Warning: Minor spoilers.

If Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers has a heart and soul (and I think it does), it can be summed up in the following scene: tween idols Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) and Ashley Benson (Pretty Little Liars) wear pink ski masks with unicorn patches where their horns would be. They pirouette, holding rifles overhead. They are bathed in dusk, and they stand in the backyard of Alien, James Franco's Riff Raff ringer character. He lives on the water (presumably Tampa Bay) and sits at a piano just a few feet from it. He plays 2004's broken-music-box ballad "Everytime," by Britney Spears, whom he's just referred to as "one of the greatest singers...an angel on earth if ever there was one." Spears' original version takes over the soundtrack and we see slow motion scenes of this trio wreak havoc on St. Petersburg, Florida: One of them pistol whips a man who spits blood, they hold up a wedding and a guy gets his face pushed into the cake, they hogtie a group of men and leave them on a hotel bed.

This scene is gorgeous and horrific. Like Spears' voice, it is hilarious and sad. It is pregnant with sentimentality and explosive with brutality. It's tongue-in-cheek and you know as much because the movie's cheek has been ripped open.

Spring Breakers is as trashy as any depiction of a Florida-based spring break should be, but it's not clueless or unreal enough to qualify as camp (not yet, at least, but as things tend to age into the sensibility, it'll be worth reevaluating by Susan Sontag's criteria in a decade or two). The film does sink into the sweet spot of ambiguity, however, of perhaps simultaneous sincerity and kidding that is reserved for the best of modern camp.

Korine uses the same documentary-style approach that he did with Gummo and Trash Humpers for this over-the-top story about a bunch of bad girls who rob a Chicken Shack to fund their debauched spring break. Soon it becomes clear that at least two out of the four of these girls are capable of having as much fun committing crimes as they do partying. Criminal, idiot and rapper Alien (gloriously embodied by Franco) calls two of them his "motherfuckin' soul mates" after they threaten to hold him up and make him perform Beyond the Valley of the Dolls-style fellatio on a gun.

Haha-for-serious is Korine's aesthetic here, and if Spring Breakers isn't his best movie, it's his first that is compulsively watchable throughout. His stunt casting of Disney staples Hudgens and Selena Gomez pays off in the naturalistic performances he wrings out of them. Korine's camera leers at his bad-girl foursome of Hudgens, Gomez, Benson, and his own wife, Rachel Korine. These characters are perverted male fantasies, Girls Gone Wild enhanced with bios. They pantomime blowjobs in anticipation of the fun that awaits them on spring break, crawl between each other's legs in underwear while singing "Hot in Herre," shotgun blunts, pee on the side of the road and make out. "Seeing all this money makes my pussy wet," says Hudgens' character after her successful robbery. "It makes my tits look bigger." That's one way of summarizing the American dream.

Are these characters designed to titillate or satirize? Is Korine's leering camera, which dips under the water while they relax in a parking-lot pool and lunges randomly at their asses as they stand lined up on a pavilion, being held by a creep who's into young girls or a guy who's out to parody the way spring break has been depicted on film for the past few decades? Certainly, his slow shots of beach—and pool—based hedonism (replete with beer bongs and Mardi Gras beads nestled between exposed, jiggling tits) envision what MTV Spring Break programming would look like if shot by someone who believed in art. Even when his girls look like shit, dirty and unkempt under fluorescent jail lights, they're still achingly gorgeous, as young people are. It's unreal and so real.

Korine has it both ways, but he's uncommonly empathic with his characters. I was on edge the entire movie, waiting for something bad to happen to one of the four girls and not much does. One drunken partying scene feels like a setup for rape, but that goes unrealized. As the girls' stay in St. Petersburg stretches on and their spiral widens, some need to check out and they do. Those who stay end up winning; they get exactly what they want.

Spring Breakers is an extremely specific movie, as much about a perennial cultural institution as it is about what that cultural institution looks like in 2013, hence the employment of trap hip-hop and Skrillex-produced EDM. By now we have been inundated with day-glo images of the Electric Daisy Carnival and revelry of its ilk, but Korine goes further to get to the yuck, the scummy residue left by the fun, the molly hangover that our culture sweeps under the rug. Spring Breakers is the portrayal of a nightmare but it's also a dream: its characters want to extend their good time indefinitely and the movie envisions an option. A crime spree is not necessarily reasonable for everybody, but there is something so relatable in these girls' collective wish of never-ending fun.

For me, watching Spring Breakers was a similar experience to watching Drive or Silver Linings Playbook. This is one of the few modern movies whose sheer entertainment value locks eyes with you and says, "You're going to be watching me regularly for the rest of your life." Spring Breakers feels like a new classic. Spring break forever, bitches.

Police are still investigating how a 12-year-old girl from Taylor, Michigan, came to possess a backpack stuffed with $20,000 in cash.

According to local police chief Mary Sclabassi, the unnamed Sixth Grade Academy student had brought the backpack to school with her and had been handing out large sums of money to her classmates when she got caught by school officials.

"Had word gotten out to maybe someone other than some other 12-year-olds, it could have put her in a dangerous position," Sclabassi said.

Though police have released few details concerning the source of the ill-gotten gains, they would say that the girl had apparently received the backpack the night before from "another child who lives across the street."

The money has since been returned to the neighbors, but police, who refuse to name any of the people involved, say the investigation is ongoing.

[screengrab via ClickOnDetroit]

Which country on earth parties harder than any other country? YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE ABOVE HEADLINE.

A new World Health Organization report says three things that you may be interested in, if you are a party person:

1) Per capita alcohol consumption in Europe "is the highest in the world." Party!

2) "The prevalence of tobacco use in the European Region reached an average of 27% of the population aged over 15 years in 2010. This figure is the highest among all WHO regions." Party!

3) What is the drunkest country in Europe by a frightfully huge margin? The Republic of Moldova! Look at this fucking chartttttttttttttttt! Fuck you, Luxembourg! Go eat some fucking chocolate, pussies! WOOO! MOLDOVA, BITCH.


4) Moldova also has the fourth highest rate of smoking in Europe, and none of the three pussy nations ahead of it drink nearly as much as Moldovans do.

What does that all add up to? MOLDOVA #1 PARTY HARD NATION ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

When you visit Moldova, why not head over to Booz Time Club?

"BOOZ TIME is the club where you will feel that to be who you are is the sense of life, that beauty and style are indispensable notions, and the spirit of adventure and risk exist and provoke the action!

BOOZ TIME is the time to live, to want and to love!

Every party in BOOZ TIME is a marvelous show, unique and unforgettable where the most impossible ideas are being embodied and where there are no limits for your fantasy flights!

The time has come to plunge into the reality where only good mood and overwhelming energy are appreciated!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is BOOZ TIME! It is time you became yourself! It is the power of BOOZ TIME!"

In Moldova!

[WHO Europe]

Beginning around rush hour on Wednesday, eyewitness reports of a dolphin swimming around New York's East River started trickling in on Twitter. Before noon, local news teams were on the scene at FDR drive. As of Wednesday around 3p.m., he (or she? Dolphins are boys, right?) was still there, swimming around in circles, distracting everyone when they should be watching their afternoon stories.

The dolphin doesn't appear to be sick or injured. The NYPD, the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation, and the National Marine Fisheries Service are all monitoring the dolphin and consulting one another to determine if it needs help.

Dolphins in New York waters are nothing new. In January, a sick dolphin swam into Brooklyn's Gowanus canal, where it proceeded to flail around for a few hours, before dying. Last summer, there was one in the Hudson.

Dolphins. Stop coming to New York City.

You come here, half in the bag, sick, or both and you make a big scene, bopping around our rivers and canals and bathroom sinks like "Ohhhh do you guys, seeeee me? Over here, I'm a dolllllphin!" Everyone freaks out. Everyone looks for a picture of you, even though all dolphins look the same and all dolphins shot from far away with grainy cell-phone cameras EXTRA look the same. Everyone watches to see what happens next, even though it will be (best case) very boring or (worst case) a sad meditation on the frailty of life. Then, after you've swum around lost for a couple hours ("Do I have to have a ticket for Saturday Night Live or can I just goooooo?"), we either send a couple cops out to remove you from our waterways or you get totally freaked out and die. Either way, we look like the assholes who couldn't take care of a dolphin.

And you know what? We are those assholes. We don't know how to take care of a dolphin. Like, what do you eat? You're a mammal but you're kind of like a fish AND you have teeth so…bread? Should we give you water or can you just drink the water you came with? What time do you wake up?

We know we can't handle a dolphin. That's why we didn't buy a bunch of dolphins in the first place.

So, dolphin, if you manage to escape from the East River (as you probably will since you seem perfectly healthy, if a little bad at maps), please tell all your dolphin friends to stay away next time. It's really not worth the hassle of your visit.

If you die, sorry dolphin! We loved you!

[Image via MYFOXNY]

In a major surprise, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentinian cardinal predicted by almost no one, has been named Pope by the Papal Conclave. He will be the first-ever pope from the Western Hemipshere, and will take the name Francis I. Bergoglio was announced to a packed and cheering St. Peter's Square minutes ago, following the traditional burning of white smoke through the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

Bergoglio, a 76-year-old Jesuit and the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was a "close second" when Benedict was chosen in 2005, according to the Times' Rachel Donadio. Generally, Papal "runners-up" aren't chosen by the following conclave—it's seen as insulting to the previous pope—but Bergoglio is thought to appeal to both hard-liners and moderates in the College of Cardinals, according to John Allen of National Catholic Reporter:

He appealed to conservatives in the College of Cardinals as a man who had held the line against liberalizing currents among the Jesuits, and to moderates as a symbol of the church's commitment to the developing world.

Back in 2005, Bergoglio drew high marks as an accomplished intellectual, having studied theology in Germany. His leading role during the Argentine economic crisis burnished his reputation as a voice of conscience, and made him a potent symbol of the costs globalization can impose on the world's poor.

Bergoglio's reputation for personal simplicity also exercised an undeniable appeal – a Prince of the Church who chose to live in a simple apartment rather than the archbishop's palace, who gave up his chauffeured limousine in favor of taking the bus to work, and who cooked his own meals.

Francis I seems unlikely to be a reform pope. He's older; it's doubtful his papacy will be long; and his career up until now has largely been a model of moderation if not conservatism. Though there's a story involving Cardinal Bergoglio washing and kissing the feet of AIDS patients at a hospice in 2001, he worked against recent legislation to legalize same-sex marriage in his home-country, and has similarly opposed gay adoption. In 2005, he was accused of conspiring with Argentina's military dictatorship in the 1970s to kidnap two Jesuits, but no evidence was produced to verify the claim; regardless of his conduct under the junta, Bergoglio was never a subscriber of left-wing liberation theology like many South and Central American priests of his era.

Meanwhile, on Twitter:

"Have you ever met anyone who doesn't like Jennifer Lawrence?" asks Vice West Coast editor Jamie Lee Curtis Taete. No, you haven't, and neither has Taete.

Which is why he decided to give some hate groups a ring and see if maybe, just maybe, they could finally put a stop to the Lawrence lovefest.

The white and black supremacists and the Southern secessionists refused to offer any sort of opinion, brushing Taete off with a curt "no comment" (though the National Socialist Freedom Movement did agree to defend Lawrence if she were ever attacked by a "flashmob of nig-nogs.")

The Westboro Baptist Church, however, never ones to shy away form hating someone, did agree to go on-record with an official statement about Jennifer Lawrence.

And, guess what? They lurve her too:

"I think that most of the young people in our church saw Hunger Games. And I think they all liked that," said WBC rep Steve Drain. "She just kinda bursted (sic) onto the scene, didn't she? She doesn't have a very long film career, does she?"

Taete reminded Drain that Lawrence was also "nominated for some awards" for Winter's Bone, to which Drain gushed: "Oh! That's her? Winter's Bone rocked! That was a great flick. I like Winter's Bone quite a bit. I think she did a very nice job there. Yep."

Okay, so it's not exactly canonization, but with the WBC that's about as close as anyone is going to get.

[H/T: ONTD, photos via AP]

Fans of the mid-2000s series Veronica Mars are putting their money on the table to get their much beloved TV-show made into a movie. Donators broke records, raising a million dollars in four hours and 24 minutes. Total funds raised are $1,332,984, as of these words.

This immediate fan response—cash money as well as internet clamor—is a game-changer. The UPN-CW show premiered in 2004 and was canceled in 2007. The Warner Brothers executives who own the rights to Veronica Mars said they would support the film, but only if creator Rob Thomas could prove there was enough interest. All Thomas had to do was ask, with the assistance of crucial cast members, including the show's star Kristen Bell. And while the money is key, obviously, it's also valuable symbolically to big studios with lots of cash—they can use Kickstarter as a barometer of audience interest and investment.

Some have groused that crowd-sourcing fails when people don't think you need money (like famous Icelandic cosmic dust mite Bjork and her Kickstarter flop), the support for Veronica Mars could prove that the fan base just needs to be powerful enough. Though it was a well-reviewed television series that ran for multiple seasons, Veronica Mars has always been considered an underdog. It was critically adored (look at those critic's tweets from earlier today, they're going crazy), but its ratings were low. The watchers were the few and the proud.

Crowd-funding campaigns could be the key to fundraising for established critically-acclaimed, low-rated projects, with a small but proud fan base. Arrested Development would fit perfectly into this model—but its need for support was maybe a few years too early for a Kickstarter campaign so it took a long and storied road to its Netflix reboot.

When the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign reaches $2 million, the film will click into production. The original cast is on board and some of them star in a promotional video that's sure to delight the fanbase. They're also offering all sorts of quirky prizes, ranging from $10 (that gets you a copy of the script) to $10,000 which gets you a walk-on role and comes with great instructions generally for actors with one line in a movie:

"You are the waiter/waitress. You approach the table, and you say, "Your check, sir." We guarantee you will be on camera as you say the line. Unless you go all hammy and ruin the scene and we have to cut you out, but that would be a sad day for all of us. Just say the line. Don't over-think it. You're a waiter. Your motivation is to turn over the table."

[Kickstarter, image via Getty]

Peripatetic poet-reporter Charlie LeDuff, author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, was arrested and charged with aggravated assault after allegedly biting a security guard's finger this weekend, the Detroit Free Press reported. The incident happened at a St. Patrick's Day parade.

The police report, published by the Free Press, says that Sunny Miller, 54, aka "V1"

SAW S1 CHARLIE LEDUFF FOX NEWS PERSONALITY. S1 APPEARED HIGHLY INTOXICATED AND URINATING IN THE STREET ... HE THEN HEARED S1 ARGUING WITH THREE UNKNOWN FEMALES CALLING THEM "WHORES". AN UNKNOWN WM ASKED S1 "SO YOU BELIEVE THAT ?" S1 REPLIED "FUCK THEM WHOES" A LARGE FIGHT ENSUED. V1 TRIED SEPERATING S1 FROM THE FIGHT. WHILE PULLING S1 AND ADVISING HIM TO CALM DOWN, S1 BIT V1 INDEX FINGER BREAKING THE SKIN.

According to the report, Miller declined medical treatment.

Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has developed a brilliantly concise definition of an asshole: "A person who demands that all social interaction happen on their terms." He was inspired by the assholes who talk in Amtrak's quiet car, but this reasoning also perfectly explains why those who use Google's new wearable computer are assholes, by definition.

Google Glass is the gadget all techies at South By Southwest are talking about this week. Glass is a wearable computer eye piece, which allows you to snap photos, read the news and do Google searches all while looking like an extra from the dance club scene in the Matrix. Glass is not yet publicly available, but Google is graciously allowing select geeks to purchase it early for $1,500, if they write them an essay about why they deserve one.

Glass has sparked much excitement and controversy. Having a computer strapped to your face is the second-greatest geek dream after robot sex. Critics have pointed out the privacy implications of Glass, for which one of the first apps is a program that lets you identify your friends in a crowd based only on what clothes they are wearing. A Seattle bar has already banned Glass, half in jest. Is Glass The Future of Computers or a Privacy Nightmare? I am not concerned with these questions. Instead I'm concerned with a much finer point: People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes.

Wearing Google Glass is functionally the same as living with a smart phone held constantly at eye-level. I've never seen it done, but I think most of us would be comfortable labeling anyone who walked around holding their smart phone at eye-level an asshole, and not just because it looks even stupider than Glass. The smartphone eye-level guy is an asshole because most of us 1) value the undistracted attention of those we're speaking to and 2) don't like to be filmed or photographed without our knowledge. If you come up to me with a smartphone held at eye level and demand that I interact with you like you're not being an asshole, you are an asshole. You are demanding social interaction on your wholly weird and unsettling terms. This does not change if the smartphone is tiny and strapped to your eye and made by Google. In fact, you thinking that this excuses your asshole behavior just makes you that much more of an asshole.

Google's defenders will suggest that this is the ranting of a backwards luddite. They will point to cell phones, another relatively new technology. Would you call all cell phone users assholes? No, just the ones who talk in public restrooms when there's a long line. But in the early days of cell phones, the loudmouth on his brick of a Motorola cell phone was very much shorthand for asshole. This stigma did not arise because society was not "ready" for cell phones, it came from the fact that the early cell phone adopters blabbing in public were disproportionately assholes. They were willing to trade other people's discomfort for their own technological convenience. They demanded social interaction on their terms. Now that everyone uses cell phones, we retroactively imagine that they were the trailblazers and everyone else a dumb luddite. But it doesn't change the fact that, at the time, these people were assholes. What if cell phones had flopped, like, say, the Segway? We would all be laughing about those dumb assholes who used to talk on cell phones in the 80s.

The utter asshole-ishness and disregard for others of the Google Glass wearer can be seen clearly in the arguments of its defenders. Take future expert Jeff Jarvis, who has made a great career out of telling people they are stupid for caring about internet privacy. His rationale for why we should not be afraid of Google Glass' head-based cameras is that nobody ever uses their cell phone cameras to take creepy pictures of people. This is not my glib simplification of his argument, it's literally what he believes:

This is the fear we hear most: That someone wearing Glass will record you—because they can now—and you won't know it. But isn't that what we heard when cell phones added cameras? See The New York Times from a decade ago about Chicago Alderman Edward Burke:

But what Mr. Burke saw was the peril.

"If I'm in a locker room changing clothes," he said, "there shouldn't be some pervert taking photos of me that could wind up on the Internet."

Accordingly, as early as Dec. 17, the Chicago City Council is to vote on a proposal by Mr. Burke to ban the use of camera phones in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.

His fear didn't materialize. Why? Because we're civilized. We're not as rude and stupid—as perverted—as our representative, Mr. Burke, presumed us to be.

(Emphasis mine.)

For someone who seems like he would be happy to have his brainwaves patched directly into Google's servers via skull socket, Jarvis is curiously unaware about what actually goes on online. There are of course many, many people who have had photos of themselves taken and/or posted to the internet by creeps.

If anything, the cell phone camera example shows why we should be extra vigilant about new forms of surveillance, even if it's from private citizens. Because of the rush to embrace that new technology we now have outdated privacy laws that are unable to deal with the problems posed by the explosion of tiny cameras. So we have revenge porn that flourishes because its victims have little legal recourse to get naked pictures of themselves posted to the internet without their consent taken down. I believe that someday something like Google Glass will become accepted and normal, but that doesn't mean we should just blissfully boogie-board down the wave of Progress and hope it's not going to deposit us into a shark's mouth. It also doesn't change the fact that people have good reason to be creeped out by Glass, and by brushing them off as clueless technophobes you are being an asshole.

It's no surprise that Google would create a product so imbued with assholishness. Glass is just the latest in a long line of asshole moves from Google. Google's aborted project to scan and upload all books in existence to the internet without the publishers' permission? Asshole behavior. Sending cars with cameras around to take pictures of everyone's houses for Google Streetview? Asshole behavior. Much of Google's assholishness ended up producing very useful products (I love Streetview), but this doesn't change the fact that they rest on an act of colossal assholery, an arrogance that says your privacy/copyright doesn't matter because Google wants to make a new thing that happens to demolish it.

By donning Google Glass, you, the Google Glass user, are volunteering to be a foot soldier in Google's asshole army. (In fact you're paying for the privilege.) You are saying that anyone who comes into your line of sight must agree to be possibly filmed, photographed, or otherwise data-mined, not just for your own convenience but to further Google's quest for total world domination. Wearing Google Glass automatically means that all social interaction you have must be not just on yours, but Google's terms.

The only way around the Google Glass asshole trap is if Glass users take a pledge to only interact with other Glass users. Maybe they could move to an island.

[Image via AP.]

Kimani Gray, the 16-year-old who was killed in Brooklyn on Saturday night by two plainclothes police officers, was shot seven times: four in the front, three in the back. An autopsy report from the Chief Medical Examiner didn't say which bullets hit first, or which killed Gray; it's unclear, therefore, whether he was shot while facing the officers—as they claim—and then turned, or was first shot while his back was turned to them.

Gray's death has led to vigils in East Flatbush, the neighborhood in which he lived, and a small "riot" in which a group of young people damaged local businesses, ransacked a Rite-Aid and stole a bystander's cell phone. The two cops who shot Gray say he brandished a .38-caliber revolver at them, recovered at the scene; a witness says Gray was unarmed.

[NYT]

During a recent special performance at the New York City Center aimed at raising money for his children's school, Louis C.K. was interrupted at least twice by a female audience member who wanted to let him know she thought his boots were "really sexy."

Not one to suffer hecklers in silence, C.K. launched into a brilliant impromptu bit about why would-be hecklers should resist the urge to interrupt comedians (and pilots, and ballerinas).

Needless to say, that woman's boot-complimenting days are over.

[H/T: Reddit]

Earlier this week, nearly 6,000 dead pigs were found floating in the Huangpu River, roughly 40 miles north of Shanghai. As terrible and disconcerting as the discovery must have been for Shanghai's 23 million residents, who receive their tap water from the river, the news got worse when authorities realized the pigs were infected with porcine circovirus, which, according to health officials, isn't transferrable to humans but still, not a great thought. In fact, according to ABC News, some residents showed "black humor" by referring to their drinking water as "pork broth." But not to worry! The Chinese government is now saying that, after testing the city's tap water, it's perfectly safe to drink, shower in, cook with, etc.

But where did the dead pigs come from? According to tags on some of their ears, they're from the city of Jiaxing in the Zhejiang provence, which is, obviously, upstream from Shanghai and responsible for delivering over four million pigs to China's east coast each year. Not that Jiaxing is taking any responsibility.

"The tags on the pigs' ears only indicate the pigs were born here," argued Jiang Hao, the vice director of Jiaxing's Animal Husbandry Bureau. "It doesn't mean they were raised here."

Fair enough.

Local farmers say that since Jiaxing started cracking down on black market sales of pigs infected with porcine circovirus, meat dealers have just started throwing the infected pigs into the river.

"Some dead pigs weighing more than 25 kilos were still being sold and making it onto people's dinner tables," the farmer said. "But since the government arrested some tainted meat dealers, nobody comes to buy the stuff anymore. So it's normal that there are so many dead pigs in the river," he said.

Yep. Sounds normal.

[ABC News/Image via AP]

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now to be known forever as Pope Francis, sounds likeable enough, to people who are disposed to like high-ranking men of the cloth. The 76-year-old Argentine is reportedly marked by a devotion to the poor and a cultivated humility—he doesn't like limos or fancy palaces, you see, favoring public transportation and sparse apartments over luxury.

But anyone who was looking for a liberal reformer in the Vatican is probably going to keep waiting. The vast majority of American Catholics now find birth control morally acceptable, and 54 percent of American Catholics now support same-sex marriage. Optimists thought this might signal that the next supreme leader of Catholicism would himself—but certainly not herself! ha ha! that would be crazy—reflect the forward momentum of his adherents. Yesterday, Pope Francis looked down upon thousands of people gathered beneath his Vatican City balcony, and millions watching around the world, and effectively said, "Nope."

In honor of all of the papacy's cloak-and-dagger skullduggery, let's start with the rumors: Though he was never directly charged with aiding and abetting Argentina's murderous dictatorial regime during the country's infamous "Dirty War," years later a journalist would accuse Bergoglio of hiding imprisoned victims from human-rights workers. These allegations were detailed by Hugh O'Shaughnessy in the Guardian in 2011 (emphasis ours):

The extent of the church's complicity in the dark deeds was excellently set out by Horacio Verbitsky, one of Argentina's most notable journalists, in his book El Silencio (Silence). He recounts how the Argentine navy with the connivance of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, now the Jesuit archbishop of Buenos Aires, hid from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission the dictatorship's political prisoners. Bergoglio was hiding them in nothing less than his holiday home in an island called El Silencio in the River Plate. The most shaming thing for the church is that in such circumstances Bergoglio's name was allowed to go forward in the ballot to chose the successor of John Paul II. What scandal would not have ensued if the first pope ever to be elected from the continent of America had been revealed as an accessory to murder and false imprisonment

In 2005, just before Benedict XVI was chosen to be pope ahead of him, an Argentinean human-rights attorney filed a criminal complaint accusing Bergoglio of helping dictators kidnap two Jesuit priests. This claim was also sketched out in Verbitsky's book, but Bergoglio's spokesman called the charges "old slander," and Bergoglio himself emerged unscathed.

What is certain is that Bergoglio has since made no bones about his part in a different kind of war, this one against gay people. And that's not hyperbole on our part; Brergoglio himself calls it "a war."

In June 2010, one month before Argentina officially voted to legalize same-sex marriage, Bergoglio wrote a letter to the Carmelite Nuns of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires. In it, he called Argentina's gay marriage bill a work of the Devil and "a move of the father of lies who wishes to confuse and deceive the children of God." He later added that waging battle against gay marriage is "a war of God."

Bergoglio and the rest of his flock's prayers didn't work, and on July 22, Argentina became the first country in Latin America to allow same-sex marriage. It was yet another in a long line of defeats Bergoglio suffered at the hands of a much more progressive Argentinean government, led by President Cristina Fernandez, widow to former President Nestor Kirchner. When Bergoglio said that gay people adopting kids was tantamount to "discrimination" against children, Fernandez said his ideas were those of "medieval times and the Inquisition."

If it's any consolation—and if you're gay it's probably not—the Guardian reports that, despite his many conservative stances (and possible war crimes), Pope Francis believes condoms "can be permissible" to prevent the passage of infection. It only took thousands of years, but there you have it: Condoms might possibly be OK in order to help prevent scores and scores of people from constantly dying of AIDS. Welcome to progress, Catholic style.

Despite overflowing toilets and "human waste all over the floor," passengers are being forbidden from leaving a Carnival cruise ship docked in port at St. Maarten—just a month after another Carnival cruise ship was disabled and left to float for days in the Gulf of Mexico as passengers filled it with excrement and built makeshift shanty towns on deck.

The Carnival Dream, CNN reports, has not quite achieved the shit levels of the Triumph, but the fact that the ship's officers are preventing passengers from disembarking surely counts for something in the great tallying of Horrific Cruise Ordure Incidents:

Several passengers aboard the Dream have contacted CNN, telling stories of power outages and overflowing toilets, all while docked in port at Philipsburg, St. Maarten, in the eastern Caribbean.

"We are not allowed off of the boat despite the fact that we have no way to use the restrooms on board," Jonathan Evans of Reidsville, North Carolina, said in an e-mail early Thursday. "The cruise director is giving passengers very limited information and tons of empty promises. What was supposed to take a hour has turned into 7-plus hours."

The Dream was meant to leave St. Maarten at 5 p.m. yesterday, but generator problems are preventing it from taking off, and also passengers from flushing the toilets:

Gregg Stark, who is traveling with his wife and two young children, told CNN, "There's human waste all over the floor in some of the bathrooms and they're overflowing — and in the state rooms. The elevators have not been working. They've been turning them on and off, on and off."

In February, the Carnival Triumph was crippled by an engine fire and spent four days in the Gulf of Mexico before being towed to Alabama. Earlier this week, more than 100 Royal Caribbean passengers were struck with a gastrointestinal virus.

[CNN, image, of Triumph, via AP]

A Craigslist ad for a "huge ass estate sale" posted last week in the site's Vancouver-area vertical piqued the interest of locals less for the items being hawked than for the reason they were being hawked in the first place: The seller's husband was cheating on her, and she was secretly getting rid of all his stuff.

"Last minute spontaneous estate sale," read the ALL-CAPS ad. "Husband left us for a piece of trash. Selling everything while he is gone this weekend with his floozie."

While the woman may have lost her husband of ten years, she was clearly holding on to her sense of humor for dear life.

Among the items up for grabs: His favorite red leather theater seating sofas and "tools which he didn't have a clue how to use." A brand new sliding glass door "that he never got installed" also needs to go.

"I want the house empty on Monday when he returns because that will be a shock for him to see," the woman writes.

She only asks that interested parties not "come too early (like he did)," because she will be nursing a hangover after an evening of "thoroughly enjoying some wine with my girlfriends" as they set fire to the cheating husband's clothes in the driveway.

"You can see the ashes of his clothes that he is going to see for no additional charge," the scorned wife says.

A staff writer for The Province who visited the sale spoke with an estates lawyer who said the woman might not be allowed to keep the proceeds from the yard sale, as a divorce court might order her to split them with her husband.

However, the writer notes, "she'll always have the look on his face."

[photo via Craigslist via VancityBuzz]

Physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research confirmed today that they have discovered a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe. Called a Higgs boson, this particle will help to explain what gives matter in the universe size and shape. The existence of the particle was predicted in 1964 as a component of the most widespread model of the physical universe. The particle takes its proper name from Peter Higgs, the physicist who proposed its existence, but the boson particle has been popularly nicknamed the "God particle."

The scientists at CERN noted they were studying a particle described as "Higgs-like" last July, but could not conclusively confirm this was actually a Higgs particle until they had finished going through the data. Now, Joe Incandela, a physicist who leads thousands of scientists in one of the two main teams at CERN, stated:

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is."

This discovery could earn a Nobel Prize for Incandela and his fellows, who still have not announced with 100% certainty that this is the Higgs boson. They will continue to use the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, or the atom smasher, for more tests. The Collider tests high-energy collisions of protons to see how the universe might have been created. The discovery of the Higgs boson is a crucial step to confirm that objects gain size and shape when they interact in an energy field with key particles.

If you can't get your fill of this heady science, an impeccably cast Morgan Freeman will host an special next Wednesday on the Science Channel on the Higgs boson particle called, Through the Wormhole: Is There a God Particle? which might not be up to date anymore, but will certainly be fascinating and sound authoritative.

[CBS, image via Getty/AP]

A Redditor who claims to have grabbed this photo from 4chan's fashion boards (/fa/) swears this is definitely not Christian Bale but just some dude who dressed up as Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho for Halloween.

To remove all doubt, some have pointed out that the doppelgänger is lacking Bale's signature "eye wart" (his Seal of Autheticity, if you will).

BuzzFeed did what they likely thought was a helpful side-by-side, but in reality just made "bootleg Bale" seem more like the real thing:

As a person impersonating Christian Bale might say: "Wow" in Christian Bale's voice.

[H/T: BIOTV, photos via Reddit, Getty]

Venezuela's interim president knows how the first South American Pope was elected: the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez swayed Jesus. Nicolas Maduro said Chavez influenced Jesus, who then inspired the Cardinals to elect their first pope from the South American continent. In his own words, which are brilliant:

"We know that our commander ascended to those heights and is face to face with Christ. Something must have influenced [Jesus] to call for a South American pope… Some new hand arrived and Christ said, 'Now is the opportunity for South America,' it seems to us."

The conclave elected Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to be the Roman Catholic Church's 266th pope, after the former pope resigned suddenly. He will be the first Jesuit pope to lead as well as the first non-European pope in over 1,200 years.

Maduro made this proclamation in Caracas on national television, at the opening of an international book fair, because you never know when you are going to make these big picture realizations. Chavez, who died at age 58 of unspecified cancer on March 5, had handpicked Maduro as his successor. Maduro will face opposition from Henrique Capriles Radonski in a special election April 14. Maduro continued his speech, suggesting that Chavez could be pulling for him with the forces that really determine elections:

He said Chavez could "call a constitutional assembly in heaven at any moment to change the [Catholic] church on Earth so the people — the pure people of Christ — may govern the world."

[UPI, image via Getty/AP]

Page Six reports today that Scott Sassa, the president of the entertainment and syndication division of publishing giant Hearst, is "quitting" (in the sense of "being ordered to quit") in the wake of a horrifying scandal. What is the scandal that is so bad it abruptly ends the career of a high powered media executives? He was sending text messages of a sexual nature to a consenting adult female.

The horror, the horror. As P6 tells it, Sassa—"a single father," which means "unmarried"— met a stripper in LA last December, and started sexting with her, and she sent him naked photos. Then, the stripper tried to blackmail him. When he didn't pay her, she sent copies of all the messages to all of Sassa's bosses at Hearst.

"She was texting him sexy pictures, and he was responding using words you absolutely would not want your bosses to see," a source said

Like what? "Baby, you look so sexy, you remind me of Conde Nast, a publishing company far superior to the one at which I'm working, and for whom I am a corporate spy?" It seems far-fetched. One can reasonably infer he was talking about, you know, sex stuff. For this, he was asked to resign, P6 says. His bio has already been pulled off the Hearst website.

We don't, of course, know exactly what the company found, or what might have been in Sassa's phone. Perhaps there was some serious evidence of corporate malfeasance, or expense account abuse, or legitimate violation having to do with his job, as opposed to his personal life. But if, as reported, this is a case of a man who failed to respond to a blackmail attempt and then was blackmailed with a bunch of sexting transcripts, one has to note: That's pretty fucked up on the part of Hearst. It's good to know that if someone tries to extort you for a consensual relationship, your company will support you by... essentially firing you. Is it a condition of employment at Hearst that an executive must never have sent a sexy text message? That would seem to call into question their digital expertise. Hearst publishes Cosmopolitan and Esquire. Have Scott Sassa's bosses ever read Cosmopolitan or Esquire? They are magazines about sex.

We've emailed the company for comment and will update if they reply. If you know more, email me.

[P6. Photo: Getty]

A Fox affiliate in Connecticut was forced to apologize several times yesterday after it aired b-roll of female breasts to illustrate a morning news report on a "Women's Day" event being held in the state Capitol.

Fox CT sent out a tweet yesterday morning after controversy first began to stir, saying the file footage was used in error.

However, Huffington Post notes that the story aired as-is not once but twice within the space of an hour, appearing to suggest that there was no miscalculation involved.

Later in the day, Fox CT again released a statement of apology, this time promising to "implement procedures to keep this from happening in the future."

The Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, which organizes the annual Women's Day to honor the accomplishments of local women, released its own statement calling Fox's story an insult "to women everywhere who are tired of being objectified."

The statement from commission executive director Teresa Younger goes on to invite Fox execs "to ask about our sexual harassment awareness and prevention trainings."

[video via The Political Carnival]