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Watch Citizenfour And Chat With Judith Miller 

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Watch Citizenfour And Chat With Judith Miller 

The second anniversary of the Edward Snowden brouhaha is tomorrow, and in honor of our most famous expat former NSA contractor, we’re hosting another Conspiracy Series film at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn. Join us June 23rd at 7:30 pm for a screening of Laura Poitras’ Academy Award-winning Snowden documentary, Citizenfour, and then stick around for our panel, which will include special guest, Judith Miller.

Watch Citizenfour And Chat With Judith Miller 

Judith Miller is a journalist and author specializing in terrorism, the Middle East and other national security issues. She won the Pulitzer-Prize working for New York Times from 1977-2005, becoming its first bureau chief in the Arab World. She reported on the first Iraq war and then became famous, some would say infamous, for her reporting on weapons of mass destruction leading up to the second Iraq War. In 2005, she spent 85 days in jail to protect confidential sources, receiving the Society of Professional Journalists’ “First Amendment Award.” She is author of four books including, most recently, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey. She can currently be seen as a regular commentator on Fox News.

Tickets are only $15, and we’re pretty sure the NSA has already purchased most of them, so make sure you buy yours today!

Gawker’s national security blog Phase Zero and Jalopnik’s military site Foxtrot Alpha have fed all of their site’s comments into the secret Gawker Media mainframe suspected to be hidden near the pastrami case at Katz’s Delicatessen in order to determine the best four films about the conspiracies – real or imagined – that fascinate us. This is the second film in the series. More information here.

Contact the author at sultana.khan@gawker.com.


500 Days of Kristin, Day 130: Kristin's Message to NFL Fans

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 130: Kristin's Message to NFL Fans

Kristin Cavallari’s book is getting closer to being published, but is her sense of style getting closer to being good? People says yes.

In a recent blog post titled, “9 Reasons Kristin Cavallari Is Even More Stylish Than We Thought,” the mag argues that some new facts about Kristin prove that she can always surprise us (by being more stylish). We’ve gone over some of the reasons listed already: “She’s getting ready for long hair again,” “She’s not superstitious about her game day outfit (or meal!),” and “Her sons are really starting to get into game day style.”

Do any of these reasons prove that Kristin is even more stylish than we thought? That’s for your heart to decide. In any case, here’s another piece of evidence to take to the lab:

“She thinks NFL fans need to get more involved in Pinterest.”

Kristin, who has starred in online advertisements for the NFL’s Pinterest pages (oh, brother—we’ll get to them), explains:

Each team now has their own board, so you can go on there and find style ideas. And I love it too because there’s “homegate” recipe ideas so you can find all kinds of drinks and food—it’s really a great place for everything. Every kind of fan will go on there and find something that they love.

Getting paid is always in style, and Kristin is getting paid for even more things than we thought or could ever believe.


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty]

Vengeful Citizens Push Over Port-a-Potty as Man Masturbates Inside

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Vengeful Citizens Push Over Port-a-Potty as Man Masturbates Inside

In Portland lives a man who jerks off in a port-a-potty, with the door open, regularly. This morning, a group of homeless people who live near the toilet decided they’d had enough and pushed the port-a-potty over, covering the masturbating exhibitionist with shit.

KATU reports that the incident took place this morning around 8 a.m., at the Eastbank Esplanade near Portland’s Hawthorne bridge, when the 48-year-old man allegedly entered the bathroom and began to expose himself.

“[He] was flashing us over and over again, and we asked him multiple times and told him to stop and he wouldn’t,” a homeless woman told KATU. “Our friend thought it would be funny to get up and jump behind the port-a-potty and kick it.”

The port-a-potty tumbled over, trapping the man inside. Portland Fire and Rescue crews rescued him. Responding police declined to arrest him.

“Physically, he’s fine but he had a crappy day,” Portland Police spokesman Willie Halliburton told KATU. “Fortunately for him, he had some clothing he could change into and clean himself up later on. It worked out OK.”

Glad to hear everything ended happily for the man who regularly masturbates in a port-a-potty with the door open.


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

Stop Asking Weatherpeople Exactly When It'll Start Raining at Your House

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Stop Asking Weatherpeople Exactly When It'll Start Raining at Your House

Weather forecasts have come a long way over the past couple of decades. Meteorologists can give you a deadly accurate five-day forecast today, when forecasting the weather beyond a day was a feat 30 years ago. Forecasts today are accurate to a fault: people expect too much, and get angry and disappointed when their friendly local weatherperson can’t deliver.

Everyone jokes about meteorologists getting the forecast wrong more often than not (“it’s the only job where you can be wrong all the time and still get paid!”), but it’s the other way around: forecasts are scary accurate these days. Big busts are rare, and even forecasts people perceive as having busted are still pretty right on—remember the historic blizzard New York City was supposed to see at the end of January that people screamed and moaned about because it didn’t pan out exactly as forecast? The track of the storm moved just a couple of miles farther east than anticipated, keeping the western extent of those huge, feet-deep snowfall totals just a few miles east of the city.

But hey, if it didn’t happen here, it didn’t happen at all.

We have a couple of weather models that excel at predicting convection (thunderstorms), and sometimes they’re eerily accurate in predicting the location, shape, and strength of organized complexes of thunderstorms. Here’s an example from this past March, showing a line of supercell thunderstorms powering through Missouri.

This was the early afternoon run of the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model that day:

Stop Asking Weatherpeople Exactly When It'll Start Raining at Your House

And this is what the radar looked like five hours after that model run, showing almost exactly what the model predicted:

Stop Asking Weatherpeople Exactly When It'll Start Raining at Your House

Science!

One of the problems with such accurate forecasts is that people expect too much from them. They expect accuracy that we haven’t achieved just yet, and it’s both a frustrating and dangerous side effect of advances in meteorology.

Now that we’re entering the warm season, pop-up thunderstorms will dominate the landscape between derechos and hurricanes. These pop-up thunderstorms go by many names—popcorn, garden-variety, pulse—but it’s all the same principle: these storms bubble up in a seemingly-random spot, rage on for an hour or so, then die off and give way to what’s left of the day’s sunshine.

You can forecast the environment in which these storms will form, but unless you’re in Mobile, Alabama, watching the sea breeze push ashore, it’s very hard to predict exactly where these pop-up thunderstorms will form. The general public doesn’t understand these limitations, so they bombard meteorologists and weather nerds with the same line of impossible-to-answer questions: Will I see a thunderstorm today? Will it rain over Jaycee Park at 3:30 PM on Sunday? Will I be okay walking to the bus stop this evening, or should I take my car?

Sometimes we can answer these questions with ease. You can sit there and watch the radar to figure out roughly what time squall lines or other complexes of organized thunderstorms will arrive at your location. This is how various weather apps can tell you it’ll start raining in exactly 36 minutes—they have algorithms that analyze radar data and figure out how fast showers and thunderstorms are moving, using this data to figure out how long it’ll take for precipitation to reach your location. When it comes to these summertime pop-up storms, they form in random locations and barely move, so predicting when and where they’ll form is virtually impossible with today’s technology.

If you go on Facebook and ask your local broadcast meteorologist what time it’ll start raining, unless it’s an organized storm system heading your way, you probably won’t get a straight answer, because there really isn’t one. The underlying problem here is that saying “I don’t know” is stigmatized. We’ve convinced ourselves that “I don’t know” is the worst thing someone can admit.

When a meteorologist says that he or she doesn’t know, it’s even worse. The pinpoint, personalized forecasts the public demands are dangerous because they create absurdly high expectations that ultimately erode overall trust in forecasts because people see “I don’t know” as some sort of proof that all forecasts are guesses or just plain wrong. In the warped mindset of so many people, the entire science of meteorology is a fraud because Skippy McHail at WXXZ can’t tell them exactly what time a thunderstorm will rain on little Jack’s crucial soccer game, if at all.

It’s summer. Thunderstorms can bubble up with little or no notice. A gully-washer could flood the town next to yours while it’s bone dry in your front yard. You could lose a tree to a gust of wind while two streets away, it was a quick burst of rain and nothing more. Forecasts have advanced by leaps and bounds over the years, but we still have a way to go before meteorologists can personalize your pop-up thunderstorm experience. http://thevane.gawker.com/unleash-your-i...

We all want answers ahead of time, but summertime weather isn’t always conducive to the instant I-want-to-know-now luxury that we’ve gotten used to. Sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands when it comes to staying out of the rain. It sounds flip, but when pop-up thunderstorms are possible, the best thing to do is to keep looking at the clouds (if you see towering, dark clouds looming overhead, the odds of rain are good!) and checking the radar to see what’s going on nearby. There are dozens of reliable apps and programs that provide radar imagery, not to mention great websites like Wunderground and the National Weather Service.

[Images: AP, GREarth]


You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

U.S. Reaches Peak Misplaced Outrage in Rick Perry-Caitlyn Jenner Flap

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U.S. Reaches Peak Misplaced Outrage in Rick Perry-Caitlyn Jenner Flap

Rick Perry’s presidential campaign launched today on the premise that you don’t need to be able to count to three as long as you can push the red button. But amid his militaristic orgy of self-praise, dumb media people had a dumb media argument about the emo twins flanking Perry. Caitlyn Jenner was involved.

A lot of pundits critical of Perry apparently watched his announcement on mute and didn’t realize who the mopey hellhounds around the Guv were. They sure looked like sad sacks. This led to snark.

Perry, however, was flanked by Marcus and Morgan Luttrell, Texan twin brothers and longtime veterans of the Navy SEAL teams’ “war on terror” operations. You may recall the Navy Cross-earning Marcus from his depiction by Mark Wahlberg in Lone Survivor. “I’m surrounded by heroes,” Perry gushed, setting the tone for his candidacy as a president who will fuck the VA and ravage military pensions, but can salute correctly.

Conservatives pundits were beside themselves that liberal pundits might not recognize the Luttrells. What effete, wine-sipping diffidence! What stupidity! Disqualify them now from having opinions on things. But the chest-beating conservative pageant took a sudden side turn into Mr. Toad’s Transphobic Ride with a nudge from normally staid libertarianishish reporter (and erstwhile workin’ friend of mine) Dave Weigel:

This is a variation on a conservative theme developed several evenings ago, a built-up frustration with the performative praise lavished on Caitlyn Jenner and her public coming-out. It’s yielded several dumb hairy-gonads memes, including one that falsely alleged ESPN had snubbed a war veteran with one leg and one arm to bestow upon Jenner its “Arthur Ashe Courage Award” and one that idiotically pushed a photo of toy soldiers as realer heroes than Jenner.

Of course, the irony in this most recent case is that a lot of fans of Marcus Luttrell probably have fuckall of a clue what Marcus Luttrell looks like, if not “something like Marky Mark.”

The only way you can have seen Luttrell in recent years is if you watch a lot of Fox News, because his status as a pop hero is attributable less to his Navy Cross for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action than to the machinations of conservative partisan political interests that also gave us Sarah Palin. That’s no reflection on him—none of us know the real him!—but on an ambition machine that finds it easier to play militarist identity politics than to articulate and advocate nuanced policy plans.

Which brings us back to a question we should actually be asking about Rick Perry’s self-coronation: Why is a presidential candidate’s best first photo op to be flanked by two enlisted ex-special forces grunts in front of a C-130?

That question sounds naive, because it’s hard for America to get more knee-jerkily military-worshiping than it already is. Lone Survivor, the movie, has grossed $150 million. The most recent paean to a Navy SEAL, American Sniper, now stands as the highest grossing war film of all time. Carhartt, tactical caps, and AR-15s are so hot right now. And opiners like Weigel and everybody to his right grumble that we still give short shrift to war heroes in this country. If our war heroes’ shrift were any longer, we’d be Soviets.

Nobody in the media wants to rassle with such naive questions. Conservative and liberal tastemakers would rather bitch about whose heroes are more heroic and in-touch with Real America. Perry—who polls around 2 percent of even GOP voters, a distant ninth among once and future presidential candidates—is gliding around wearing his Air National Guard service like he’s Dwight Eisenhower, and touting as his military surrogate Luttrell, a retired and somewhat bashful Navy first-class petty officer. Great optics, as they say in the Northern Virginia swamps and parlors. Great brand identity. But where are the generals and admirals? Or even the diplomats and professors? Does Perry have no Giambastiani, or Clark, or Franks, or Jones? Nah. In place of any coherent global strategy, Perry will substitute performative jingoism. And tweetin’ scorekeepers in the media will let him.


Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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Stephen Colbert Introduces the Late Show's New Bandleader, Jon Batiste

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It remains to be seen how (or even if) Stephen Colbert will shake up the late night talk show format when he takes over for David Letterman in September, but he’s keeping at least one of the hallmarks of the genre in place: The Late Show will have a house band. Colbert announced Wednesday that the Paul Shaffer to his Letterman will be Louisiana jazz musician Jon Batiste.

You may know Batiste, a 28-year-old Juilliard grad, as himself in Treme or from his previous appearances on the Colbert Report. When Batiste did Colbert’s show last year, he led a crowd outside into a street parade—it’s kind of his thing—while a clearly impressed Colbert danced along. These two already have an, uh, a Colbert rapport, if you will. (Sorry.)

Batiste will bring his band of 10 years, Stay Human, along with him as he steps into Shaffer’s old gig. They sound like this:

Wise move to pick a young, high-energy performer who seems to have synergy with Colbert, but also brings things to the show that Colbert can’t.

Every network late night show is still hosted by middle-aged white dudes, but that doesn’t mean their bands have to be. Batiste makes three black bandleaders on major shows, along with the Tonight Show’s Questlove and the Late Late Show’s Reggie Watts.

At 28, he’ll also be the youngest major player on any of the shows. The Late Late Show’s James Corden, 36, is practically a baby by late night standards, but Batiste makes him look like a toddler, at least.

Surviving the Drought

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Surviving the Drought

Since the drought began in California, my mom has become even more overzealous about conserving water. “The lawn is all brown blotches,” she giggled before I went home to visit last summer. “I turn off all the sprinkler but I think Marcelino turns it on.” Marcelino is our neighbor. He is retired gardener who sometimes comes over with his grandkids to tend to our yard. I think he feels bad for it.

“How do you know he turns the sprinklers on? Is the water bill super high?”

“Oh no. Bill is lower than before drought!” she boasted. “At night I go to gym to take a shower. I really yell at people when they take shower too long. Hey! Hello? We are in drought! Hello?”

I laughed. Her frugality may have started out as immigrant necessity but it has since morphed into a kind of renegade environmentalism. She conserves everything—electricity, gas, food, and of course water—which most people used to consider “free” out of the municipal tap.

Growing up, we were never allowed to be frivolous with our water use. My sister and I took baths together with only four or five inches of water. Scooping enough water to pour over our heads felt like we were bailing ourselves out of a leaking boat. We had this strategy where one person would push the water into the plastic bin—teamwork! Or we would use towels to soak up the water and wring it over each other’s heads. Our baths were a workout.

So we lived in blissful, strenuous ignorance until we started going on vacations to Las Vegas and staying in hotels. Then we understood. Our baths were a joke! In Las Vegas, we could use as much water as we wanted because we weren’t paying the water bill. My dad would seem especially giddy and reckless in that land of vice, that air-conditioned oasis surrounded by hot, dry sand. He would fling the bathroom door open and announce: “I’ll even take two showers!” (And then not actually do it.)

Since then, I’ve had many years of living independently to recondition my habits. Now it seems perfectly normal to use many gallons of water every day just to clean myself. It seems only mildly indulgent to turn on the air conditioner and then snuggle in heavy blankets in the middle of summer. But when I visit my mom at home, all of this reconditioning has to be unconditioned. I return to my former self. In her house, I have to live by her rules.

So I had been forewarned about the dying lawn before I went back to visit recently. But I was still emotionally unprepared for what I would see after I landed at LAX. For one thing, all the trees in Los Angeles looked ill. They looked like they were sort of listing to one side in an effort to stay upright. I thought of dehydrated people teetering around in the desert, faces all yellow and ashy. Along the freeway I watched as clouds of dry soil coiled up into the air, an ominous reminder of the city’s original landscape. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. A watery mirage shimmered ahead on the hot road.

I took it all in, heart sinking. I used to feel nervous about the smog, the suffocating cloud of it descending during the week, then lifting briefly over the weekend. But this was a whole new sensation. When we pulled into our driveway, I saw that the two-story tall grapefruit tree that has always guarded our property had dropped all its shriveled fruit. Little mummified miscarriages. Its remaining leaves clung limply to the branches. I’d never seen anything like it.

“Are you not watering the tree?” I accused my mom with a panicked edge in my voice.

Mom sighed. “I water that grapefruit tree all the time,” she said sadly. “Still not enough.”

Inside the house, it was dark and quiet. The curtains were drawn to block out the heat of the afternoon sun, because mom doesn’t believe in air conditioning. It was too wasteful; she couldn’t justify it to herself. My dad was living in Taiwan and my sister lived in her own apartment in Koreatown. This was her new solitude. It was so quiet I could hear the clock ticking. Every corner had been touched by her survivalist temperament: thrifted furniture that looked like it belonged in a cabin, wrought from large hunks of wood to endure and endure. A half-knitted thing balanced on the arm of a sofa. And of course, all the buckets and basins.

That she would have jigged up an elaborate water-saving set-up involving all these buckets and basins should not have been a surprise, and yet, there I was, baffled. It had not yet dawned on me that her water-saving fervor had reached such a pitch. I hadn’t wondered what the basin was doing in the sink until I turned on the faucet to wash my hands. Mom yelped—“Ai yah!”—and rushed over to turn off the faucet. I had washed my hands in a way that did not allow the water to fall into the basin! She admonished. I was to wash my hands over the basin so that the water could be saved and then poured into the bucket resting on the floor.

Life, it seemed, had become an elaborate system of pouring liquids from one bucket to another bucket. If mom washed dishes, she would fill one basin with just a tiny bit of detergent, and another with clean water, wash and rinse, and then pour all the dirty water into a larger bucket. The water could water the plants. Or rinse out more bowls. Or flush the toilet. It was hard to keep track of.

“You know you can drink toilet water?” She exclaimed. “It’s the same water as for drinking!” She was defending herself because I asked if it was really worth it to haul the dirty dishwater bucket all the way to the bathroom to flush the toilet. “Why we flush the toilet with drinking water?” The idea of it offended her.

Travel-weary, I said I needed to take a shower. But could I just do it? The shower looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time. “Yes, yes take a shower!” She insisted, almost offended to be asked. I felt inordinately guilty. The showerhead sputtered from disuse, crusted over with mineral build-up. I did everything quickly, in less than three minutes.

That night, I lay awake thinking. I couldn’t sleep because it turns out mom didn’t believe in turning on the A/C for just two people either, so I lay flat on the bed with all my limbs outstretched like a starfish. Maximizing the surface area in order to get cool.

What was it that compelled her to save this way, when there were people out there shamelessly slinging water on their lawns, washing their cars, golfing on emerald turf, eating grass-fed beef and California almonds? Was it altruism? Was it some hippie love for the planet? She wasn’t rich, but she certainly wasn’t poor anymore either. There was no reason to be so extreme.

The next morning for breakfast, mom taught me about a new method for boiling eggs that required only a tiny bit of water. She heard about this method on NPR. Basically hard-boiled eggs can be cooked just as well by steaming them. So you put in just a tiny bit of water to cover the base of the pot, and—ta da! She had been enlightened and she was never going back. Suddenly the idea of filling up the pot and immersing the whole egg in water seemed crazy to her too.

So we ate our hard-steamed eggs with some instant oatmeal, which we microwaved. After breakfast, I put my dirty oatmeal bowl in the sink. Mom scraped hers clean and then put it in the freezer. When she opened the freezer door I saw there was also a small skillet in there with just the thinnest film of olive oil, looking as though it had been used to sautée something. Mom gestured proudly. “Look! Less dishes to do later!” She cackled, delighted by her own ingenuity.

I have to admit. I felt scared then. Now that my mom was living alone, all of her habits had radicalized dramatically, like she was a pioneer on her own homestead, out of touch with the outside world. She was developing her own language of logic. So I fought back.

“Mom. This is crazy. We have enough money for you to boil an egg like a normal person. And wash your skillet after you cook. Do you need money? I’ll give you money.”

Her face sank—I had deeply wounded her. She shot back: “This is not about money. California is in drought.”

We stood there in a standoff. I watched my mom, standing there in her defiant pose, wearing her favorite red flannel shirt from Goodwill, her stretchy hand-me-down jeans from her sister-in-law, her globe of self-cut hair protectively cushioning her head like a helmet. She was indestructible. She was survival itself. She started aggressively washing out my bowl in the basin. Yes, she had always been this fiercely independent person. Tough. She knew what she was about. But what was in her core that oriented all of her decisions and her actions?

As the week went on, we eased into each other’s habits. I found myself more aware of how much water I used on a daily basis. I began to feel guilty about how much I was drinking, eating, how I was using up space. My life shrunk dramatically. Then a week passed: it was time to go back to New York. I sat in my seat and felt bad about the carbon the plane would be emitting into the atmosphere. The plane lifted up in the sky. Down below, everything looked brown and diseased. I thought of my mom as a speck in all that brown land.

After a few minutes we were flying over the arid moonscape of Nevada. And then I suddenly remembered this one magical time when we’d gone to Las Vegas in my childhood. Through some computing fluke, we somehow ended up with a VIP Master Suite on top of the MGM. This was an insane luxury for my family at the time. We all staggered through the cool carpeted halls and into the brightly lit master bathroom. There was a marble Jacuzzi elevated on some kind of pedestal. Immediately, my sister and I filled that whole thing up and turned on the jets. For some reason we thought we had to wear swimsuits, because it suddenly felt like we were about to jump into a pool. The steamy cauldron roiled and seethed. When we got in we were tossed around like we were whitewater rafting. So much water! We tossed around in there until our fingers pruned up. After it was all over, we pulled the drain and watched as the water slurped into the void, creating a small whirlpool in its wake. Then it was all gone. I remember feeling sick.

I mourned that water. I’d wanted to clutch it to my chest and keep it forever. And yet this was one of the many experiences I would have throughout my childhood of the sensation of running out. We were never going to take this kind of bath again. If the possibility of running out was always present in my mind, then I knew it must have been exponentially more present for my parents. Water, money, food, the good graces of our neighbors: all of this might one day run out. The running out of these things seemed an imminent possibility that we were always just staving off.

But what would it mean for California to run out of water? Are we prepared to know what that possibility might feel like? California has less than one year of water left in its reservoirs. Thousands of wells have gone dry. Ancient water is being pumped out of the ground. And yet the debates rage on: there’s more to this drought than individual actions; it’s the state; it’s Big Agriculture; it’s wealthy people. We keep pointing in all directions, looking for somewhere to place the blame. And perhaps it still brings some solace to continue debating. Just like we would love to continue debating whether or not climate change is real. To continue debating means nobody has to do anything yet. We will keep debating until everything runs out.

Anelise Chen is a writer in New York. [Previously from Anelise Chen]

Illustration by Jim Cooke

Prosecutor: Germanwings Pilot Contacted Dozens of Doctors Before Crash

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Prosecutor: Germanwings Pilot Contacted Dozens of Doctors Before Crash

According to the French prosecutor leading the investigation, Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz contacted dozens of doctors before intentionally crashing Flight 9525 into the Alps in March.

Lubtiz suffered from depression and had reportedly been treated for suicidal tendencies, though prosecutors didn’t say why he contacted the doctors in the weeks leading to the crash. From the Associated Press:

Brice Robin, the lead prosecutor in the investigation into the disaster, told The Associated Press late Thursday that Lubitz had also reached out to dozens of doctors in the period before the crash.

Robin did not elaborate, or comment on whether the pilot had been seeking help for a particular ailment.

He said he has received information from foreign counterparts and was reviewing it before a meeting with victims’ relatives in Paris next week.

On March 24, investigators say the 27-year-old co-pilot locked his captain out of the cockpit and deliberately flew the Germanwings flight into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. He reportedly researched cockpit security and suicide in the days before the crash.


Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.


Minnie Mouse, Hello Kitty Arrested in Another Times Square Mascot Brawl

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Minnie Mouse, Hello Kitty Arrested in Another Times Square Mascot Brawl

Two of Times Square’s notorious costumed mascots have been charged with assault after a cat (and mouse) fight broke out Thursday afternoon between two women playing Minnie Mouse and Hello Kitty.

Sandra Mocha, 34 (Minnie) and Giovanna Melendez, 40 (Kitty) were cuffed at the scene around 3:30 p.m., the New York Daily News reports. They had allegedly been fighting over tips.

“This is another reason why we need regulations to address the growing problems in Times Square,” Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins told the Daily News.

Previous reasons include the time two Iron Men, an Elmo, and a Spider-Man were arrested for “aggressive panhandling” and the time Spider-Man punched a cop. At this point, Times Square is basically an Octagon for costumed villains fighting to the death over who gets to grab tourists and make them pose for photos.

The NYPD has been trying to crack down on it for some time, with little result. After a meeting between cops and characters last year, one police source claimed “The meeting was a waste of time. They were in their little costumes, [and] they didn’t give a shit about what we had to say.”

Stay safe out there in the badlands this Tony weekend, tourists and guys dressed as Olaf the Snowman.

[h/t Gothamist, Photo: Jake Rullman/Twitter]

A Brief List of Ways Melissa McCarthy's Character Is Humiliated in Spy

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A Brief List of Ways Melissa McCarthy's Character Is Humiliated in Spy

Melissa McCarthy reteams with director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat) in Spy, which opens today. As usual, McCarthy’s character is considered wholly unappealing by almost everyone she encounters. This is entirely related to her character’s appearance, which is to say Melissa McCarthy’s appearance. This is her brand. Below are some of the ways in which McCarthy’s character, Susan, is humiliated throughout the movie.

  • At dinner, Susan (Melissa McCarthy) receives a jewelry box from the movie-star handsome man that she works and is in love with, Bradley Fine (Jude Law). The box does not contain an engagement ring, as Susan hopes it does, but a plastic pendant in the shape of a cupcake. Bradley insists Susan wear the cupcake pendant immediately.
  • In the same scene, Bradley assumes Susan is a cat owner. When she corrects him, he tells her, “You should get some, they’re good company.”
  • Susan comes down with a facial irritation that her boss Elaine (Allison Janney) swears is pink eye. Though Susan denies it, she is mocked relentlessly for it.
  • Susan shares a story about her mother leaving notes in her lunch box that said things like, “Give up on your dreams, Susan.”
  • A bartender ignores Susan and her friend/co-worker Nancy (Miranda Hart) but waits on their more conventionally attractive C.I.A. colleague Karen (Morena Baccarin) immediately.
  • Nancy frames a fart on Susan, who is fat.
  • When Susan goes undercover, her weaponry is hidden in embarrassing personal items: her pepper spray looks like toe fungus treatment, poison antidote comes in a stool softener bottle, and disposable towels containing chloroform are disguised as hemorrhoid wipes.
  • Susan is made to stay in Paris in a rat trap hotel located in a seedy part of town.
  • Susan is instructed to tell a crowd that she shit her pants to get people to move out of the way.
  • Susan’s first assigned disguise is that of a dumpy mother of four. “I look like someone’s homophobic aunt,” she says. Her second disguise is a similarly dumpy owner of 10 cats.
  • While wearing the second disguise, Susan ignored by leering Italian men who catcall people on each side of her.
  • Susan is pawed relentlessly by an Italian agent who serves as her guide.
  • When she finally wears a dress of her own choosing, which spotlights her cleavage, Susan walks down the street holding her head high. Soon, the foolishness of her pride is exposed when she is mocked by her fellow agent Rick Ford (Jason Statham), who tells her, “You look like a flute player in a wedding band.” Her nemesis, Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne), calls her dress “hideous” and an “abortion.”
  • Susan witnesses a man poisoning Rayna’s drink—a problem, since Rayna must be kept alive. Susan tells Rayna that she saw a guy attempt to roofie Rayna’s drink, and Rayna immediately doubts that Susan could possibly know what it looks like when a man roofies a woman’s drink. “People often try to roofie you?” she asks, incredulous.
  • Rayna compares Susan to a clown she saw growing up in Bulgaria who performed her tricks in mud and “would just cry and cry.”

Susan, in contrast to last year’s Tammy—the role McCarthy wrote for herself to play in the movie of that name—isn’t a completely pathetic loser. She is highly skilled at hand-to-hand combat. Additionally, she is no mere victim; she often insults people with the same spite that they do her. It’s a depressing version of equality, but it counts as progress in terms of the way McCarthy is treated onscreen by her director, her co-stars, and herself.

Use Google Searches to Figure Out How Racist Your Neighborhood Is

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Want to know whether a given area has a higher number of racists than average? It turns out that Google searches can provide you with a pretty good answer, at least according to two recent studies.

A few years ago, data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz set out to study whether “racial animus,” or racism, could affect the outcome of a presidential election where one candidate was black. Luckily, he had a great dataset: Obama had just been elected, and there was a ton of data on how various areas had voted. But what he needed was a good proxy that measured the racism in these places. He decided to use Google searches on the word “nigger,” which he calls (quoting Randall Kennedy) “the paradigmatic slur.”

In 2013, Stephens-Davidowitz wrote about how he looked for racism using Google in his dissertation (part of which later became a paper published in Journal of Public Economics):

I define an area’s racially charged search rate as the percent of Google searches, from 2004- 2007, that included the word “nigger” or “niggers.” ... The epithet is searched for with some frequency on Google. From 2004-2007, the word “nigger(s)“ was included in roughly the same number of Google searches as words and phrases such as “migraine(s),” “economist,” “sweater,” “Daily Show,” and “Lakers.” The most common searches that include the epithet, such as “nigger jokes” and “I hate niggers,” return websites with derogatory material about African-Americans. From 2004-2007, the searches were most popular in West Virginia; upstate New York; rural Illinois; eastern Ohio; southern Mississippi; western Pennsylvania; and southern Oklahoma.

He’s careful to point out that he tried to control for non-racist uses of the word:

In particular, I control for search rates for “African American,” “nigga,” (the alternate spelling used in nearly all rap songs that include the word), and profane language.

While this certainly doesn’t control for all non-racist uses, it does go a long way toward disambiguating the many connotations of the word. This is underscored when you consider that Stephens-Davidowitz found that, after controlling for “nigga,” the most popular results included clearly racist phrases like “nigger jokes” (a phrase that’s popular on Reddit’s racist “Chimpire” subreddits as well).

What Stephens-Davidowitz ultimately discovered was that racism “appears to have cost Obama roughly four percentage points of the national popular vote in both 2008 and 2012.” He determined this by showing that the higher the number of searches there were on “nigger” in a given area, the more likely it was that Obama lost votes there — even controlling for things like income, already-existing political affiliations, and more. In other words, even in an area where people typically voted for Democrats, you’d see a less-than-typical number of votes for Obama if the rate of Google searches on “nigger” was higher than average. As Stephens-Davidowitz put it, “An area’s racially charged search rate is a robust negative predictor of Obama’s vote share.”

Now Stephens-Davidowitz’s method of identifying racist regions has made its way into another fascinating data analysis, published a month ago in PLoS One. This paper, authored by a team led by University of Maryland, College Park, biostatistician David Chae, deals with the correlation between regional racism and higher-than-average rates of black mortality.

The team focused on 196 “designated market areas,” or regions defined by Nielsen Media Research (yes, the group that does Nielsen Ratings), and looked at Google searches for “nigger” in these areas. They show the results below, in a map that reveals which areas are a half-standard deviation away on either side from the average number of searches for the word.

Use Google Searches to Figure Out How Racist Your Neighborhood Is

“Notably, this shows that greater proportions of Google search queries containing the “N-word” were concentrated in the rural Northeast and South of the US,” the authors write.

They also found that, looking at mortality rates for blacks over the age of 25 from stress-related conditions, there was a correlation between higher rates of death and higher rates of racism. Specifically, they found a 5.7% higher rate of death among blacks in the areas with the greatest levels of racism.

They write:

DMAs characterized by a one standard deviation greater level of area racism were associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause Black mortality rate, equivalent to over 30,000 deaths annually. The magnitude of this effect was attenuated to 5.7% after adjustment for DMA-level demographic and Black socioeconomic covariates.

It has already been demonstrated in many other studies that racism — and indeed, social stigmatization of many kinds — can lead to greater stress, and therefore higher mortality rates. But this is the first study to quantify those rates using this new measure of racism.

These studies suggest many areas of further research to be done. You could look for correlations between racist Google searches and bank loan rates to black families, for instance; or just search your city for the most racist neighborhoods and correlate that with housing prices. I look forward to seeing the results.

[via PLoS, Journal of Public Economics, and DASH Harvard]


Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: CA58 326B 1ACB 133B 0D15 5BCE 3FC6 9123 B2AA 1E1A

How Maryland Governor Larry Hogan Has Failed West Baltimore

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How Maryland Governor Larry Hogan Has Failed West Baltimore

With the thousands of soldiers, countless police, and CNN trucks, West Baltimore in April looked very different than it had just a few months before. When Governor Larry Hogan strolled in—mic and camera in tow—he claimed he was looking out for the best interests of residents. He boasted of being the only politician who would come to rough neighborhoods and talk to locals. Hogan even moved his base of operations to Baltimore, stating in a press conference that he was “taking over the situation.”

But when it came time to take real action, Hogan cowered. Recently, a bill crossed Hogan’s desk that, in one fell swoop, would restore the right to vote to 40,000 Maryland residents—disproportionately black residents, many of whom are from poor Baltimore neighborhoods, the vast majority of whom are victims of our discriminatory mass incarceration system. The state legislature overwhelmingly supported the bill, which would give Baltimore the chance to regain their constitutional voice.

Hogan vetoed it.

In other words, when given the opportunity to show that he is serious about ensuring a voice for black and poor Maryland residents, Hogan decided he’d rather keep them quiet. The bill would have granted felons the opportunity to vote “as soon as they leave prison rather than waiting to finish parole or probation.”

When Hogan said he was “taking over the situation,” the situation he referenced was not Freddie Gray’s murder at the hands of callous police. In fact, Hogan barely commented on Gray’s death at all, completely failing to rebuke the officers who killed him. What concerned him—what brought him to Baltimore—were the protests that followed Gray’s death.

He did not see courage on the faces of the people calling for justice. He did not understand that they were calling for a voice, calling for change to the broken system they live in. These protests were a response to much more than violent policing. They were calling for leaders and lawmakers to act on the needs of low-income communities of color.

Freddie Gray’s crime was simply existing. He was killed in West Baltimore, where being poor and black means being shut out of opportunity. Like so many other low-income communities of color, people in Gray’s neighborhood commonly suffer from not only police violence but economic and institutional violence, as well.

In West Baltimore, the unemployment rate is 24 percent and the median income is about $24,000. Children born there are bound to be victims of systematic inequality at virtually every juncture, and receive significantly fewer resources than kids in other neighborhoods. Public schools in the area are dilapidated and under-resourced, and the city has closed 14 recreation centers since 2010.


This is why Maryland’s felon disenfranchisement laws—which currently bar anyone in prison, on parole, or on probation from voting—are so problematic. Hogan’s description of this law as simply a just punishment further underscores his willingness to turn a blind eye to reality.


The economic distress, educational deprivation, and out-of-control policing tactics that plague places like West Baltimore increase the likelihood that those in the community will be funneled through the criminal justice system. Black teenagers are almost as likely to be arrested as they are to graduate from high school, and more people in Maryland prisons come from Gray’s West Baltimore neighborhood than any other neighborhood in the state.

This is why Maryland’s felon disenfranchisement laws—which currently bar anyone in prison, on parole, or on probation from voting—are so problematic. Hogan’s description of this law as simply a just punishment further underscores his willingness to turn a blind eye to reality.

The truth is that felon disenfranchisement is a mechanism to reduce the political voice of entire neighborhoods of color. The loss of a vote not only hurts the potential voter, it hurts their whole community. Entire populations of low-income minorities are slowly shut out of our democracy. They are forced to watch their power steadily deteriorate.

It is not surprising, then, that lawmakers like Hogan have done little to address the West Baltimore community’s perpetual poverty and marginalization for so long. The rampant disenfranchisement in these communities makes voters unable to hold their elected leaders accountable. Since places like West Baltimore have less and less electoral power, lawmakers are free to ignore the issues that confront these constituents.

Gray’s tragic death put a spotlight on West Baltimore. But now the news cameras have left, the protests have waned, and the Governor has packed up and gone home. Residents find themselves, once again, abandoned and voiceless.

Last month’s protests prove that Baltimore residents need to be heard. Families are crying out, demanding that this broken system be repaired. The state legislature supported giving residents a voice. But Hogan decided he preferred their silence. Baltimore deserves better.

Josie Duffy is a policy advocate for The Center for Popular Democracy.

[Image via Getty]

Plastic-haired hedge fund sleazeball Anthony Scaramucci, proprietor of the worst place in Manhattan,

The Undeniable Power of Rihanna: A Story in Three Tweets

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The Undeniable Power of Rihanna: A Story in Three Tweets

Last night, Rihanna sat courtside at Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors (stay with me!). Sitting next to her was Warriors owner Joe Lacob, pictured right. This was exciting for everyone except for one person: Lacob’s fianceé, who made very sure her husband-to-be didn’t get too much face time with perhaps the most alluring celebrity on Earth.

Here, via San Jose Mercury writer Diamond Leung, is a short story demonstrating the power of Rihanna:

The Undeniable Power of Rihanna: A Story in Three Tweets

:-)

[“hat tip” my friend Joe Schoech]

What's Going on With Nicki Minaj and Meek Mill? A Timeline

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What's Going on With Nicki Minaj and Meek Mill? A Timeline

Over the last week, fans, tabloids and this very website inferred from a series of cryptic Instagram posts that Her Minajesty, Onika Maraj, may have dumped recent manfriend Meek Mill right on his ass. Those posts included two May 31 photographs of Minaj quoting lyrics from Beyoncé’s “Best I Never Had” (“Thank God ya blew it!!! Thank God I dodged the bullet!!!!” and “U turned out to be thaaaaaaaa......and I’m gon always be thaaaaaaaa......”).

The same day, Meek Mill posted a sad-looking photo of himself emerging from the backseat of a Maybach, captioned, “Even bosses got feelings u know?”

One day after unleashing those fire-fanning subs, Minaj tweeted, “Love my baby <3” (though tagged no one) and posted another selfie on Instagram, this one captioned “I’ll hold you dowwwwwwwwn,” presumably referencing Chris Brown’s verse on this Khaled track (though as a New York kid, I kinda wish she were throwing back to this). These plus a lovey ‘gram in support of Meek’s new video game and shopping selfie referencing a (fire) new Meek track served to tamp down speculation about a split—and Meek Mill is still supporting the upcoming US leg of her Pinkprint Tour, during which they’ll no doubt perform “Buy a Heart” and “Big Daddy.” But considering that most of our news about the duo’s relationship has filtered almost exclusively through Minaj and Mills’ social media accounts, these are still clues that all might not be perfection in the Omeekaverse.

First, some background. Though they’ve been publicly dating since around January and have known each other for several years before that, Minaj and Mill haven’t been together long enough to make it to the top tier of all-time epic hip-hop romances, whether ill fated or forever. They are not quite yet a Common and Badu, nor a Nas and Kelis; neither Amber and Wiz (RIP!) nor even Kanye and Kim. (They have surpassed Future and Ciara, thank god, but the ballpark of Jay and Beyoncé is still light years from here.)

If we’re being honest, it wouldn’t be surprising if we found out later the relationship were a high-profile rebound on the part of Minaj, clearly the alpha in this situation, with Meek as the comeback kid for Minaj’s weary heart after her split from childhood sweetheart Safaree Samuels. Just last December, Minaj spoke about that ten-plus-year relationship with CRWN’s Elliott Wilson:

We’re talking about my best fucking friend. Like somebody I would really jump in front of a bus for, before and after. Nothing changed. I’m like the most loyal chick. If you ask anybody that knew me from before this shit, they’ll tell you I was the same exact way. People can say whatever the fuck they want about me, I been this way. I been trying to run my own shit. I been like that. It’s just a sad time, because for the first time in my life, I realize everything I thought? It’s changing right in front of my face. I didn’t plan this. It’s just happening.

By that time, the rumor mill had already been churning about Minaj and Mill, not just in relation to The Pinkprint’s passionate collabos but because of Instagram pics dropped like crumbs. In December, a selfie with Mill captioned “Guess what video we’re shooting” was taken as a hint at their possible union, which seemed to be solidified at this photo of the duo cuddling as well as Minaj’s revealingly coy insistence that they were “just friends” around the same time.

But soon she was calling Mill “my baby,” and by April 15, Minaj revealed a humormous, heart-shaped rock from Pristine Jewelers on her ring finger, guesstimated to have cost around $500k; that day, Mill posted his own photograph shouting out the jeweler with the hashtags “#lightwork but #therightwork.” (Two days before the posts, he tweeted an emoji of a yellow heart.)

Their “engagement,” like the majority of their relationship, was never publicly confirmed, just simply speculated upon by fans, tabloids, and Rihanna fan sites like Jezebel dot com—but their bond is/was clearly precious enough to Instagram hand-model shots straight out of one of those TV commercials equating diamonds with love.

So, even if Minaj’s May 31 “see ya” tweets were directed at Safaree—with whom she hasn’t publicly interacted in months—what could have happened between posts of possibly-near-wedded bliss and selfies that said, sayonara, sweetheart?

Like a lot of (maybe) break-ups, someone went running their mouth. On May 26, just a few days before Minaj’s “Best I Never Had” Instagrams, music magazine The Fader posted its cover feature on Meek Mill, something that may have turned out to be a potential breaking point because Mill said no, they are not engaged:

“It’s definitely real,” he says of their relationship, “but it ain’t really time to get married yet. We’re still learning each other, feeling each other out.”

T.I., a person whose own hip-hop relationship with Xscape’s Tameka “Tiny” Cottle is so fealty and steadfast they’ve almost graduated to Ice-T/Coco territory, may have exacerbated this point later in the piece:

“I ain’t engaged,” Meek says sheepishly, but T.I. isn’t having any of it. “You never asked her, ‘Will you be my girlfriend?’ But she is your girlfriend,” he says. “You may not have asked her, ‘Will you marry me?’ But you are engaged.” Meek shrugs, unable to argue with this logic. “I’ve said my part,” T.I. says, backing away with his hands up. “As long as you know what’s going on.”

This is, I believe, where things went awry, if we are to believe the foolhardy facts presented by Nicki Minaj’s unelaborated-upon social media presence.

For one, Minaj’s satisfaction with her press coverage is almost always parse-able by how—or whether—she promotes it. When she likes something, as with her recent Cosmopolitan cover or her great Dazed & Confused profile, she is generally effusive about it, undeniably satisfied. (She was clearly open enough for the former; in the Cosmo profile, she talks about having sex “in the back of my Range Roger. It’s so small and comfortable. Neither of us could believe we were doing that, but it happened.”) When she is not, she is either deafeningly silent or transparently nonplussed, as with her December Rolling Stone cover (she posted the magazine and commented on its coverlines, “Mad Genius. Manic Diva. Oh yea?”).

All of which is to say, Minaj pays attention to the coverage of her, at least half as savvy and opinionated about media as any of us who are in it. And once the Fader’s Meek Mill cover dropped, amid fan retweets and excited promo for her upcoming role in Barbershop 3, here were her social media clues:


All posted May 28, they seem to allude to Mill’s words in his Fader cover, and though she posted the ambiguous “I love my baby” tweet, the diamond heart ring has been nowhere to be found since, either on her Instagram, on June 2—

—or in her most recent performance photos, shot at the iHeartRadio Summer Pool Party on May 30, 2015:

What's Going on With Nicki Minaj and Meek Mill? A Timeline

If a stage performance seems like spurious evidence, note that she was wearing the ring on May 17 at the Billboard Awards, just nine days before Meek’s Fader quotes emerged:

What's Going on With Nicki Minaj and Meek Mill? A Timeline

So, is there trouble in paradise? Time will tell, but it’s worth noting a quote from her recent Cosmopolitan cover, about which she is clearly very enthusiastic: “I’m very protective of my heart.”


Contact the author at julianne@jezebel.com.

Images via Getty


Shockingly, Man Can't Get Assault Charges Dropped by Whipping Out Dick

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Shockingly, Man Can't Get Assault Charges Dropped by Whipping Out Dick

An Alabama man, accused of third-degree assault, attempted to wiggle out of his legal trouble by wiggling out of his pants. He reportedly showed the alleged assault victim his dumb penis and asked her to drop the charges. To everyone’s absolute and total shock, he was unable to make his problems disappear merely by waving his dick like a magic wand.

Wiley Lee Sanders, 32, added indecent exposure to the charges pending against him when he visited his alleged victim’s home May 10. Alabama news site AL.com reports the woman wasn’t especially moved by what he had to offer:

He offered to have sex with her once and left when she turned him down, but returned hours later, according to the documents. The second time the woman opened the door, Sanders dropped his pants and showed her his penis, then asked to either come inside or to take her back to his apartment.

The woman refused, went inside and closed the door, according to the deposition.

She called police, and Sanders was eventually picked up Wednesday. AL.com reports he’s out on bond from the Tuscaloosa County Jail.

[Photo: State of Alabama]

Wait—Does Scientology Work?

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Wait—Does Scientology Work?

OT VII Tom Cruise performs some of his own stunts when filming Mission: Impossible movies and never lets you hear the end of it. This one, however, sounds impressive: Cruise recently revealed to USA Today that he held his breath for over six minutes while filming an underwater scene for the upcoming Mission: Impossible 69 (I assume).

Let’s look at the facts. As an OT VII, Cruise likely long ago attained full cause over MEST (matter, energy, space, and time), explained further here, from the Church of Scientology:

In Scientology, a state of complete spiritual freedom is attainable. It has been achieved not on a temporary basis but on a stable plane of full awareness and ability, unqualified by accident or deterioration. And it is not limited to a few. It is called, in Scientology, “Operating Thetan.” The definition of the state of Operating Thetan is “knowing and willing cause over life, thought, matter, energy, space and time.

Is that how he did this thing, then? Here’s what Cruise told USA Today about his lifelong dream of holding his breath for 6 1/2 minutes:

“It’s something I have always wanted to do. (Director Christopher McQuarrie) and I have been thinking about it since working on ‘Edge of Tomorrow.’ I have done a lot of underwater sequences. But we wanted to create a suspense underwater sequence without cuts. So doing that sequence was really interesting. We’re underwater and we’re doing breath-holds of 6 to 6 1/2 minutes. So I was doing all my training with the other stuff (on-set). It was very taxing stuff.”

Does Scientology work?

We may never know, but the answer is yes.


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

Fuck Your Air Conditioner, Ceiling Fans Forever

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Fuck Your Air Conditioner, Ceiling Fans Forever

It’s a cool 60 degrees in New York City right now, but in a few weeks time, we—along with the rest of the U.S.—will likely be experiencing the dead heat of summer. Here, that means sweating through your clothes while waiting for the M train, constantly inhaling the weighty stink of garbage, and listening to the city’s elite drone on endlessly about Summer Fridays and their homes in the Hamptons. It also means that it’s time to fire up your window air conditioner, right?

WRONG.

Friends, colleagues, strangers: I’m here to tell you what, in your heart of hearts, you already know. Air conditioners are hurting us more than they’re helping us. Air conditioners are making us weak. “I think my AC is making me sick,” a Gawker Media co-worker recently texted me. And he’s right. It is making him sick. Sick in the head.

Air conditioning is a blight on society, mostly because none of us are responsible enough to be trusted with it. There’s no reason that you, on a 95 degree day, should have to haul a sweater everywhere you go and yet you do because indoor public spaces have been turned into freezing cold tundras by people who should know better. Sure, you could avoid those overly air conditioned places entirely and stay outdoors, but—oh, is that rain? No, it’s not. It’s the filthy water from someone’s window unit dripping all over you. And by the way? That window unit is poorly installed and could crush you to death at any moment.

So what do you do to stay comfortably cool without air conditioning? You turn to fans. Particularly ceiling fans. Ceiling fans that will keep your apartment feeling mosquito-free beach with a temperate breeze all summer. Ceiling fans that keep your air constantly circulating. Ceiling fans that make a comforting whir-whir-whir sound as you lie on your cold wooden floor and contemplate how energy efficient you’re being.

Can’t install a ceiling fan? That’s okay because an oscillating fan will get the job done, too. Set one up next to your bed at night and you’ll hardly miss air conditioning at all. In fact, you’ll probably THRIVE without it because you’re no longer waking up with a sore throat or an AC-induced crick in your neck.

Look, I’m not a monster. I realize there’s typically at least two weeks per summer where not having air conditioning is next to unbearable, which is why I’ll excuse it in these select places:

  • Movie theaters
  • Hospitals
  • Malls
  • Restaurants (if they keep it above 70 degrees)
  • The apartment of the person who you’re fucking mostly—but not entirely—because they have air conditioning
  • Any apartment above the third floor (sparingly)

Beyond that, it’s time we become a fan of fans. Embrace them (not literally because it will hurt/rip your hair out), speak words of love into it so that your voice comes out sounding like a robot, poor yourself a glass of lemonade (what I call gin) and enjoy your breezy summer.

(P.S. Do you have air conditioning? If so, please let me know if I can come stay with you in August.)


Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

Image via Paramount

The Truth About Josh Duggar's Sham Cult-Center "Counseling"

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The Truth About Josh Duggar's Sham Cult-Center "Counseling"

On Wednesday night, Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar went on Fox News to discuss the molestation of four of their daughters by their eldest son, Josh. During the interview, they made vague allusions to Josh’s “counseling” at some sort of “training center.” There’s a reason they never got into specifics: Josh’s counseling was bullshit.

The oft-referenced training center was actually the Institute of Basic Life Principles’ (IBLP) Little Rock Training Center, one of many scattered throughout the country that were once run by the single, 80-year-old cult leader Bill Gothard, who was forced to formally step down in 2014 in response to a few inconvenient (specifically, 34) charges of sexual abuse.

We know that Josh was definitely at the Little Rock Center, thanks to a former IBLP leader, Harold Walker, who confirmed to Radar Online the reality star’s stint. Of course, it took about a year after finding out that Josh had been molesting his sisters for his parents to actually do anything about it.

But what exactly went down during these “counseling” sessions? In addition to the construction work that Jim Bob has pointed to as being part of Josh’s “recovery,” it’s highly likely that Josh was subjected to IBLP’s special brand of warped, fundamentalist therapy. Of course, these aren’t trained therapists—at least not in any widely accepted sense. Rather, their credentials come straight from god himself. From IBLP’s “Comprehensive Course in Effective Counseling”:

The Truth About Josh Duggar's Sham Cult-Center "Counseling"

So do people trained under IBLP have the necessary credentials? Absolutely not! But they’ll be damned if that stops them.

Which is incredibly unfortunate for the countless people who have been subjected to this sort of therapy. As we’ve seen with their material on counseling victims of sexual abuse, the program is full of the sort of dangerous, backwards logic that places blame in all the wrong places. In other words, it not only has the potential to be highly damaging to those already hurt, but it does little to actually correct the root of the problem in any meaningful way.

This is how IBLP trains their counselors to correct “immorality”:

The Truth About Josh Duggar's Sham Cult-Center "Counseling"

Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing a little spiritual soul-searching. But when your 14-year-old son has been sexually abusing his sisters, there is clearly a psychological problem that needs to be addressed. By psychologists. Sending him to anyone other than a legally trained and licensed professional is not only irresponsible—it’s child endangerment.

And Josh certainly didn’t get trained on what an appropriate sexual relationship looks like during his time there. From a page in the counseling material labeled How Can Sex Education Courses Contribute to Juvenile Delinquency?:

Teaching children the details of a sexual relationship on the basis that this will satisfy their curiosity is a violation of sex and education. Sexual curiosity cannot be satisfied with detailed information about it. Those addicted to pornography understand this fact all too well. Scripture also affirms this point: “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied.”

Translation: Surely teaching them about what it is that’s sparking their curiosity won’t work—instead let’s do nothing. But wait, it gets better:

Such a course is also a violation of education since it is based on the false assumption that right information will produce right living.

So instead of giving those in need of counseling the—by their own admission—“right” information, the counselors of IBLP are trained to give those in need...no information. Instead, all that likely got instilled in Josh was a deep sense of self-loathing and some wildly inaccurate science. IBLP, on the other hand, got some free labor for whatever construction might have popped up as well as the cost of admittance.

Whatever it is the Duggars (among thousands of others) were paying to send young Josh away, we do at least know it wasn’t going towards any sort of outstanding mortgage. That’s because the Little Rock Training Center was donated to IBLP by none other than Bill Gothard’s good friends the Green family—otherwise known as Hobby Lobby, as you can see from the deed below.

Of course it was.

So whatever the Duggar clan says tonight (when Jill and Jessa get their turn across from Megyn Kelly’s chair), you can be sure it’s not the whole story. And that while Jill and Jessa will almost surely advocate for the abusive brother, they’ve been trained since childhood to assume that anything bad in their lives is a result of their own sin. Which is awful, heartbreaking, and exactly why Josh Duggar will be absolved of any guilt in his family’s eyes.


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com. Image via Fox News.

Here Is Marco Rubio Pretending to Know About Wu-Tang and Rap in General

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Did you go to a fratty mid-Atlantic college in the late ’90s, have a Bob Marley blacklight poster, and squee to MTV Party to Go Platinum Remix while drinking Red Stripe at parties? Congratulations, Dawson! You know as much about rap as Marco Rubio, Fox News rap correspondent.

This specialized knowledge is, in fact, a major selling point of Rubio, the hard-drivin’ “New American Century” young-conservatism poster boy who hopes to become the GOP’s candidate for president:

So let’s check in on his Fox News clinic from yesterday in the video clip above:

Fox News: [Discuss] your love of Wu-Tang Clan. Do you have a favorite member?

Rubio: No. You know, I don’t know...

Fox: You can’t pick a favorite?

Rubio: No. That’s like… you know, uh, that’s like early ’90s stuff.

Note: This is the second time Rubio has insisted he likes Wu-Tang, but declined to name any members.

Give Rubio the benefit of the doubt and assume he knows some Wu-Tang members, but doesn’t want to take a controversial position. This, of course, is why Meth and Red exist!

Fox: Who do you listen to?

Rubio: Well—listen to, yes, but not with my kids there—Pitbull, who lives in Miami, and he’s great...

Note: Pitbull is not great. Rubio has acknowledged this on several occasions in the past. But he occasionally needs to remind voters that he is Floridian, Latino, and under 70. Bad move.

Rubio: But I really still—there’s a Sirius XM channel called Backspin, with all the stuff from the ’90s, I dunno, maybe I’m getting old. I still like especially the stuff that came out of the West Coast in California in the ’90s with Dre and then when Tupac went West Coast and abandoned the East Coast and all, that was a good time.

Note: Tupac moved with his mom to Marin County, California, from Baltimore when he was 17. His East Coast allegiances extended to writing a teenage Jada Pinkett love poems and joining the Young Communists while beatboxing in his performing arts high school.

Rubio: But I’m a West Coast fan. I don’t think they shoulda shot each other, and had a dispute that way, but I was a West Coast fan.

Note: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rubio: You know, so Tupac went over to West Coast and went to Death Row Records and they produced just one of the greatest rap albums, which was the one that Dre put out, where it had ‘California’ [sic] and all these other songs.

This has been rap history with Marco Rubio, who has also said that “the only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem.”

Don’t forget to vote in 2016.


Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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