multiple times over the course of the video, an empty bottle of wine the frame. The woman on the phone appears to deny having said the epithet.

Fred Jacobs, a SeaWorld rep, told the Orlando Sentinel that the video was apparently sent to them by an "internal whistleblower." "The video is particularly reprehensible since John Hargrove is wearing a SeaWorld shirt," Jacobs told the paper. "SeaWorld would have terminated Hargrove's employment immediately had we known he engaged in this kind of behavior."

Hargrove, meanwhile, decries the video's leak as part of a smear campaign against him. "These are all just personal attacks to try to slander me and my character," Hargrove told the Sentinel. "This is so typical of SeaWorld. If they're going to pull up videos and say he was drunk one night and used a derogatory word...these are petty, childish attempts to discredit somebody."

petty, childish attempts to discredit somebody

Hm. Seems to me that being caught screaming and repeating racial slurs does plenty to discredit yourself.

[Video via Orlando Sentinel]

Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications, received total compensation of $156.1 million in 2014, a year in which the company's stock price fell by 25%. If you can find a justification for that, then you have what it takes to become a CEO.

On Friday afternoon, two narcotics officers with the Burbank, Calif., police department reportedly showed up at Tom DeVocht's door on an anonymous tip—complete with dubious photographic evidence—that the former Scientology executive was selling drugs in the area. The documentary Going Clear, in which DeVocht appeared as an interviewee, had premiered on HBO five days before. Was the apparent frame job the church's way of getting revenge?

DeVocht thinks so, and Scientology's track record would seem to back him up. DeVocht, an ex-confidant of megalomaniacal church leader David Miscavige, told Scientology-centric journalist Tony Ortega that he's noticed private investigators watching him from a park near his home in the weeks since Going Clear's release. In the film, DeVocht alleges that Miscavige regularly requested and read reports from Tom Cruise's "auditing" sessions, sharing the personal secrets gleaned from those reports with other Scientologists and using them as fodder for jokes.

Adam Baumgarten, one of the narcotics officers, showed DeVocht a picture that had been taken of him sitting in his car, holding "a quart-sized plastic bag with something white inside." Ortega writes:

DeVocht says Baumgarten told him, “Somebody dropped this off on my desk. I don’t know why it was on my desk. But we were tipped off that you might be dealing drugs, and the photos show you supposedly with drugs in your car.”...

Tom then explained what they were seeing in the photographs. He and his girlfriend often go on hikes and like to carry snacks with them in his car. The quart bag he was holding, he pointed out, was filled with popcorn.

“It’s not a big deal. We’re not here to arrest you,” Baumgarten told him.

(De Vocht posted a photo to Facebook showing some of the alleged snacks in question.)

DeVocht's theory—that someone working for the church had taken the photos and provided them to the police as a way to harass him—might seem desperate and paranoid if he were discussing any entity but Scientology, an organization with a rich and documented history of surveilling and harassing ex-members and other critics.

In an email to Burbank PD, DeVocht urged the investigating officers to consider who they might be dealing with. And if they weren't familiar, he wrote, they might consider watching the movie.

"They have had PIs following me, and I have reported this to the Burbank Police department — it should be on file. Please take a look online for my name and you will see this for yourself. Also, please watch Going Clear or at least find out about it."

[Photo via Going Clear]

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Without giving too much away, here's the final scene of Furious 7 that had America's audiences (myself included) pretending that their allergies were acting up. It's a real goddamn tearjerker.

On Sunday night, Vin Diesel shared the new music video for one of the soundtrack's original songs, "See You Again" by Wiz Khalifa featuring singer Charlie Puth. While it isn't exactly what the viewer sees in theaters, it does feature the movie's montage tribute to Walker and his final scene with Diesel tacked onto the end. "See You Again" plays out as they drive away, down diverging roads.

Furious 7, which opened on Friday, has already pulled in $384 million in worldwide weekend box office sales—that's fifty percent more than the sixth film's debut. If you haven't seen it yet, bring some tissues and a box of Junior Mints (good movie snack!).

Vani Hari, AKA the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following in her Food Babe Army. The recent subject of profiles and interviews in the New York Times, the New York Post and New York Magazine, Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She's also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by "breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life." She and her army are out to change the world.

She's also utterly full of shit.

I am an analytical chemist with a background in forensics and toxicology. Before working full-time as a science writer and public speaker, I worked as a chemistry professor, a toxicology chemist, and in research analyzing pesticides for safety. I now run my own blog, Science Babe, dedicated to debunking pseudoscience that tends to proliferate in the blogosphere. Reading Hari's site, it's rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word "toxin" anytime there's a chemical she can't pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it's hard to pinpoint her biggest sin.

Hari's superhero origin story is that she came down with appendicitis and didn't accept the explanation that appendicitis just happens sometimes. So she quit her job as a consultant, attended Google University and transformed herself into an uncredentialed expert in everything she admittedly can't pronounce. Slap the catchy moniker "Food Babe" on top, throw in a couple of trend stories and some appearances on the Dr. Oz show, and we have the new organic media darling.

But reader beware. Here are some reasons why she's the worst assault on science on the internet.

Natural, Organic, GMO-Free Fear

Hari's campaign last year against the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte drove me to launch my site (don't fuck with a Bostonian's Pumpkin-Spice Anything). She alleged that the PSL has a "toxic" dose of sugar and two (TWO!!) doses of caramel color level IV in carcinogen class 2b.

The word "toxic" has a meaning, and that is "having the effect of a poison." Anything can be poisonous depending on the dose. Enough water can even be poisonous in the right quantity (and can cause a condition called hyponatremia).

But then, the Food Babe has gone on record to say, "There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever." I wonder if anybody's warned her about good old dihydrogen monoxide?

(AKA water.)

It's a goddamn stretch to say that sugar has deleterious effects, other than making your Lululemons stretch a little farther if you don't "namaste" your cheeks off. However, I implore you to look at the Safety Data Sheet for sugar. The average adult would need to ingest about fifty PSLs in one sitting to get a lethal dose of sugar. By that point, you would already have hyponatremia from an overdose of water in the lattes.

And almost enough caffeine for me.

And what about that "carcinogenic" caramel color? Well, it turns out that it's not the only thing in your PSL that's in carcinogen class 2b.

There's also coffee.

Coffee is class 2b because of the acrylamide accumulated during the roasting process. Coffee, before Starbucks turns it into a milkshake, is pretty healthy for you. Class 2b means that all possible carcinogenic effects haven't been ruled out (because we haven't tested drinking it while tightrope walking across the Grand Canyon and simultaneously attempting to eat fire… yet), but that it hasn't been shown to cause a single case of cancer.

This is a blatant attempt at getting you to look to her for answers by making you unnecessarily afraid. The goal of Hari's campaign was to… well, we're still not sure. Remove the caramel color? Smear Starbucks? After that campaign failed, she launched a failed attempt to get them to use only organic milk, which would have made their lattes far more expensive and no healthier.

Hari uses this tricky technique again and again. If I told you that a chemical that's used as a disinfectant, used in industrial laboratory for hydrolysis reactions, and can create a nasty chemical burn is also a common ingredient in salad dressing, would you panic? Be suspicious that the industries were poisoning your children? Think it might cause cancer? Sign a petition to have it removed?

What if I told you I was talking about vinegar, otherwise known as acetic acid?

This is Hari's business. She takes innocuous ingredients and makes you afraid of them by pulling them out of context (Michelle Francl, in a review of Hari's book for Slate, expertly demonstrates the shallowness of this gimmick). This is how Hari demonized the harmless yet hard-to-pronounce azodicarbonamide, or as she deemed it, the "yoga mat chemical," which is yes, found in yoga mats and also in bread, specifically Subway sandwich bread, a discovery Hari bombastically trumpeted on her website. However, as the science-minded among us understand, a substance can be used for more than one thing perfectly safely, and it doesn't mean that your bread is made of a yoga mat if it happens to contain azodicarbonamide, which is FDA-approved as a dough-softening agent. It simply means your bread is composed of chemicals, much like everything else you eat.

Hari's rule? "If a third grader can't pronounce it, don't eat it."

My rule? Don't base your diet on the pronunciation skills of an eight-year-old.

A Force to Disagree With

In a recent blog post, Hari accused several of her detractors of having nefarious ties to sinister organizations. These evildoers included Dr. Joe Schwarcz, the director for Science and Society at McGill University, Dr. Steve Novella, a Yale-educated neurologist and contributor to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, and Dr. Kevin Folta, the horticultural chair at the University of Florida. Why? Because these highly credentialed scientists had the nerve to use facts against Hari. Dr. Schwarcz speaks out regularly about her tactics. Dr. Novella debunked some wild claims of hers about the science of microwaves. And Dr. Folta said "she found that a popular social media site was more powerful than science itself, more powerful than reason, more powerful than actually knowing what you're talking about."

But could any of these scientists' criticisms possibly have merit? Not to Hari. She has flung these accusations at Dr. Folta multiple times. He's responded on his personal blog and has released his email correspondence to prove that he has no financial connections to hide. And yet, Hari has not recanted.

Moreover, the tireless crusader for transparency doesn't want you to pay attention to the bullshit behind the curtain. And it's not just when scientists point it out in the news–it's when anybody questions her on her Facebook page.

There's a group on Facebook called "Banned By Food Babe" that boasts nearly 6,000 members. Reasons for being banned include "I asked for her qualifications" and "I pointed out that water was a chemical." Some members of the page were former fans of hers who were banned when they asked questions of clarification. Any dissent couldn't possibly have merit within the ranks of the Food Babe Army.

And when Hari's been questioned about silencing critics by news outlets? She consistently says that she won't be silenced by people who are haters and shills, racist or sexist.

If she thinks she's being attacked for being a woman, she's missed that she's not the only "babe" in this discussion.

If her arguments had merit, she could engage in a battle of wits with her detractors instead of making insidious accusations. It's not about Hari, the woman who gets home at the end of the day, maybe gives her dog an (organic) treat and watches some crappy TV show. It's about Food Babe LLC, the business organization that spreads terribly inaccurate science.

It's about statements like this:

"The enzymes released from kale go in to your liver and trigger cancer fighting chemicals that literally dissolve unhealthy cells throughout your body."

One of her outspoken critics, Kavin Senapathy, is a writer at Grounded Parents and a contributor at the Genetic Literacy Project. Senapathy has said that the Food Babe "exploits the scientific ignorance of her followers." With a background in genomics, Senapathy is a science writer and likewise an Indian American woman, but I'm sure it's a much more comforting narrative in the Food Babe Army to say that we're all just sexists and racists.

Is It Made With Real Girl Scouts?

How many companies or products do you think it would make sense to crusade against in the course of a career? One? Three? A dozen?

Hari has declared, to date, more than 610 products and companies to be unsafe over the course of four years.

According to Hari, the problem with most of them, including Girl Scout Cookies: GMOs and pesticides. She's even alleged that an apple can be worse for you than a hot fudge sundae, if it's not organic.

And is there even a shred of truth to this? Not in the least. Hari claims going organic will save you from pesticides, but organic farming uses pesticides too. Some of them are far more toxic than conventional pesticides. (Remember, the dose makes the poison. Neither apple would have enough pesticide by the time it reaches market to be harmful.)

The difference between organic and conventional? For a product that's no healthier, organic is more expensive and they give Hari a commission.

As for those GMOs in the Girl Scout Cookies, fret ye not. In order to introduce a genetically modified crop into the food supply, they have to be proven to be nutritionally indistinguishable from their non-GM counterparts.

Maybe Hari's crusades would be OK if she had the facts to back them up. But she doesn't, and worse, when she's wrong, she tries to make her errors disappear.

Recently, a writer from the New York Times contacted me to ask for some background on Hari. I was happy to oblige. She was looking for the articles for which Hari had been widely criticized and that were conspicuously absent from her Facebook page. Hari had told the writer that she couldn't recall those articles.

Luckily, the internet never forgets.

If you want proof that Hari doesn't research anything before she puts it online, look no further than this article on airplanes, which she deleted from her site. She claimed that pilots control the air in an airplane, so you should sit near the front to breathe better air. She wrote that passengers are sometimes sprayed with pesticides before flights, and that airplane air is pumped full of nitrogen.

Please recall high school science, in which you hopefully learned that the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Also, if anyone has personally been sprayed with pesticides before a flight, please email me, I would love to talk to you about it (not really).

The other piece of writing that she unsuccessfully attempted to cleanse from the bowels of the internet claimed that microwaves are like small nuclear reactors, and they make water crystalize the same way it does when you say "Hitler" or "Satan" to it, because water has ears and a grasp of early twentieth-century European dictators.

Feel Better—Detox and Definitely Don't Vaccinate!

Food Babe has written that, in order to deal with the flu, you should take vitamins, get sunshine, and "encounter the flu naturally." In other words, her advice is to get the flu, an infection that kills an average of 31,000 people annually.

A PSA: Please remember that when you vaccinate, you help protect the people around you who cannot vaccinate. You protect people who are immunocompromised, who are going through cancer treatments, and who are on immunosupressants. If you catch the flu, you become a disease vector and can easily infect more people.

"I won't eat any of these ingredients or even put them on my body," Hari wrote of the components that make up the flu vaccine. "However, the mainstream medical community, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies suggest that I directly inject these ingredients into my bloodstream? And I need do it every year until I die? Are you freaking kidding me?"

Nope! Not kidding. The flu is serious. To scare people into not taking every measure they can against a deadly disease mortifies me. Hari has denied that she's anti-vax, but all the reasons she has for avoiding the flu vaccine are ones anti-vaxxers hold near and dear to their hearts for letting their children suffer. Toxins. Aluminum. Mercury. The usual suspects.

But hey, the next time you're down with a bug, follow Hari's lead and detox your way out of it. Who doesn't want to lose a few pounds, feel better, and have more energy? Hari will help, for only $9/per bottle from her sponsor, Suja.

In Hari's non-defense, they're "only" $6 per bottle from Suja's website.

But wait, didn't she say that the Pumpkin Spice Lattes had a toxic dose of sugar at fifty grams in a grande? So why does she endorse Suja when it has forty-two grams of sugar and even comes with a warning on its website that it's not suitable for diabetics?

It's probably because detox is complete bullshit.

In order to buy into the premise that you need detoxing, you first have to be "toxed." The common enemies they claim that juice can clean out of your system are heavy metals and pesticides. The bullshit? Those don't cause allergies, acne, weight gain, or whatever symptom she's using to scare you into buying overpriced juice this week. Heavy metal toxicity has specific symptoms, and actual pesticide poisoning is really scary.

Neither can be fixed by fruit juice. Not even organic fruit juice.

You're constantly "detoxing" just by living. Your kidneys and liver take care of cleaning out unnecessary things in the body fairly efficiently on their own. Proof? The toilet paper industry.

Go Ahead, Lie About Your Food Allergies

We've already established that Hari has a fickle relationship with the truth. How about the definition of the word "allergy"? That seems basic enough. An allergy is an immune system overreaction. Life-threatening food allergies are serious.

And this one is very serious.

Hari claimed that she's allergic to refined sugar in a blog entry in which she also wrote about about all the desserts she's eaten. But only refined sugar, because apparently short-chain carbohydrates are only evil if they're not from one of her approved sponsored sugar sources. So, I guess she can just eat these now that her acupuncturist diagnosed and treated her for this alleged sugar allergy.

Alleged. Because she's admitted that she's fine with lying about allergies.

"Go as far as telling the server you are allergic to butter and dairy, soy and corn," she writes. "Butter really isn't bad for you if it is organic and you use it in moderation – but restaurants can go crazy with it, adding several hundred extra calories you can live without."

This is a problem.

I have celiac disease, and there are people with genuine life-threatening allergies. When people like me go into a restaurant, we're at the whim of a waiter who may have just served twenty fussy assholes from the Food Babe Army who think that gluten causes your spleen to turn radioactive, or whatever lie she's using to sell organic kale dipped in yak's butter this week. So when I tell a server that I can't do gluten, that waiter might roll their eyes at me because of people like Vani Hari.

Well, people like Hari and her Food Babe Army. Changing the world, one lie at a time.

Yvette d'Entremont holds bachelor's degrees in theatre and chemistry along with a master's degree in forensic science. With a background working as an analytical chemist, she currently runs Science Babe full time. Her site has become a reliable mix of debunking pseudoscience with humor and science. She lives in southern California with her dog, Buddy. Follow her at fb.com/sciencebabe and scibabe.com.

[Photo via Getty]

It's bad enough that the "broken windows theory" of policing, with its constant harassment of small-time hustlers, is back in vogue in New York City. Do they have to steal the churros, too?

DNA Info reports today on the plight of churro vendors in the NYC subway system. It sounds like a real pain in the neck! First of all, because you are necessarily already poor in order to work full time as a subway churro vendor. Second of all, because NYPD officers are constantly ticketing or arresting you for selling food without a license. And third of all because they are stone cold eating your churros.

Once police arrest [churro vendor Ana] Alvarado, they confiscate the churros and take her to the local precinct, where she’s had to watch police officers eat her churros in front of her, she said. Then they toss what’s left of her inventory into a bag, she said.

“They take the churros, saying they need them for evidence and that they will return them, but they don’t return them,” said Alvarado, in Spanish. “When they get to the precinct, whoever wants one grabs one, and whatever is left they put in a black bag.”

Give back the churros man.

#NYPD #StopStealingChurros.

(With all due respect to hardworking subway churro vendors, cold churros are gross.)

[Photo: Flickr]

The wealth of information available online puts the world at our fingertips—literally! You can click a link and look at a picture taken from space just a few minutes ago. This treasure trove of data is great, but it takes smart consumption to grow smarter about the world around us. Not all sources of weather information are equal, and we need to learn what sources are worth listening to, and which ones are peddling a load of sleet.

The internet is a loud place, and it takes a strong voice for people to hear your words above the noise. Some of us have had lucky breaks that afford us the opportunity to communicate with a huge audience on a pretty sizable soapbox, but most people in the weather community have to compete for eyes on the vast expanses of social media.

The incredible amount of weather information on the internet—surface observations, radar and satellite images, weather model data—allows just about anyone with a passing knowledge of high school earth science to act like a meteorologist, building a pretty decent following on Twitter and Facebook by posting weather information, whether it's accurate or not. Some of these pages grow into traffic juggernauts, emboldening their less-than-informed owners to use their reach to advance their own popularity or ad revenues with false or misleading weather information.

One of the growing problems in the weather world over the past couple of years has been the rapid uptick in the number of "social mediarologists," to use a term popularized by The Weather Channel's Sunday afternoon talk show, WXGeeks. Almost every weather geek fell in love with the weather when they were young, and most of us grew up on limited amounts of information. I was fortunate enough to grow up during meteorology's internet boom—the tools were there to let me watch storms thousands of miles away race across the landscape in real-time, but I couldn't really do anything about it. You could just watch and learn, absorbing knowledge and gaining early experience without the possibility of getting in above your head and doing harm.

Today, not only can middle and high schoolers look at in-depth weather data, but they can build themselves a sizeable audience by spreading information about the weather, the nuances of which they know little about. Some of these folks are derisively called "weather weenies"—the worst offenders among them spread false or misleading weather information either out of ignorance or malicious intent. They look at the models one or two weeks out, see a huge snowstorm that would never happen in the real world, and tout it on their Facebook page as a huge blizzard that's about to paralyze the area. They can take a model forecast five days in advance, see huge amounts of instability and rotation in the atmosphere, and take to Facebook urging people to LIKE and SHARE to warn others about "the next great tornado outbreak," ignoring any of the conditions that would likely inhibit such an event.

We have to deal with hoaxes and false alarms every season. Last summer, there was an ugly hurricane hoax that spread across the internet like wildfire, scaring coastal residents into thinking they were going to get hit by a storm that didn't exist. Every winter we deal with people circulating outlandish model forecasts that show feet upon feet of snow dumping on some major metro area, when the real weather turns out to be 45 sunny degrees. It's not so much an issue of people spreading incorrect forecasts as it is people spreading false information to beef up their own popularity.

As we head deeper into tornado season, you're going to start seeing one ugly theme crop up from less reputable sources: April 27. Comparing severe weather outbreaks to April 27 is like a politician invoking September 11 whenever they need to drum up support for their platform. If you're not familiar with the date, the largest tornado outbreak in recorded history unfolded across the southern and eastern United States on April 27, 2011, spawning 211 tornadoes that killed 313 people. It was a traumatic event for many people who lived through it, and to this day local meteorologists have to calm people down by assuring them that an upcoming round of severe thunderstorms won't be like April 27.

Now, you can imagine the viral power a blog post or Facebook status could have—especially in the southeastern United States—if one were to compare a potential tornado outbreak to April 27, and some people with larger followings are capitalizing on this unsavory trend. The prospect of getting thousands of likes, shares, comments, and clicks is too compelling for some folks to come to grips with the fact that they're preying on people's fears and trust, thereby eroding overall trust in actual meteorologists who are more interested in getting it right than stroking their egos.

It's not just weenies who run into this—some meteorologists and news stations are guilty of overhyping severe weather events, too. It's kind of like CNN's overuse of "breaking news": if everything is breaking news, is anything really breaking news anymore? Hyping severe weather breeds complacency. No longer is saying "dangerous thunderstorms are possible tomorrow" sufficient—we need to add scary adjectives and use terms like "catastrophic damage expected" to grab people's attention. The National Weather Service is in the process of experimenting with stronger wording than "tornado warning," because warning people that there's a tornado down the street isn't enough to force them to seek shelter anymore.

We already have to deal with hoaxes created by bad "satire" websites and the usual troublemakers, so if you're a weather enthusiast with a large following, please don't stir people up by claiming that a potential tornado outbreak could be the next April 27. Keep some perspective and stick to the facts, not what you want to see happen. One of the fundamental principles that guides doctors should also guide people who communicate weather information to the public: first, do no harm. If you're purposely hyping, misrepresenting, or flat-out lying about a major weather event, you're doing more harm than good, even if you don't think so.

It's impossible to police bad behavior on the internet, of course, so it ultimately lands at the readers' feet to figure out what's worthy of one's attention. You should always get your weather information from a trusted source, whether it's the National Weather Service, a well-respected weather company, local news meteorologists, or even your favorite weather blog like The Vane (cough) or the ones run by meteorologists like Cliff Mass or David Epstein.

You should always be suspicious of weather information you see on sites like Facebook or Twitter, especially if the information sounds too good or scary to be true. A weather forecast could save your life one day, so it's important to know what you're consuming in order to make informed decisions. It all comes down to trust but verify.

[Top Image: Timothy Vogel via Flickr | Map by the author]

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In February of 2009, a man waving signs interrupted a meeting of the Sarasota City Commission to stand before the microphone and make a remarkable claim: John Lennon—shot and killed on December 8, 1980—had not been murdered by deranged Catcher in the Rye fan Mark David Chapman, but by none other than popular author Stephen King.

"Stephen King is the worst criminal the state of Florida has ever harbored," Steve Lightfoot said, before being peacefully escorted out of the council chambers. King was a part-time resident of Casey Key, which is under Sarasota City jurisdiction. "I'm from California. I'm known by ten percent of Florida. I'm known by fifty percent of California. I'm the man exposing the truth about John Lennon's murder."

"Stephen King," Lightfoot said, "shot John Lennon."

Just hours before he was shot outside his home at the Dakota, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a photograph was taken of John Lennon signing a copy of his album Double Fantasy for a fan whose blurry face can be seen in the background. That person was later identified to the public as Mark David Chapman—the photo was widely published after the shooting. (The record is available for sale for $1,250,000.)

According to his website LennonMurderTruth.com, Lightfoot writes that he was well-acquainted with this photograph when one day, a few months after initiating his investigation into Lennon's death, he came across a photo of someone he thought was the same man:

A face rolled by on the microfiche and it looked like the assassin getting John's autograph that the media showed the world. I rolled it back and knew it was him based on the coded head-line:" One great big Zippo lighter ." which describes the murder scene, then three months to come, of a man in a raincoat at night with a gun blazing fire in the night.I had no idea who Stephen King was, the man attached to the headline, and was under the impression that King was an alias. I compared the face to the autograph hound and saw it was, indeed, the same exact person.

Here are the two photographs in question, via LennonMurderTruth.com:

There is certainly a resemblance. But why would Stephen King kill John Lennon? Because Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan wanted it done.

In 1971, while running for re-election, Richard Nixon had tried and failed to have Lennon deported. In a photograph accompanying a news story pegged to Reagan's inauguration as president, Lightfoot explains, the former Hollywood star is pictured with a copy of Nixon's book The Real War.

According to Lightfoot, Nixon writes in The Real War, "the prancing of the trendies… rock stars… beautiful people of New York… who say war is bad and peace is good… must be removed from the stage of public debate…by whatever means… a flyswatter… are needed."

Lightfoot believes that Reagan took up the cause, and had Lennon killed. "Chapman is a paid patsy. A decoy. A King look-alike who was waiting in the police station while King, posing as Chapman, was murdering Lennon," he writes.

But again—why Stephen King? Here, Lightfoot's theory gets hazy. The apparent similarity in the two men's appearance is the strongest piece of evidence that he presents on his website—a 24-page booklet containing more information is available for $5.

(Lightfoot agreed via email to speak with me on the phone, but when I called the number he gave me a message saying the number was unreachable would play.)

Strangely enough, however, in the January 1981 issue of Playboy magazine—which carried what Lightfoot claims was Lennon's last major interview before his death—there is also an essay by Stephen King, on horror movies. It concludes:

The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized... and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For thsoe reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them—Dawn of the Dead , for instance—as lifting the trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that.

As long as you keep the gators fed.

In 2012, Lightfoot was reportedly driving around San Diego's Ocean Beach in a white van, across the side of which had been printed, "Stephen King, Not Chapman, Murdered Lennon." Also: "It's true, or he'd sue."

Lightfoot isn't the only Lennon fan who believes the musician's death came about as the result of a conspiracy theory.

"I believe John Lennon could have changed the world as we know it. He scared the status quo and was ostracized because of it. We have not progressed at all since, really," writes YouTube user Toxicnut1. "That is very sad. You only get so many chances."

"John Lennon was very influential and outspoken, and that made him dangerous. There is no doubt in my mind that these dirty warmongering NWO scum were behind his death," SeekTruthandWisdom writes. "He was a very real threat to the establishment so they took him out."

"I think our whole society is run by insane people, for insane objects, for insane objectives," Lennon once said.

In 1992, Lightfoot allegedly received a letter from King denying his accusations. "I didn't kill John Lennon, and I think you know that as well as I do," the letter reads. "Why don't you let it go." (While King was not available for an interview, his assistant Marsha DeFilippo confirmed that King had written the letter.)

Six years earlier, however, Lightfoot had received a letter in what he believes was the same handwriting. That first letter reads, "You haven't got the whole story yet," and includes a clue. Both have been scanned and posted to his website.

Lightfoot's most recent updates—the latest one is dated April 2, 2015 (so, yesterday)—are buried in a section called " Footnotes." In October of last year, he wrote, "Lately I stumbled onto what I consider to be a major stepping stone towards golf perfection." In the months subsequent, he elaborates on his search for the ideal golf swing.

"A lot of life is being in the zone, living in the moment, etc., having oneself in tune with the universe and operating at an optimum level," he wrote on March 24. "I must be in that rarified space because I am learning more, lately, about golf, than ever in my life, each epiphany as profound as the next, it seems."

"So profound was my last lesson learned in practice that I will go out on a limb to say that, in the future, golf technique will focus mostly on making a good backswing and letting the whole downswing and follow through and finish happen automatically by itself."

This is Illuminati Month on Black Bag, in which Gawker locks itself in the woodshed and breaks out the red yarn to explore its favorite conspiracy theories. Contact the author at brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Stuart Leaf, a financier, purchased and combined nine separate apartments in a Brooklyn Heights condo building. He is now selling the resulting 11,000-square-foot apartment because it is "too spread out." Stuart, you motherfucker.

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Kristin Cavallari, who parlayed her social success in high school into a lifelong career of being Kristin, married Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler in 2013. He seemed to be popular in the continental U.S. at the time, but things change.

The Chicago Tribune reports that no one bid on a football signed by Jay at a Chicago charity auction on March 26. The auction benefitted the local Anti-Cruelty Society, which promotes pet adoption. The starting bid was $100.

Luckily for the Anti-Cruelty Society, someone called last week and offered $100 for the football. The Tribune notes that an anonymous man made the offer and stated that his intention was to give the football to his son for his birthday.

A perfect gift for a Camden or a Jaxon.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Chicago Tribune via Deadspin, Photo via Getty]

Gertrude Weaver, the world's oldest person, died on Monday at the age of 116. According to staff at the Silver Oaks Health and Rehabilitation Center in Camden, Arkansas where she lived, Weaver died of complications with pneumonia.

Weaver turned 116 on July 4, 2014, and had brazenly invited Barack Obama to her 117th birthday party. When asked for her secret to longevity only last week, Weaver claimed that she treated people well and frequently "sittercised" in order to live a long life.

Staff at Weaver's nursing home told KATV that she died peacefully on Monday morning at 10:12 a.m.

The title of world's oldest person now belongs to Jeralean Talley of Michigan. According to the Gerontology Research Group, Talley is 115 years old. Congratulations!

Rest in peace, Gertrude.

Previously: Rest in Peace, World's Oldest Person, Misao Okawa

Image via AP. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Just 24 hours after setting the Sichuan Giant Panda Research Centre's record for panda sex by fucking his old flame Zhen Zhen for seven minutes and 45 seconds, Lu Lu the panda aka the "Enduring Brother" more than doubled his record sex time while doing it with another bear at the center. Sorry Zhen Zhen.

Lu Lu reportedly had sex with his new friend—Xi Mei—for a staggering 18 minutes and three seconds last week. For comparison’s sake, the average panda sex session lasts between 30 seconds and five minutes; another couple at the research center recently had sex for only one minutes and 20 seconds. Will Lu Lu's reign as the panda sex king ever end?

The man who shot himself at the M Resort this past Sunday blamed his suicide on being banned from the buffet that had once promised him free meals for life, according to an indexed, 270-page suicide note mailed to the Las Vegas Review Journal.

His final message, which was supplemented by both photographs and DVDs, attributes his depression to the "M Resort Spa Casino and its employees," who had awarded him free meals for life before banning him once he began to harass some of the hotel's female employees. From the Review Journal:

“Today, I end my life due to the M Resort Spa Casino and its employees,” Noble wrote in one of two suicide notes he included with an obsessively detailed dossier on the people he blamed for destroying his life....

The second to last page, titled “The Curse,” spells out all the harm he wishes on those he believed wronged him. Included on the list are several women who worked at M Resort’s Studio B Buffet and who Noble showered with gifts and unwanted attention after he won meals for life there in September 2010.

The note also describes a suicide threat he'd made back on Easter of 2013, just a few weeks after he first lost his buffet privileges, which resulted in brief stay at a state psychiatric hospital.

No one else was injured during the shooting, though witnesses were obviously traumatized.

"Families must have been terrified," one bystander said. "Kids shouldn’t have to experience that, no one should."

Image via Yelp.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Further cementing Facebook's present-day role as a center for old, angry people to congregate, a New York City judge declared Facebook messages a perfectly acceptable venue for filing divorce papers.

The ruling, issued by Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Matthew Cooper, is apparently geared towards allowing a Brooklyn woman to file against her husband, who vanished several years ago and—like a Brooklyn man has done before him—reportedly communicates with her only by phone and Facebook.

According to the slip opinion, the holding doesn't change the court's preference for in person service delivered by a process server or home delivery of the papers, both of which the person filing must first attempt.

Still, might be a good time to start checking your "other" folder, married people.

[image via Shutterstock]

Contact the author of this post at gabrielle@gawker.com

Exciting time to be Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. Dates with each other, dates with significant others, dates over here, dates over there, dates in Central Park, dates at very exclusive parties... As Martin might say, make new girlfriends but keep the old; one is a blonde movie star and the other is also a blonde movie star.

Hot off a vacation to Mexico, America's favorite are-they-or-aren't-they (divorced already) couple split off to separate coasts, apparently to spend time with their new significant others. And while Martin's boring old-man date with Jennifer Lawrence made headlines this morning, that's cool, you know, 'cause Gwyneth's dating too.

Reports the Daily Mail:

Her ex Chris Martin has been quietly dating Jennifer Lawrence, but Gwyneth Paltrow is also moving on from her failed marriage with her new boyfriend, Glee co-creator Brad Falchuk.

The pair have been linked for months but were pictured together for the first time on Saturday.

The 42-year-old actress and her 44-year-old companion were seen arm-in-arm while leaving her close pal Robert Downey Jr's 50th birthday party at Barker Hangar near the Santa Monica Airport.

The couple were joined by an A-list invite group including Jennifer Aniston and fiance Justin Theroux, Gwen Stefani and husband Gavin Rossdale, Orlando Bloom and Avengers star Jeremy Renner.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Falchuk at Rober Downey Jr's 50th birthday bash on April 4. #ChrisMartin#JenniferLawrence pic.twitter.com/e8qw4OVQOV

— Minnie (@luckykim) April 6, 2015

Hey Chris, New York sounds fun. Oh, me? Not much, no big deal, we're just uh, we're just wearing coordinating outfits to Robert's birthday party, yeah it's in an airplane hangar. But Central Park sounds sooooo fun!!! Oh wow I think I'm losing you, could we maybe just text?

[image via AP]

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

A simple trip to the White House ended in chaos for a Washington-area honey bee on Monday, when a bunch of kids started freaking out and our commander-in-chief proved powerless to stop them.

"Oh no, it's a bee!" said President Obama after the insect's arrival at a South Lawn Easter celebration today, adding, "That's okay, guys, bees are good," as attending children shrieked in terror.

"They sting and they're scary!" countered one guest, causing the president to (not very convincingly) promise, "They won't sting you. They'll be okay."

But was the bee okay? The White House remains suspiciously silent on the matter. If you know anything, be sure to send us an email or leave a comment below.