In cell phone video taken by a Virginia Beach teen from inside her car, a second teen in the backseat of the vehicle can be seen screaming in pain as a police officer uses pepper spray and fires his Taser twice.

The video was recorded from an alleged traffic stop outside of the home of Courtney Griffith this past January, when police, claiming to smell marijuana in Griffith's car, asked Brandon Wyne to exit the car from the backseat. When he refused to step out of the vehicle until his mother arrived, an officer used his pepper spray before threatening to fire his Taser. "I'm 17-years-old!" Wyne can be heard shouting repeatedly as the cop blasts his face with pepper spray. The officer then deploys his Taser on the teen twice.

After Wyne gets out of the car, an officer can be seen inspecting Griffith's car, and appears to end the video's recording. Griffith claims the officers tried to delete the video off her phone. "I asked him, 'Who deleted my video?' And they all started laughing," she told WVEC. She was apparently able to recover the video from her phone's "recently deleted" folder.

According to the Daily Press, the officer depicted in Griffith's video using the pepper spray and firing the Taser has since been placed on administrative leave after authorities were alerted to the video this week. An internal investigation is reportedly underway.

Wyne was charged by police with assault and battery, obstruction of justice, and possession of marijuana with intent to sell, and is apparently still in juvenile detention.

A 40-year-old contract worker was arrested in Tokyo Thursday after police matched his DNA to semen found on an 18-year-old schoolgirl's skirt while she was riding the Japan Rail Sobu line. The serial jerkoff artist is suspected in around 110 similar incidents on Tokyo trains over the past few years, the Asahi Shimbun reports.

Tetsuya Fukuda admitted to wiping his fluids on female train passengers about 2 or 3 times a month since 2011. He first became a suspect after the incident with the schoolgirl last December, according to Asahi Shimbun.

Tokyo Metropolitan Police believe Fukuda cut holes in his jacket pockets so he could more discreetly fiddle with his dick on public transit.

“I get excited when in close contact with a woman on a crowded train,” he allegedly told police, according to TBS News.

He's been charged with vandalism—apparently for damaging the skirt.

[h/t Mirror, Photo: TBS News]

Above is a picture of Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, standing next to a young man wearing an “I’m With Stupid” shirt. Good prank. Believe it or not, this picture going viral has not been the worst part of Correa’s week. That would be the “Heil Hitler!” tweet he sent yesterday.

Looks like the t-shirt was correct.

h/t Mashable

Brooklyn home prices are up 18% since last year—a time when they were already unaffordable. Explorers in search of "the next Brooklyn" have reached the Himalayan foothills, where they are awaiting mortgages and supplies.

A Secret Service officer was arrested today in Washington D.C., according to MSNBC and CNN.

U.S. Secret Service Spokesman Brian Leary told CNN that "an off duty USSS Uniformed Division Officer assigned to Foreign Missions Branch was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C."

It’s not clear yet why the officer was arrested, though in the past month two Secret Service agents have been accused of drunk driving and a Secret Service supervisor was suspended for allegedly sexually assaulting a co-worker.

UPDATE 5:28 pm: The Washington Post reports that the officer was charged with trying to break into his ex-girlfriends apartment. From the Post:

Arthur E. Baldwin, 29, was arrested and charged with first-degree burglary and destruction of property. According to D.C. Superior Court charging documents, police arrived at the scene of the apartment in the 3200 block of D Street SE and noticed the front door with dents, broken hinges and a boot print on the door. Also, two of the windows to the apartment were shattered.

When police arrived at the apartment, the woman, who, according to the report, was crying, shaking and “appeared to be in fear of her life” told officers that her ex boyfriend wouldn’t “leave me alone.”

[Image via AP]

Two weeks ago, a happy-go-lucky troupe of ragtag recording artists (collective net worth: over $2,000,000,000) stood shoulder to shoulder on a stage and asked for your money. In return they would give you "TIDAL," a streaming music website and app that costs too much. I gave it a try. You should not.

Somehow, people already hate Tidal, a company that's barely had a chance to exist but has already alienated much of its market:

tidal app is ugly pic.twitter.com/SMkuxv5enN

— eich (@eihyke) April 8, 2015

if tidal wasn't so ugly I would like it

— frank (@franktbh) April 4, 2015

I hate tidal and I refuse to get it. Fuck that shit

— #BBHMM (@CandianNavy) April 6, 2015

lmfao tidal fucking sucks pic.twitter.com/irH98NooPA

— #BLACKLIVESMATTER (@Valinciaa) April 1, 2015

For the record, Tidal sucks. Don't download it.

— Riley West (@RecklessWest21) April 7, 2015

Tidal looks so ugly

— Rihanna Updates (@iStanForRihanna) April 6, 2015

hey @rihanna tidal sucks put ur new music back on spotify pls

— C (@christianfailla) April 9, 2015

And so on.

The quick pitch for Tidal's HiFi subscription is that it costs more than Spotify^[1] so that artists can get a bigger slice of the pie. By using Tidal you are "supporting the artists" and "giving back to Madonna." Paying more for higher quality is the selling point of Tidal—it's the only point of Tidal. So it had better work!

Here is the first thing you see when you log into your Tidal account:

To someone like myself, who cares deeply about his friends, this is profoundly troubling question. Can I believe that they are not listening to their Rihanna tracks on their iPhone earbuds in premium lossless audio? Do I therefore have an ethical obligation to shill for Tidal? If my friend needs help, should I not help him?

I decline. This is what shows up next: a list of bands and people who might be among my favorites.

Why is Robinson Cano, second baseman for the Seattle Mariners, one of the first faces I see on one of the first screens of Tidal? I didn't click on Robinson Cano's face. I hadn't heard of anyone else except The Mountain Goats and Rihanna, so I picked those two. If I were really being honest with Jay Z and Madonna I would have to admit that I don't even like The Mountain Goats, but having only one favorite seemed sad.

I listened to my favorite song, "Cheers (Drink To That)" by Rihanna. Tidal says its music sounds better than that of Spotify or Rdio because it uses "lossless" file encoding, which means the songs aren't compressed before being streamed from a remote server to your laptop or phone. On paper, this means that lossless music will sound "like the producers wanted" and give you "the authentic Jack White experience." On my laptop's speakers I could not tell the difference between Rihanna belting YEAH-HEE-YA, YEAH-HEE-YA, YEAH-HEE-YA! on Tidal versus Rihanna belting YEAH-HEE-YA, YEAH-HEE-YA, YEAH-HEE-YA! on Rdio.

I tried a few other songs, and at times I thought maybe the Tidal versions sounded better, but that could just be due to me wanting the Tidal versions to sound better because I want to be someone who appreciates "how music is supposed to sound."

Tidal's search bar is annoying. When I search for "kanye " in Rdio I get a bunch of suggested songs and albums by that guy. But in Tidal, I get a bunch of confusing nonsense:

On the other hand, Tidal offered me this handy link to a web store that sells unwanted Kanye West merch from 2008:

Every time I open Tidal I see this same list of things I'm not interested in instead of something worthwhile, like "new releases," or songs by Rihanna and my other favorite band, The Mountain Goats, or people who I recognize and am familiar with because of their music and not their lifetime .310 batting averages.

Why are album titles and playlist descriptions frequently truncated ("After The Blues: Tribute to Jaso...")?

Why did the volume go down to a whisper on the Tidal iPhone app, causing me to no longer be able to really hear "Cheers (Drink To That)" by Rihanna on my phone?

Why do songs on Tidal sometimes just not play at all? What if I were throwing a party and wanted to listen to the "Beyond Bluegrass: A New Wester..." playlist, but the music won't play, and all of the new friends I've made with the promise of true, high-quality sound as it was meant to be heard walk out on me?

Why would anyone pay $20 per month to beta test Jay Z's Super Sweet Celeb Streaming Service when Rdio and Spotify don't have any of these problems and are cheaper? Tidal costs too much: Even the free trial I received felt like a ripoff.

Photo: Getty

^[1] Tidal and Spotify both offer subscription service on two tiers. Spotify's—"Free" and "Premium"—cost $0 per month and $9.99 per month, respectively. Tidal's—"Premium" and "HiFi"—run $9.99 per month and $19.99 per month. Premium Tidal is basically equivalent to Premium Spotify, in that it offers "standard" sound quality, and no ads. There is no free version of Tidal.

Yesterday we reported BuzzFeed’s decision to delete a staff-written post that criticized a viral advertisement for Dove beauty products. In response, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith released a rather incredible internal memo that instructed the site’s writers not to “advance [their] personal opinion” and claimed that “we’ve never had to pull a post before”—which is true for BuzzFeed Life, perhaps, but not for BuzzFeed as a whole.

Even still, Smith presented the memo as an act of transparency. But as a recent BuzzFeed post about the board game Monopoly demonstrates, the site is deliberately deceptive about its editorial practices, especially when it comes to suspiciously disappeared content.

On February 13, BuzzFeed and the toy manufacturer Hasbro announced a joint marketing campaign to celebrate Monopoly’s 80th anniversary. A few weeks later, as Gawker commenter dreamingofpastry noted, BuzzFeed UK editor Tom Chivers published a 1200-word post titled “Why Monopoly Is The Worst Game In The World, And What You Should Play Instead.” You can find an oddly formatted version of the piece, dated March 12, on the website Archive.Today. Here are the opening lines:

Monopoly is shite.

That is my opinion, but it’s not only my opinion. It has been reviewed by more than 15,000 users of the website BoardGameGeek, and gets an average score of less than 4.5 out of 10. People who play board games think it sucks. So does James Bond. See above.

BoardGameGeek lists Monopoly's playing time as 180 minutes. Wikipedia puts it at one to four hours. Even this post, which says that when people play Monopoly “correctly” it’s faster, says that a game “often lasts about two hours.”

That’s still quite a long time, especially since once somebody starts winning, they can just grind out the victory.

And then, much like the Dove post, BuzzFeed deleted the post within a day. Its URL now redirects to a bare-bones page, dated March 13, indicating that “this post was removed at the request of the author.” BuzzFeed also took the extraordinary step of adding the post’s URL to its robots.txt directory, a text file website administrators use to instruct web crawlers, such as Google and the Internet Archive, what not to index (e.g., any password-protected pages).

Disallow: /buzzfeed/api/
Disallow: /tomchivers/monopoly-sucks
Disallow: /_service_docs

This means, as the website Techno Guido explains, that Google was likely prevented from generating a cached copy of the original Monopoly post. More importantly, it means that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine does not possess, and is prevented from storing, a copy of the post, since its crawler retroactively deletes all copies of any URL included in a site’s robots.txt file. The Monopoly post was effectively invisible to any program that keeps track of content hosted by third-party sites.

This is more than just a weird technical issue. The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that serves as the web’s unofficial library, was the only way we were able to determine last year that BuzzFeed had deleted more than 4,000 posts without telling anyone. It is the only site that managed to archive a copy of Sicardi’s anti-Dove post before BuzzFeed quietly erased it.

True, maybe BuzzFeed had an additional motive—maybe the site wanted it ensure Hasbro executives couldn’t use Google to find Chivers’ post. But on balance, it’s difficult to see how BuzzFeed’s noodling with its robots.txt file is not an attempt to shield itself from public scrutiny and slip the deletion of the post under the internet’s rug.

Indeed, the only other remaining copy of Chivers’ post (besides the one hosted by Archive.Today) is a temporary Google cache of a page hosted by the defunct website ilike-them.com. We came across Google’s copy thanks to the Guardian blogger John Self, who tweeted a link to it on the day the post disappeared.

There’s very little accountability when it comes to the life of content on the internet, which is why most news organizations have strict standards in place so their content can’t be deleted like one might trash an embarrassing LiveJournal post. BuzzFeed purportedly adopted such standards, but they seem to be applied inconsistently, or simply not at all.

If you work at BuzzFeed and know more about this situation, please get in touch.

Update 4/10/15, 4:00 p.m.

BuzzFeed has reinstated both the Monopoly and Dove posts:

Appreciate the criticism. We just reinstated two posts and I sent this note to staffers. pic.twitter.com/YodxHiQmt2

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) April 10, 2015

Email or gchat the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Image credit: BuzzFeed

The Hugos are among science fiction's most prestigious awards. Since the 1950s, they've been awarded to the genre's best and brightest—icons like Heinlein, Asimov, LeGuin, and Dick. This year, they're just the latest front in Gamergate's war against women and minority fandom.

The toxic, conservative, anti-woman movement that briefly claimed to be about reforming video games journalism has allied with a group of neoreactionary authors in an effort to ensure sci-fi's future looks more like its less diverse past.

Meet the Sad Puppies

After a 2014 Hugo ceremony during which non-white-guy creators Ann Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal, John Chu, and Kameron Hurley all won rocket trophies—our sister site io9 hailed it as "a sign that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre and helping to redefine and expand it"—a small group of authors and their supporters set out to re-redefine and shrink the genre back to what they think it should be: Mainly white dudes writing space adventures with cool ships and none of that boring crap about "prejudice" or "exploitation."

"We’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters," the author Brad R. Torgeson put it in a blog post from February.

Torgeson's post was a mission statement for Sad Puppies, one of two separate—but related—campaigns to flood nominations with creators favored by socially conservative white nerds. The idea is that "Sad Puppies" helps the forces of reaction coordinate the slate of nominees—because, Torgerson argues, the galaxy of sci-fi lit isn't safe for traditional geeks: "The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation?"

This is, of course, quite ridiculous. Science fiction and its awards still skew heavily male and heavily white. There is no documented shortage of books and media about cool spaceships.

But Sad Puppies isn't the only conservative campaign, either. Controversial, bigoted sci-fi author Vox Day—a neoreactionary blogger for racist wackadoodle news site WorldNetDaily who, among other things, believes blacks are inferior to whites and marital rape is "an oxymoron"—launched his own Sad Puppies-inspired slate called Rabid Puppies.

Day, real name Theodore Beale, has long been a divisive figure in the sci-fi community. He ran for president of the World Science Fiction Society in 2013, drawing 10 percent of the vote, but was nearly expelled from the organization later that year after referring to popular author N.K. Jemisin, who is black, as a "half-savage." Nice guy. And he's nominated again this year in the Best Editor (Short Form) and Best Editor (Long Form) categories.

Although many of Day's nominees overlap with the Sad Puppies', he takes care to point out that they're not exactly the same: "But they are similar," Day writes, "because we value excellence in actual science fiction and fantasy, rather than excellence in intersectional equalitarianism, racial and gender inclusion, literary pyrotechnics, or professional rabbitology."

(One of the main differences is that Rabid Puppies included those two nominations for Day himself.)

The Sad Puppies' "Victory": The 2015 Hugo Award Nominations

The Puppies' campaigns worked, bigtime. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw at the Daily Dot explains,

"Three of the five Best Novel nominees come from the Sad Puppies list, while the Best Novella shortlist is identical to Vox Day’s own recommendations—including three separate nominations for works by John C. Wright, an author notorious for his homophobic views.”

Wright, better known for his rants about how "homosex" on television is a "perversion" that will "destroy your life" than for any actual contribution to the field of literature, received a record-breaking six total Hugo nominations this year. Wright is published by Castalia House, a tiny Finnish publishing house founded by…wait for it…Vox Day.

But the Puppies couldn't have nominated these cretins without Gamergate, the internet's haven for reactionary mostly-white mostly-dudes with a chip on their shoulder about social justice.

The Gamergate Connection

They were invited! Turns out the Puppies and the Gamergaters have an enemy in common: "Social Justice Warriors," or SJWs, a Gamergate coinage for anyone who doesn't want to see all geek media revert to a time before its fans had to grapple with uncomfortable concepts like race and gender.

So, with the aim of "hurting social justice" and "fighting the infection" (where the "infection" is women), they formed an alliance against the tyranny of "racial and gender inclusion."

The #gamergate and #sadpuppies hashtags began to overlap on Twitter and, more importantly, Gamergaters started casting votes for the authors on the Puppies' Hugo slates.

One Problem: There's No Rule Against Hijacking the Hugos

To vote for the Hugo awards, you merely have to join the World Science Fiction Convention. There's no requirement to attend Worldcon, held this August in Spokane, Wash.—you can just donate to the WSFS by purchasing a "supporting membership" for $40.

Anyone who joined last year's London convention, this year's Spokane event, or the 2016 convention was eligible to vote, and, judging by the success of the Sad Puppies slate, it seems a lot of Gamergaters were happy to shell out 40 bucks to stick it to the "SJWs."

But maybe not that many—we're talking about just over 1,800 total votes for Best Novel (the most popular category), with only a couple of hundred needed to make the shortlist. Remember that, before Gamergate even existed, 10 percent of the WSFS members who participated in the society's presidential election cast their votes for Vox Day. That doesn't mean 10 percent of all members agree with his views—one imagines his rabid supporters had higher than average turnout—but it does mean that carpetbagging Gamergaters aren't entirely to blame for the outcome of this year's Hugo nominations.

In fact, this is the third year the Sad Puppies, led by Larry Correia, have released a list of suggested nominations.

Last year, Correia launched a slate with Vox Day, resulting in a nomination for Correia's novel and novelettes by Day and Brad Torgerson. In fact, 7 of the 12 works they advocated made the shortlist—although none of them won a Hugo.

But whether a slate is technically within the rules and whether it's a good thing are two separate issues. As author (and self-described six-time Hugo loser) John Scalzi puts it, "There is no rule that disallows nominating for the Hugos from a slate; there’s also no rule that disallows Hugo voters from then registering their displeasure that these slates exist."

Even blatant ballot-stuffing by groups who buy memberships just to vote is not a new phenomenon. As George R.R. Martin points out, the Church of Scientology engaged in a similar tactic in 1987, signing up en masse to cast their votes for L. Ron Hubbard.

Hubbard made it onto the ballot, but lost the award.

What Happens Next

Now that the finalists have been determined, another, more complex round of voting will determine the winners. It seems like some categories, like the entirely Puppy-dominated Best Novella, are bound to fall to Gamergate, but this isn't necessarily the case.

Voters don't have to back anyone in a given category. In fact, they can explicitly elect to give no award.

Here's Scalzi again:

[Y]es, in fact, “No Award” can be placed first in a Hugo category. It has done so several times in the history of the award, when the voters for the Hugo Award decided that nothing deserved to take home the rocket.

The Puppies' chances of sweeping the awards seems slim. They had a couple hundred voters during the nomination process, while the other 1,500 or so were split across the entirety of sci-fi works released last year. Now, those votes will be divided among 5 works at most (or No Award).

(It's worth noting that some of the creators promoted by the Puppies had nothing to do with the campaign, and voters like Scalzi have vowed to evaluate the nominated works on their merits, not to penalize them for being part of a perfectly legal slate.)

Still, even a single Hugo would be a real victory for the Puppies, who've already received media attention out of all proportion to their actual numbers and galvanized conservative elements on the web to get involved in an insular sci-fi community debate. Hell, the National Review even published a piece about the "leftist assault" on sci-fi.

And why stop at the Hugos? Author (and 2014 Hugo winner) Charles Stross speculates that Vox Day and the Gamergaters who've enlisted in his fringe army are now in a position to attack the Nebula awards, the only sci-fi awards more prestigious than the Hugos.

Nebula voters are required to be Science Fiction Writers' Association members, which means publishing three short stories or a novel. Pretty convenient, then, that Day has his own publishing house.

What This Means for the Hugos

When we say Gamergate is precipitating a larger culture war that has little, if anything, to do with video games—this is another front in that culture war. It'll be difficult to take the Hugos seriously after this, and there's no question some major changes need to be made.

Here's author Philip Sandifer's analysis of the situation:

To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities. And the fact that it has just happened to the oldest and most venerable award in the sci-fi/fantasy community makes it unambiguously clear that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom is not fit for purpose.

Sure, it's a tad bit dramatic, but it's hard to say it's wrong.

Even George R.R. Martin, the closest thing to royalty in the contemporary fantasy world, has lost hope. "I think the Sad Puppies have broken the Hugo Awards, and I am not sure they can ever be repaired," he blogged Wednesday, and promised to follow up with a series of posts elaborating on that thought.

So, on top of everything else, the Puppies have distracted GRRM from finishing the Winds of Winter? What a fucking disaster.

Martin's observation that the Hugos have always belonged to Worldcon and its fandom might also be the key to repairing their reputation. Although he doesn't say this outright, Hugo voting might have to be restricted to those who attend the convention, or have in the past, to keep out the people actively working to undermine it. It's not perfect, but it's a higher barrier to entry than shelling out $40.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Occasionally, against all odds, you'll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic "forward" or a pitiless "delete."

Image via Imgur

FORWARD

Thanks to the internet's endless appetite for so-called "history porn" (and the dozens of shady picture-sharing accounts that provide it), fake and misattributed war photos are everywhere these days, but this improbably dope image is the real thing.

Taken by 1st Lt. John D. Moore on Easter morning, 1945, the National Archives identifies the picture's subjects as T/5 William E. Thomas and Pfc. Joseph Jackson, two members of the all-black 969th Field Artillery Battalion preparing to "roll specially prepared eggs on Hitler's lawn."

Image via U.S. Army/Wikipedia

DELETE

This similarly fun (and really quite plausible) image of the Snoopster Bunny, on the other hand, is—as most owners of one or more eyeballs probably guessed—just Photoshop.

When the same picture blew up on Reddit last Easter, original bunny suit model Clar00 came forward to post the undoctored, sadly Snoop-less photo.

Still, as Redditor hoppepper noted, this year's version is a solid improvement over 2014's, which depicted the Doggfather with some oddly Anglo hands.

Images via Imgur

DELETE

Another promising candidate for "Worst Photoshop Job of the Week," the above image went viral on Friday bearing the caption "Pink Forest, Ireland."

In reality, of course, no such forest exists, the picture being a photo of Kyoto, Japan's Saihō-ji "moss temple" color-shifted to better resemble regurgitated cotton candy.

Images via Imgur/Wikipedia/Ivanoff

FORWARD

When a Vero Beach, Florida man's picture of a big ol' bobcat catching a big ol' fish made the rounds this week, much of the discussion centered around whether the photo was legit. Contacted by a number of media outlets, experts quickly reached a consensus: Yeah, probably.

"There is no reason to believe it's fake," Liz Barraco of the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission told WESH-TV, later explaining, "This is the first time we've seen something like it. It's not totally unreasonable but it's just the first time."

National Geographic Photo Editor Ken Geiger (who presumably knows about this sort of thing) agreed, saying a close examination of the photo suggested the image was authentic.

Image via Twitter

DELETE

While Titanoboa is a real scary-ass snake that slithered the Earth 60 or so million years ago, this skeleton is not, the aluminum and stainless steel creation of Chinese-French artist Huang Yong Ping.

Titled Ressort, Ping's sculpture stretches some 175 feet, making it several times longer than the relatively puny Titanoboa, believed to max out at a no less terrifying 42 feet.

Image via Twitter//h/t @PicPedant

Meet Dick Butt, an obscure-ish internet meme that originated from a webcomic in 2006, spread to 4chan, then Reddit, then the rest of the internet, and ended up affixed to the side of Ferrari's Formula 1 car this week. This is the story of Dick Butt's incredible journey.

Last month, UPS—a sponsor of the Ferrari team—launched a campaign that gave fans a chance to see a tiny version of their Facebook profile picture on their favorite race car. Just upload the photo, allow yourself to be subsumed into the global shipping giant, and your face might be included on a digital mosaic of the company's logo that would be added to the car before this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix. Naturally, someone submitted Dick Butt for consideration.

And whatever human or bot running quality control on the submissions let Dick Butt pass right through, like Mario Andretti crossing the finish line. Go, Dick Butt, go! Here's the logo as initially presented by UPS, archived on this Reddit thread.

And here's a pixellated closeup of Dick Butt's spot at the apex of the P's curve.

Unfortunately—perhaps because of its popularity on Reddit—UPS discovered what it had done and uploaded a new, Dick Butt-less version of the logo to Facebook today, writing, "Thank you to our social community for bringing to our attention the inappropriate image that was submitted to our special version of the UPS shield. We have since recreated the mosaic and can ensure that all other photos will still appear on the Ferrari car this weekend."

But some simple zooming in on photos of the decal that was placed on the car reveal that Dick Butt did adorn the competition Ferrari—at least for a time. Here's the above image, of Ferrari drivers Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen holding the logo before sticking it on, enlarged and brightened to show detail.

See? There's Dick Butt! UPS claims that they've taken him off the car and replaced him; if you're watching the race this weekend, look closely and see if they've kept their word.

Images via UPS/Facebook. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

There are many ways for a woman's body to look a little off. It could be "pear shape." It could seem pregnant when it is not pregnant. It could have a tummy. Luckily, Kristin has typed up swimsuit shopping advice for women who possess all of these cursed forms, as well as for women who have—no offense—small busts.

In a post on her eponymous app titled "Best Bathing Suit for Different Body Types," Kristin writes, "If you have a small bust: suits with some fringe or embellishment on the bust completely enhance the area." Like this:

You could also get a boob job, but who would know anything about that?

On Monday, we will reveal Kristin's final piece of swimsuit shopping advice, which is for girls who are like Kristin.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via the Kristin Cavallari app, Getty]

It's infuriating, sometimes, to think that there are aspects of celebrities' lives they choose to keep private. How dare they? I would tell them anything about my life they wanted to know. Luckily Hoda Kotb, television woman, said something about her personal life recently.

While at an otherwise unimportant event, Ms. Kotb spoke to Us Weekly about her relationship with her boyfriend, Joel Schiffman, after, according to the magazine, "months of concealing her mystery man's identity." Finally we are given what we deserve: a look into Hoda Kotb's relationship with Joel Schiffman.

Here it is:

"I think we just genuinely like to be together. I don't know how else to put it. It's pretty simple, really."

He also watches Girl Code with her.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Deadspin How To Attend A Sporting Event Like A Functional Adult | io9 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System | Jezebel Who Would Be the Worst White Mulan? | Lifehacker Edward Snowden Explains Why You Should Use Passphrases, Not Passwords | Kinja Popular Posts

Weird Utah pseudocelebrity Dell Schanze, a.k.a. "Superdell," the star of a number of wacky commercials for defunct computer chain Totally Awesome Computers, could have taken a plea deal when he appeared in court Thursday, but he didn't—because that would mean admitting he kicked that owl.

Superdell, who comes across as an asshole in his court proceedings, faces federal charges of "knowingly using an aircraft to harass wildlife and pursuing a migratory bird," the AP reports, after he was allegedly caught on video in 2011 chasing down and kicking an owl in flight while paragliding, then bragging about it.

Here's that video:

"Who's the predator? HOO-rah! I kicked an owl's butt!" Schanze can be heard cheering, after he follows the bird for nearly 7 minutes on his powered paraglider.

Schanze's plea deal fell through because he refused to stipulate to the facts of the case, saying that would make him look like an "evil, horrible guy."

Outside the courtroom, he "proceeded to go into a rant ... about the satanic media that tells lies," the AP reported.

Superdell, whose chain of computer stores shut down in 2006, maintained his local fame by running for governor of Utah. Thankfully, he was not elected.

His charges carry a maximum sentence of 1 year in prison and a $10,000 fine.

[h/t New York Post]

The Manhattan district attorney’s office announced today that Harvey Weinstein will not be charged for allegedly groping an Italian model last month.

"This case was taken seriously from the outset, with a thorough investigation conducted by our Sex Crimes Unit," Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman at Cyrus Vance's office, told the Los Angeles Times. "After analyzing the available evidence, including multiple interviews with both parties, a criminal charge is not supported."

The alleged victim, identified as Ambra Battilana, told police that Weinstein tried to put his hand up her dress and grab her breasts during a private meeting at the film mogul's office two weeks ago.http://defamer.gawker.com/tell-us-what-y...

Image via AP. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

"Their place at the table," reads the headline of a front-page article on yesterday's Suffolk Times, a newspaper serving the north fork of Long Island. Nothing about that phrase or the article accompanying it is visibly amiss, but one eagle-eyed reader called in to complain anyway. "Do you think that's the correct spelling of that word?", she asked the paper's editor. "It's spelled -IER."

The call—recorded in part below and noted by media reporter Jim Romenesko—finds baffled Suffolk Times editor Mike White doing an admirable job of keeping his cool while explaining to the woman that their is in fact spelled their, not thier. But as baldly wrong as the reader's complaint is, and as rude as she is in delivering it, sometime between her allegation that White didn't graduate from college and her calling him a "fucking baby," you can't help but start to root for her a little.

[Image via Mike White]

We humans are doing a bang-up job of messing up our home planet. But who's to say we can't go on to screw things up elsewhere? Here, not listed in any particular order, are 12 unintentional ways we could do some serious damage to our Solar System, too.

Wild speculation ahead...

Above: We could cause some serious damage with a Shkadov Thruster (see #7). Credit: L. Blaszkiewicz/CC.

1) A Particle Accelerator Disaster

By accidentally unleashing exotic forms of matter from particle accelerators, we run the risk of annihilating the entire solar system.

Prior to the construction of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, some scientists worried that collisions created by the highly energetic accelerator might spawn such nasties like vacuum bubbles, magnetic monopoles, microscopic black holes, or strangelets (a.k.a. "strange matter" — a hypothetical form of matter similar to conventional nuclei, but also containing many of the heavier strange quarks). These concerns were condemned by the scientific community as "rubbish" and nothing more than rumors spread by "unqualified people seeking sensation or publicity." Moreover, a 2011 report published by the LHC Safety Assessment Group concluded that the collisions presented no danger.

Anders Sandberg, a research fellow who works out of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, agrees that a particle accelerator disaster is unlikely, but warns that if strangelets were to be somehow unleashed, "it would be bad." As he explained to io9:

Converting even a planet like Mars to strange matter would release a fraction of the rest mass as radiation (plus perhaps splatter strangelets). Assuming a conversion acting on a hour timescale and releasing just 0.1% as radiation gives a mean luminosity of 1.59*10^34 W, or about 42 million times the sun. Most of which would be hard gamma rays.

Ouch. Obviously, the LHC is incapable of producing strange matter, but perhaps some future experiment, either on Earth or in space, could produce the stuff. It's hypothesized, for example, that strange matter exists at high pressure inside neutron stars. Should we artificially create those conditions, it could end the show real quick. (Image credit: The Core.)

2) A Stellar Engineering Project Gone Horribly Wrong

We could also wreck the Solar System by severely damaging or altering the Sun during a stellar engineering project, or by screwing up planetary dynamics in the process.

Some futurists speculate that future humans (or our posthuman descendants) may choose to embark upon any number of stellar engineering projects, including stellar husbandry. Writing in Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, David Criswell from the University of Houston described stellar husbandry as the effort to control the evolution and properties of stars, including attempts to prolong their lifespans, extract material, or create new stars. To make a star burn less rapidly, and thus last longer, future stellar engineers would work to remove its excess mass (big stars expend fuel faster).

But the potential for a catastrophe is significant. Like plans to engage in geoengineering projects here on Earth, stellar engineering projects could result in any number of unforeseen consequences, or instigate uncontrollable cascade effects. For example, efforts to remove the Sun's mass could create bizarre and dangerous flaring effects, or result in a life-threatening decrease in luminosity. It could also have a pronounced effect on planetary orbits. ( Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC)

3) A Failed Attempt to Stellify Jupiter

Some thought has been given to the prospect of turning Jupiter into a kind of artificial star. But in the attempt to do so, we could destroy Jupiter itself and wipe out life on Earth.

Jupiter transforming into the Lucifer star in 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

Writing in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, astrophysicist Martyn Fogg proposed that we stellify Jupiter as a first step to terraforming the Galilean satellites. To do so, future humans would seed Jupiter with a tiny primordial black hole. The black hole would have to engineered perfectly so that it not fall outside the bounds of the Eddington limit (an equilibrium point between the outward force of radiation and the inward force of gravity). According to Fogg, this would produce "energy sufficient to create effective temperatures on Europa and Ganymede that would be similar to the values on Earth and Mars, respectively."

Lovely, except for what would happen if things go askew. As Sandberg told io9, it would work fine at first — but the black hole could grow and eventually absorb Jupiter in a burst of radiation that would sterilize the entire Solar System. With life extinguished and Jupiter sucked up into a black hole, our neighborhood would be a complete mess.

4) Screwing Up the Orbital Dynamics of the Planets

Should we start to mess around with the location and mass of planets or other celestial bodies, we run the risk of upsetting the Solar System's delicate orbital balance.

Indeed, the orbital dynamics in our Solar System are surprisingly fragile. It has been estimated than even the slightest perturbation could result in chaotic and even potentially dangerous orbital motions. The reason for this is that planets are subject to resonances, which is what happens when any two periods assume a simple numerical ratio (e.g., Neptune and Pluto are in a 3:2 orbital resonance, as Pluto completes two orbits for every three orbits of Neptune).

The result is that two orbiting bodies can influence each other even when they're quite distant. Regular close encounters can result in the smaller object getting destabilized and cleared right out of its original orbit — and even the Solar System altogether!

Looking to the future, such chaotic resonances could happen naturally, or we could instigate them by fidgeting around with the Sun and planets. As already noted, there's the potential for stellar engineering. The prospect of moving Mars into the habitable zone, which could be done by decaying its orbit with asteroids, could likewise upset the orbital balance. Alternately, if we build a Dyson Sphere using material extracted from Mercury and/or Venus, we could alter orbital dynamics in a very profound and dangerous way. It could result in Mercury (or what's left of it) being tossed from the Solar System, or Earth having an uncomfortably close encounter — or even a collision — with a large object like Mars. (Illustration: Hagai Perets.)

(5) The Reckless Maneuvering of a Warp Drive

A spaceship driven by a warp drive would be awesome, no doubt, but it would also be incredibly dangerous. Any object, like a planet, at the destination point would be subject to massive expenditures of energy.

Also known as an Alcubierre engine, a warp drive could someday work by generating a bubble of negative energy around it. By expanding space and time behind the ship, while squeezing space in front of it, a ship could be pushed to velocities not limited by the speed of light.

Regrettably, however, this energy bubble has the potential to do some serious damage. Back in 2012, a research team crunched the numbers to see what kind of damage an FTL drive of this nature could inflict. Writing in Universe Today, Jason Major explains:

Space is not just an empty void between point A and point B… rather, it’s full of particles that have mass (as well as some that do not.) What the research team...has found is that these particles can get “swept up” into the warp bubble and focused into regions before and behind the ship, as well as within the warp bubble itself.

When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship.

“Any people at the destination,” the team’s paper concludes, “would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for [forward] region particles.”

The researchers added that, even for short journeys, the energy released is so large "you would completely obliterate anything in front of you." And by anything, that could be an entire planet. Moreover, because the amount of energy is dependent on the length of the journey, there is potentially no limit to its intensity. An incoming warp ship could do considerably more damage than just wreck a planet. ( Image: Mark Rademaker.)

6) An Artificial Wormhole Accident

Using wormholes to sidestep the constraints of interstellar space travel sounds great in theory, but we'll need to be extra careful when tearing a hole in the space-time continuum.

Back in 2005, Iranian nuclear physicist Mohammad Mansouryar outlined a scheme for creating a traversable wormhole. By producing enough amounts of effective exotic matter, he theorized that we could theoretically pierce a hole through the cosmological fabric of space-time and create a shortcut for spacecraft.

Mansouryar's paper is opaque, and it's not immediately clear if he's onto something, but as Anders Sandberg pointed out to io9, the negative consequences could be severe:

First, wormhole throats need mass-energy (possibly negative) on the scale of a black hole of the same size. Second, making time loops may cause virtual particles to become real and break down the wormhole in an energy cascade. Likely bad for the neighborhood. And besides, dump one end in the Sun and another elsewhere (a la Stephen Baxter's Ring), and you might drain the Sun and/or irradiate the solar system if it is large enough.

Yes, killing the Sun is bad. And by irradiation we're once again talking about the complete sterilization of the Solar System.

7) A Catastrophic Shkadov Thruster Navigational Error

Should we choose to relocate our Solar System in the far future, we run the risk of destroying it completely.

In 1987, Russian Physicist Leonid Shkadov proposed a megastructure concept, since dubbed the Shkadov Thruster, that could literally move our solar system and all that's within it to a neighboring star system. In the future, this would allow us to reject our older, dying star in favor of a younger version.

Writing in Popular Mechanics, Adam Hadhazy explains how it works:

The Shkadov Thruster setup is simple (in theory): It's just a colossal, arc-shaped mirror, with the concave side facing the sun. Builders would place the mirror at an arbitrary distance where gravitational attraction from the sun is balanced out by the outward pressure of its radiation. The mirror thus becomes a stable, static satellite in equilibrium between gravity's tug and sunlight's push.

Solar radiation reflects off the mirror's inner, curved surface back toward the sun, effectively pushing our star with its own sunlight—the reflected energy produces a tiny net thrust. Voilà, a Shkadov Thruster, and humanity is ready to hit the galactic trail.

What could go wrong, right? Clearly, lots. We could miscalculate and scatter the Solar System to the cosmos, or even smash directly into the other star.

Which brings up an interesting point: If we develop the capacity to move between stars, we should also be able to figure out how to manipulate or influence the plethora of small objects located in the outer reaches of the solar system. We're definitely going to have to careful here. As Sandberg warns, "Ah, destabilizing the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud: whoops, we got zillions of comets slamming into everything!" ( Image credit: Steve Bowers.)

8) Attracting Evil Aliens

If the advocates of Active SETI have their way, we could soon be transmitting messages to space in the hopes of alerting aliens to our presence. You know, because all aliens must be nice. (Image credit: Mars Attacks.)

9) The Return of Mutated von Neumann Probes

Say we send out a fleet of exponentially self-replicating von Neumann probes to colonize the Galaxy. Assuming they're programmed very, very poorly, or somebody deliberately creates an evolvable probe, they could mutate over time and transform into something quite malevolent.

Eventually, our clever little space-faring devices could come back to haunt us by ripping our Solar System to shreds, or by sucking up resources and pushing valuable life out of existence. ( Image: Babylon 5.)

10) An Interplanetary Grey Goo Disaster

Somewhat similar to self-replicating space probes, there's also the potential for something much smaller, yet equally as dangerous: exponentially replicating nanobots. A grey goo disaster, where an uncontrollable swarm of nanobots or macrobots consume all planetary resources to create more copies of itself, need not be confined to planet Earth. Such a swarm could hitch a ride aboard an escaping spaceship or planetary fragment, or even originate in space as part of some megastructure project. Once unleashed in the Solar System, it would quickly turn everything into mush.

11) An Artificial Superintelligence Run Amok

One of the dangers of creating artificial superintelligence is that it has the potential to do much more than just snuff out life on Earth; it could spread out into the Solar System — and even potentially beyond.

The oft-cited paperclip scenario, in which a poorly programmed ASI converts the entire planet into paperclips, conveys the urgency of the problem. Should an out-of-control ASI emerge, it's obviously not going to produce paperclips ad nauseam, but it could do something else, like produce an endless supply of computer processors or turn all available matter into useable computronium. An ASI may even devise a meta-ethical imperative it feels it must enforce across the entire Galaxy. (Image credit: Stevebidmead/Pixabay/CC.)

12) Making the Solar System Meaningless

Which we would do by going extinct. ( Image credit: Udra11/Sutterstock.)

Many thanks to Anders Sandberg for his many contributions to this list! And a h/t to James D. Miller for suggesting #12.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Follow George on Twitter | Friend him on Facebook | Contact him at george@io9.com

The internet is a reliable source of nothing so much as simultaneous self-aggrandizement and humiliation, and the latest entry in the struggle saga has been generously provided by BuzzFeed. Yesterday, the respected hub for longform journalism drew some withering skepticism from our sibling GMO-shilling chocolate blog, after the BuzzFeed Life vertical deleted a post that was critical of a BuzzFeed advertiser and replaced it with the sentence: “We pulled this post because it is not consistent with the tone of BuzzFeed Life.”

The original post was written by BuzzFeed beauty editor Arabelle Sicardi (who has contributed to Jezebel before), and had calmly criticized Dove’s history of “empowering” women through perpetuating, overblowing and then monetizing the (false) idea that women all have terrible self-esteem. You can read the whole post here: it’s good, clear and thoughtful, and though it was pegged to the news cycle, it was not, as BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith put it, a “hot take.”

.@iam486 & @emofly sent this to staff earlier today about why we changed a post: We are trying not to do hot takes pic.twitter.com/bgVdxOR3Uh

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) April 10, 2015

It is interesting to see BuzzFeed self-identify one of its pieces as a “hot take.” Hot takes, #SlatePitches, clickbait, “race bait”: these are categories mostly built out of the projections of irritated readers. Anything can look like clickbait, hot-takery, contrarianism if you simply disagree. Ben Smith calling Arabelle Sicardi’s post an example of a “hot take,” which they’re “trying not to do,” is weird—and not just because he’s wrong. It’s like an editor-in-chief tweeting, “This post was clickbait, so we took it down.”

Of course, many of the most irritated readers of internet content are also the editors and writers of irritating internet content, and what you dislike as a reader you’d naturally try to avoid on the other side. But the process of incorporating these external definitions into a workable in-house strategy is not going very clearly for BuzzFeed, as seen in the staff email that accompanies Smith’s tweet, which lays out the contours of the Hot Take, To Be Avoided:

We can and should report on conversations that are happening around something that we have opinions about, but using our own voices (and hence, BuzzFeed’s voice) to advance a personal opinion often isn’t in line with BuzzFeed Life’s tone and editorial mission.

[....] The main takeaway is: When we write about news-related topics revolving around class, race, and feminism and other heated topics, it’s important that we show the conversation that is happening, or find other people who can give smart and valid quotes to make the point, or, ideally, add to the conversation with something substantively new.

So. In order to avoid a hot take by BuzzFeed standards, you’ve got to “avoid using [your] own voices to advance a personal opinion,” and get more of “the conversation” in there. More precisely on that last point, you should get other people to help “make the point”—though it is a dubious proposition that two people saying the same thing ever makes a point any stronger—or “ideally, add to the conversation with something substantially new.”

In other words, the ideal situation is for the take to be cooled down a bit via crowdsourcing; the “hot take,” by these definitions, is a personal opinion that comes on too strong.

But that’s not what Sicardi’s piece was: it was an argument, which would not get any stronger with the addition of other people. Arguments are not aggregated opinions; they’re a series of propositions stacked up to a point. Arguments are also, it should be said, not mandates:

BuzzFeed Life has had such a huge positive impact on people’s lives by communicating our values in a fair and demonstrative way, rather than telling our audience how to think and feel.

Nothing is an interpersonal mandate unless it’s genuinely persuasive enough to be so. I’d argue that the person telling their audience how to think and feel, in this scenario, is Dove.

And now Smith has reinstated the post, saying that the decision to delete it involved “an overreaction to questions we’ve been wrestling about the placement of personal opinion pieces.”

Appreciate the criticism. We just reinstated two posts and I sent this note to staffers. pic.twitter.com/YodxHiQmt2

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) April 10, 2015

“The answer is no.” God, it’s messy in this dumpster, isn’t it?

All this about a post about a soap ad. BuzzFeed seems very afraid of personal opinions in these in-house emails, which is a stance I support but find untenable editorially. There are lots of ideas getting jumbled here, and I’d like to suggest a brief and highly subjective taxonomy of some words that I think are being misused.

Opinion:

A personal judgment that can exist supported by facts or reason, but would still exist without any support at all.

Most opinions are bad, because most opinions do not materially affect the life of the opinion-haver. Some of the worst types of opinions are those that involve in-depth estimations of other people (it does not matter what you think of another person unless they are your close personal friend or stated nemesis), those that involve institutions that you will never come close to reforming or affecting (a city-dwelling feminist saying “fraternities are bad”), etc.

But, some opinions are good. If the Dove post had—as that staff email stated—actually been nothing but Sicardi’s personal opinion (“Dove Soap is bad”), that’s still a pretty good opinion. Sicardi is a beauty editor. All beauty advertising relies on insecurity; the most evil of this kind of advertising passes off insecurity as validation. That is a material, viable opinion.

Proposition:

An opinion with the addition of logic, ideally of the actionable kind.

Here is a good proposition in Sicardi’s post:

You don’t have to be beautiful (or at the very least, you shouldn’t have to be), and not being beautiful doesn’t mean you’re average. Feeling beautiful is an obligation and a pressure — and sometimes a pleasure, but not always. Feeling beautiful is so much work: work that beauty companies cash in on and exploit.

At the very least, we don’t need our soap to try to be our therapist. Just work and let us think for ourselves.

Argument:

The totality of a set of propositions, plus a conclusion, also ideally actionable. Sicardi’s conclusion is mostly unspoken: Don’t buy this Dove shit, both literally and in theory. I would surmise, as Gawker has, that this is very obviously the part that BuzzFeed finds objectionable—the fact that their beauty editor is telling their audience not to buy Dove.

Hot Take:

There are some existing theories about hot takes: John Herrman defined the hot take as “the internet’s evolutionary defense against attention surplus,” which is an excellent definition—the hot take as something produced in order to be able to throw some words into a gaping void. Alex Pareene defined the hot take by what it lacks: “content related to some sort of news (or pseudo-news), despite having no original reporting or intelligent analysis to add.”

I agree with both of those, and Sicardi’s post is obviously neither. It also does not fit my personal definition of a hot take, which is pretty close to Herrman’s and Pareene’s: a piece of writing that is (1) primarily gestural and (2) primarily based on reaction—both the illusory need to react, and the idea that a reaction is worth paying attention to simply because it exists (a common and bad idea, also frequently found clinging to the opinion).

My personal definition of a hot take is also close to my personal definition of trolling.

Trolling:

Anything that is a means to an end—a reaction—rather than an end in itself. I am not against trolling as a category at all: Grantland’s song tournaments and Kara Brown’s “Adults Should Not Be Drinking Milk” post are two of the most wonderful examples of the form, the latter containing the first three categories as a bonus.

Think Piece:

Different from a hot take in that it’s not inherently reactionary. Similar to a hot take in that it is produced primarily out of an illusory demand for “thought” (no one cares what we think), as well as the idea that a thought is worth paying attention to simply because it exists.

Idea:

As John Herrman wrote at the Awl, the idea is the ostensible teleological end of all of this, but not the actual one. Almost everything we say on the internet is irrelevant: ashes of opinions to ashes of takes, dust garbage to garbage dust. But, very good opinions can sometimes become very good propositions that can sometimes build into very good arguments.

Along the way, these good arguments—occasionally and somewhat legitimately marked by topicality, the youth of the writer, or inherent pugnaciousness—will be mistaken by some as “hot takes.” This is inevitable and fine. But sometimes those arguments will make it through the wilderness of our garbage brains and emerge as a real idea, such as “Stevie Wonder Is Not Actually Blind.”

Garbage:

Almost all of the above, including this post, which is full of opinions and is a take about takes :/

But Sicardi’s post was not garbage, and not a hot take. It was actually in service of an idea. She’s not the first to write about the hollow, rude condescension of corporate empowerment marketing; she won’t be the last. But she was writing in service of a real understanding that could legitimately change the way that—aren’t these stakes so fucking miserable—women are talked to by brands, either the ones that pay us or sell us things, although, as BuzzFeed shows us, it’s often all the same in the end.

Image via Shutterstock

Contact the author at jia@jezebel.com.

What's amazing about BuzzFeed's perpetual amnesiac/wayward-husband approach to its ethical guidelines (Today is the first day of the rest of our ethics!) is that the person who has to give voice to this ever-evolving set of rationalizations about the trial-and-error nature of developing ethics is the stolidly conventional Ben Smith, who certainly 10 years ago when I shared a newsroom with him, at the New York Observer, showed no signs of not being fully socialized to professional standards. In fact, in that light, his absurd and instantly disprovable messaging about the need to define and restrict BuzzFeed writers' use of personal opinion becomes intelligible—it is meant, consciously or unconsciously, as an appeal to stodgy, ultra-conventional journalistic values. He did not violate basic standards because he is at the helm of a post-moral money-making machine that only impersonates journalism to the extent it helps with its branding, but because he was uncomfortable with this newfangled opinion-slinging.

Contact the author at scocca@gawker.com.

Gunmen have killed at least 20 workers at a construction site in a remote part of the Baluchistan Province's Turbat district, the New York Times reports. Officials believe that the attack was carried out by a separatist group that's operated in the region for decades.

According to the Times, the attack came between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. "The laborers were working on a bridge that links Turbat to a national highway," Turbat's top police official Imran Qureshi said. "They opened fire on the laborers, most of whom were sleeping." No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

Government commissioner Pasand Khan Buledi told the Associated Press that 16 of the dead were from Pakistan's Punjab province and four from Sindh province. He also said that the eight guards—all of whom are from Baluchistan—were unharmed.

This follows the pattern of previous separatist attacks, the AP reports, in which gunmen have killed people from Pakistan's most populous province, Punjab, and those from Baluchistan are freed.

The construction site is in what Qureshi referred to as the "B-Area," which the Times describes as "tribal regions of the province where the police do not exercise authority." Security there is provided by a paramilitary force, the Baluchistan Levies. Baluchistan is Pakistan's largest province by area and abounds with mineral resources and natural gas.

Photo credit: Getty Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.