YouTube, in addition to being a renowned cesspool of virulently racist and misspelled comments, hosts videos. Many of these videos seek to shed light on the many secrets that the sheeple of the world would keep locked behind closed doors. And almost every single one of them is absolutely, phenomenally, mind-numbingly insane.

We’ve compiled something of a starter set for you. A little bit of this, a little of bit that, a dollop of animated robotic personal vendettas, a dash of hollow Earth, what have you. But remember: This rabbit hole goes deep, and once you’ve started down your path of Truth, it’s nearly impossible to look away. You’ve been warned.

Seim Refusing Fruit Nazi Checkpoint & Driving Away.

God bless Billy the Fruit Nazi (he pops in around 1:50).

This was a “State” border crossing from Nevada into CA. I’m not willing to be stopped and questioned on our highways. We finally just drove away. We were not chased down or arrested. Thanks to my wonderful wife Sondra for her support and for boldly filming.

This is the Long Valley Agriculture Check station on 395N. 10/05/12 at around 3PM - We the people must rid ourselves of this tyranny by refusing to cooperate.

“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty” — Thomas Jefferson

The Flat Earth Conspiracy Documentary

In this 90 minute documentary I have compiled and condensed all the most compelling video evidence that we are living on a motionless, flat Earth. Please take the time to do yourself and humanity a favor by watching this most important, mind-blowing and entertaining film! Please also like, share and spread this video around to help raise awareness of this highly taboo, suppressed, and ridiculed truth. To learn even more about the ball-Earth deception and fully discover the depths of this five-century running indoctrination, be sure to read my new 252-page book, “The Flat Earth Conspiracy,” the first flat-Earth book published in over 40 years, available in paperback, eBook, and ePub:

Carl Cephas vs the Library of Congress

A little background: Carl Cephas got fired from the Library of Congress. Carl Cephas should not have gotten fired from the Library of Congress, according to Carl Cephas. So Carl Cephas made a series of animated videos to shed light on the Library of Congress’s poor treatment of Carl Cephas, as one does.

Top:

Two people discuss the treatment of Carl Cephas by the Library of Congress.

Bottom:

Two wrestlers discuss the poor treatment of Carl Cephas by the Library of Congress.

How do we know the Earth doesn’t move?

Disclaimer: These programs were not built with Geocentrism in mind so some of the planets are not to scale.

Donkey Kong & Missile Command Conspiracy

I am not entirely sure.

Roy Shildt played his 1985 Missile Command World Record on the slow cursor setting.

Ron Paul Was Cheated Out of Presidency

A compilation of footage that shows how the establishment used illegal tactics to get Ron Paul out of the presidential running. Everything from bias to voter fraud. It makes us sick and we hope Ron Paul and his family have a bright future ahead.

Hollow Earth, The Biggest Cover Up - Full Documentary DVD

Hollow Earth, The Biggest Cover Up - The Full Documentary. This is done at the request by some of my Subscribers / viewers, also posted as 4 seperate parts on my channel. In this series i.Hollow Earth, The Biggest Cover Up - The Full Documentary. This is an updated Version with an additional 5th Chapter: The U-209 Letter. In this series i will.Description The Hollow earth cover up by Admiral Byrd in the North and South poles. Charles Lawson exposes the Illuminati are killing off the blacks folks by.

Gang Stalking: Reptilian Love Affair

This one also requires a bit of explanation. From what I can glean from efant045’s (extensive) back catalog, the issue here is that he is being gang-stalked by some sort of reptilian being, the evolution of which I think(?) is highlighted here. As you’ll see from his videos, our friend is being gang-stalked in all sorts of ways including, but not limited to: Guerrilla noise making, guerrilla elderly abuse, guerrilla toilet paper, guerrilla magical pyramids, and guerrilla loving couples (above). Here, the couples are essentially being planted around him, particularly in high-density locations (what are the odds!), to psychologically torture him for him for reasons unknown. Allow him to explain sort of:

Gangstalkers will organize, predesignate, and strategically deploy romantic lovers everywhere a TI may routinely go to. This gaslighting technique may give the illusion that the TI is imagining things, making their victim’s question their own sanity, because it seems as though there’s always loving couples everywhere. Such terroristic sensitization is also rampant in malls and where there’s heavy flow of people traffic, because such harassments are also intended for the next and other TI’s who will eventually fall into the set-ups, (thus killing several birds with one stone). The victim’s sense of security and safety is destroyed overtime, when inflicting paranoia and extreme anxiety to the singled-out victim. Its purpose is to make someone jealous, to annoy, mock, ridicule, gaslight, and insult. If anything else such street theater skits also advertises power, control, and total ownership of the TI’s, and their environment. But the worst thing that a TI could possibly do is to get hoodwinked into generalizing and become phobic to all couples, because NOT everyone is a gangstalker, and not everyone in this video is an actual perp. Most people are just innocent bystanders, going about their business, and oblivious to these criminal activities.

Gangstalking is nothing but the biggest psychological con game of all. Trickery is their game; and brainwashing is their aim. So whenever you encounter something suspicious don’t automatically assume that they are the perps. But then again, gangstalkers will do what ever it takes to make their TI’s become prejudice and develop certain hatred and phobias by perpetrating it methodically, systematically, and calculatingly. And it doesn’t really matter what the sensitizing agent is. It could be a puppy, a bunch of flowers, an infant, a water-bottle, a police siren, a certain odor, a firetruck, standbys, etc. Something that’s already predominantly common and numerous in an everyday setting. So when a TI is finally sensitized, brainwashed, and phobic to whatever object they use, the TI will automatically blame and mistake everything they come across with as a gangstalking production. When in reality: it is NOT.

In a nutshell, gangstalking is a classic form of military psychological warfare. The kind of mind control con used by the: Gestapo, KGB, Stasi, Red Guard, etc. The enemy’s goal is to: sensitize, confuse, disorient, deceive, distract, gaslight, trick, misinform, suppress, oppress, persecute, intimidate, bully, annoy, ridicule, humiliate, dehumanize, brainwash, control, isolate, and ultimately destroy and murder the mark overtime.

Psychological warfare is a two way street, and knowing your enemies and their cheap tricks is already half the battle. Your very survival is their prison, and your life’s enjoyment everyday is a constant reminder that they will never win. Use your everyday presence to make them GAG, and work even harder for a fruitless lost cause delusional agenda that will never be. Enjoy the fact that you’ve already wasted their time, money, and energy for nothing for many years, and will continue to do so until they bleed dry trying for nothing.

In a gridlocked stalemate, on an endless psychological battle between TI’s and gangstalkers, at the end of the day, the TI automatically wins, for the TI had always been put in a total unfair disadvantage from the start. Because one against the many is just WRONG! Therefore, the game of gangstalking, in reality, is just a game for COWARDS and LUNATICS.

Lies and fear are the tools of the devil. So never ever take anything at face value, because things aren’t always what they seem. Stand your ground, and dig your heels in even deeper. Never ever backdown nor surrender. Fight to the bitter end. It’s the only way when dealing with psychopaths.

The more you know.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Just one day after a report that a Chinese-affiliated online attack had seized sensitive information about literally every federal employee from the Office of Personnel Management, another bomb drops: these same hackers also grabbed classified security clearance applications, filled with deeply private data.

The document in question is known as Standard Form 86, an exhaustive 127-page questionnaire that demands disclosures of everything from romantic partners and roommates to illegal drug history and criminal records. It’s the sort of thing that could ruin a life, to say nothing of make it easy to steal an identity—and could put the lives of countless spies and people close to them at risk.

From the AP report:

The officials said they believe the hack into the security clearance database was separate from the breach of federal personnel data announced last week — a breach that is itself appearing far worse than first believed. It could not be learned whether the security database breach happened when an OPM contractor was hacked in 2013, an attack that was discovered last year. Members of Congress received classified briefings about that breach in September, but there was no mention of security clearance information being exposed.

The OPM had no immediate comment Friday.

Nearly all of the millions of security clearance holders, including CIA, National Security Agency and military special operations personnel, are potentially exposed in the security clearance breach, the officials said. More than 2.9 million people had been investigated for a security clearance as of October 2014, according to government records.

Emphasis added. You can read a sample SF86 form below:

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

True to form, the CIA waited until 4:16 p.m. EDT this afternoon to release a trove of documents related to the September 11 attacks. Deep within one of those documents is a section on everything the agency learned after 9/11 about “Issues Relating to Saudi Arabia.” We can now share it here for the first time.

The Saudi Arabia findings comprise literally the final section, the last 30 pages, of the CIA’s massive, 495-page master report—completed in 2005 and never revealed before—on who was accountable for what intelligence failures in the September 11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. High-level Saudi involvement in the attacks has long been suggested by many parties in the know; several members of Congress and the 9/11 Commission have urged the release of a still-secret 28-page excerpt of the commission report, believed to detail connections between the House of Saud and the Al Qaeda hijackers. But the U.S.’s special security relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and its reliance on foreign oil, give the federal government incentives to keep that knowledge under wraps.

With that in mind, here are the highlights of the CIA’s findings on Saudi Arabia, with a complete version of the PDF embedded below them.

Here’s the first page:

Here is the first of several figures and diagrams:

Here is a subsection on “implications”:

And a subsection on who was accountable:

Here is the only unredacted text in the entire section, filling up slightly less than one of its 30 pages:

The report emphasized that the JI had made “no final determinations as to the reliability or sufficiency of the information” regarding Saudi Issues raised by its inquiry.

Assessment of the finding

Many of the points of this finding relate to the investigative efforts on the Saudi intelligence presence in the United States and of Saudi officials’ contacts with terrorists in the country, and, as such, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) 9/11 Review Team defers consideration of these to the Department of Justice and the FBI. The Team lacks access to the full range of investigative materials in FBI possession and is therefore unable to either concur or dissent on those points. In addition, the Team encountered no evidence that the Saudi Government knowingly and willingly supported al-Qa’ida terrorists. Individuals in both the Near East Division (NE) and the Counterterrorist Center [REDACTED] told the Team they had not seen any reliable reporting confirming Saudi Government involvement with and financial support for terrorism prior to 9/11, although a few also speculated that dissident sympathizers within the government may have aided al-Qa’ida. A January 1999 Directorate of Intelligence (DI) Office of Transnational Issues Intelligence Report on Bin Ladin’s finances indicated that “limited” reporting suggested that “a few Saudi Government officials” may support Usama Bin Ladin (UBL) but added that the reporting was “too sparse to determine with any accuracy” such support. None of the Saudi Government officials named in that report was a member of a [REDACTED FOR 26 MORE PAGES]

Read the entire document on “Issues Relating to Saudi Arabia” below, and consider yourself fortunate to live in a nation that is so transparent with the citizenry about its shortcomings and its ill-advised strategic arrangements.

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

Clinton Correctional Facility employee Joyce Mitchell has been arrested for allegedly helping convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escape from prison last week. Mitchell, who reportedly had a relationship with the Matt, allegedly provided the two prisoners with power tools to aide in their escape and planned on serving as a getaway driver before a last-minute change of heart.

Mitchell will be charged with promoting first degree prison contraband and fourth degree criminal facility. Both charges are felonies.

BREAKING: Prison worker Joyce Mitchell has been arrested for assisting in New York prison break pic.twitter.com/s3BQlT8uCr

June 12, 2015

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Deadspin Jason Whitlock Out As Head Of The Undefeated | io9 Jurassic World Is All Park And No Bite | Jezebel When Rachel Dolezal Attended Howard University, She Was Still White | Kotaku One Year Later, Did Sony (And Friends) Keep Their E3 2014 Promises? | Kinja Popular Posts

When a Lamborghini Gallardo was found, abandoned and destroyed on a Dallas toll road it didn’t take long for reporters to conclude it was a rented car. It also didn’t take long for us to request the video from local authorities. We just got it, and it’s exactly as ridiculous as you’d hoped.

It’s hard to determine the exact speed, but the driver appears to be going faster than than traffic when he or she (we still don’t know the driver’s identity) tries to make a correction mid-turn and overloads the tires and it’s not long before they’re in the wall.

Despite the dramatic look of the crash, the driver was well enough to abandon the car and get somewhere else.

Contact the author at matt@jalopnik.com.

It’s the day after Rachel Dolezal blew up Twitter and thoroughly confused people. Who was this white woman pretending to be black, we all wondered, so black she became the president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP? Where did she come from? Well, she came, in part, from the historically black Howard University.

Dolezal graduated from Howard with her Masters in Fine Art in 2002 alongside an administration source at the university who spoke to Jezebel on Friday under the condition of anonymity. When I called the school to confirm Dolezal had attended and graduated from the predominantly African American institution, the man who answered the phone had no idea about the social media firestorm Dolezal had ignited but he remembered her name.

“I know her and I remember her husband who went to medical school here,” he told Jezebel after he confirmed her graduation date over the phone. “All of her time has been controversial here, like when she presented her thesis.”

Dolezal’s final thesis was a series of paintings presented from the perspective of a black man and the late Dean Tritobia Benjamin, a formidable scholar whose specialty was black women in the arts, wanted to know how Dolezal felt qualified to tell this type of story as a white woman.

“Her thesis presented an inner journey of what goes on inside the mind of a black male,” he said. “This was ten years ago but I still remember one was a three dimensional piece of a man was being consumed by a fire all the way into the ground. The rest of her work were two dimensional paintings.”

Dolezal’s reverse passing—new term! new term!—would not have been tolerated at Howard, says our source along with another Howard graduate named Shannon Washington, who took a class with Dolezal in the early aughts. Besides, Dolezal looked white back then.

“She had straight, blonde hair,” he said.

“She didn’t look the way she looks now at all in school, that’s why when I initially saw the story I didn’t recognize her!” Washington told Jezebel. “She looks about three shades darker.”

While at Howard, Washington took an experimental studio course with Dolezal who was an MFA student-teacher at that time.

“She was a good teacher and never came off as ‘trying’ to be black to me,” said Washington. “She was Rachel, a white woman who could paint really well. She painted Black people but, being at Howard, I saw it as her painting the world around her. No one asked about her ethnicity because we didn’t need to. No one assumed she was black.”

Contact the author at hillary@jezebel.com.

Image via Facebook.

Dallas police are in a standoff and attempting to negotiate with a gunman in an armored vehicle after a shootout outside their headquarters, the Dallas Morning News reports. No injuries have been confirmed, but the assailant, who identified himself as James Boulware, told police he’d been wounded. [Update, 2:05 p.m.: The man, whose identity has still not been confirmed, is dead.]

According to the News, two explosive devices, which police described as pipe bombs, were found near Jack Evans Police Headquarters. One exploded when a bomb squad tried to use a robot to remove it.

The shootout began around 12:30 a.m. this morning. Boulware fired at police cruisers from gun ports in his armored van, wounding no one. The shootout began outside police headquarters and moved to the parking lot of a Jack in the Box restaurant after the Boulware fled, the New York Times reports. There, police disabled the vehicle.

Here are some pictures of the damage at HQ. pic.twitter.com/ic18axSTPO

June 13, 2015

Picture of squad car that was shot at. No officers were injured. pic.twitter.com/vfT2nCiJzP

June 13, 2015

“The suspect has told our negotiator that we took his child and that we accused him of being a terrorist and that he’s going to blow us up, and then cut off negotiations,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters. “We cannot confirm a motive at this time.”

From the News:

Authorities cautioned that they have not confirmed the man is who he says he is. But in 2013, police in Paris, Texas, said they arrested James Lance Boulware after he obtained firearms, ammunition and body armor before threatening to attack his family, as well as churches and schools.

Police said then that he was taken into custody on two felony warrants from Dallas County. However, it appears the case against him was dismissed last year after he fulfilled requirements a judge had imposed.

Boulware appears to have been driving a armored van similar to this one, recently sold on Ebay: a modified Ford 3-door van listed by Jenco Sales Inc., a Georgia company, for $8,250.

This was obviously planned out. Not just some random ish. #DallasPDShooting pic.twitter.com/DoDTbKpLeN

June 13, 2015

Via the News, here is a description of the vehicle posted to Facebook (since deleted):

Zombie Apocalypse Assault Vehicle and Troop Transport. This full armored zombie busting vehicle features convenient gun ports so no zombie juice touches you during a mass zombie take down. It also has benches in the back so you can take turns resting during long Zombie sieges. The tactical step boards are installed for when you only need swords and axes for drive by mow downs. The bumpers are made of reinforced steel tubing, so no dents from smashing zombie heads! It’s full armor plated and has bullet proof windows just in case you run into other zombie hunting hordes who might try to take this bad boy from you. Like anything, there is a price attached to this fine piece of zombie fighting machinery.

Witnesses reported that as many as four people were involved in the shooting, including one person who did not make it back to the van and is still on the loose. Brown said police had not yet confirmed the number of assailants.

Update, 11:40 a.m. – Earlier this morning, police snipers shot the suspect in the van. His condition is unknown, Brown said:

Because the suspect during negotiations expressed that the van he was traveling in was rigged with explosives. our officers are not approaching that vehicle but instead our bomb technicians are deploying the robot and plan to detonate specific areas around the van to ensure that it’s not rigged to explode.

Police are trying to gain access to the vain by shooting in its windshield with high-powered rifles, the Guardian reports.

Update, 2:05 p.m. – Police have confirmed that the suspect is dead. It had been more than five hours since he last contacted them.

#Breaking We can now confirm that the susp in the van is deceased but unable to confirm ID pending Med Ex. identification #DallasPDShooting

June 13, 2015

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Wait, we can be black if we want?

June 13, 2015

Earlier:

which white woman comedian is going to put on black face and do a skit about rachel dolezal? my money's on amy schumer

June 12, 2015

Like, come on.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reports, a campaign aide, who last fall accused Republican congressional candidate Carl DeMaio of sexually harassing him, admitted in federal court that he lied about receiving anonymous emails threatening him not to speak about his time with DeMaio’s campaign.

Todd Bosnich had said he left DeMaio’s campaign after multiple incidents of alleged harassment, and received anonymous emails threatening that he would never work in politics again if he went public.

According to the Times, Bosnich admitted on Friday that he had written the emails himself, taking them to DeMaio’s opponent, the incumbent Democrat Scott Peters, who turned them over to the San Diego Police Department. He plead guilty to obstruction of justice by lying to the FBI.

“Mr. Bosnich, for whatever reason, had a great deal of hostility and personal animus toward Mr. DeMaio,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Phil Halpern said. His actions “had the potential to affect a national election.” And indeed they may have: DeMaio lost the election and is now a radio talk-show host.

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

John Stamos was booked on Friday night for allegedly driving under the influence in Beverly Hills. ABC News reports that police stopped the actor and immediately took him to the hospital.

According to TMZ, Stamos was handcuffed at the scene and transported to a hospital by paramedics. There, police cited him for misdemeanor DUI.

Stamos, who was alone, is scheduled to appear in court September 11.

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

If you thought that the news about Rachel Dolezal—president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP who has been pretending to be black—had reached peak insanity, then you were wrong.

Last night, one of Dolezal’s former students at Eastern Washington University told Buzzfeed that Dolezal had refused to let her participate in an class exercise because she “didn’t look Hispanic” enough. The exercise, called “Fishbowl,” was part of a “Race and Culture” course, one of the many first-year foundational courses offered by the university. The exercise was designed to expose students to “racial and cultural experiences,” and included lectures on white privilege and microagressions.

Buzzfeed reports:

In the first round of Fishbowl, the student said Dolezal sought out a volunteer of Hispanic background to be questioned.

The student, who told BuzzFeed News that she identifies as Hispanic, grew up in a Spanish-speaking country, speaks the language fluently, and, while she has light skin, believes she has a “pretty solid experience of what it’s like to be Spanish.” She raised her hand to participate.

“I think we should ask another student,” the student recalled Dolezal saying in class.

The student asked why she could not participate.

“Rachel said I didn’t look Hispanic,” she said, and that her instructor “doubted that I could share experiences of racial or ethnic discrimination because I didn’t have the appearance of looking Hispanic.”

According to the student, Dolezal chose another Hispanic student to speak to the class. The anonymous former student told Buzzfeed that she didn’t think much of Dolezal’s decision at the time, but “now I wish I had said something, especially now that her race is the one people are questioning.”

“As he approached 40, Fabrice Grinda, a French technology entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $100 million, couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Somehow the trappings of his success were weighing him down.” It may surprise you to learn that this man is a terrible houseguest.

From the NBA Finals and the Women’s World Cup to the death of Kalief Browder and the outing of Rachel Dolezal, it has been a roller-coaster week. Oh, and Gawker Media—you know, the company that owns this very website—is, according to Jonathan Mahler and the New York Times, undergoing a “moment of truth.” You don’t say?

“Kalief Browder, 1993-2015” by Jennifer Gonnerman

That evening, in a room packed with family members, Prestia said, “This case is bigger than Michael Brown!” In that case, in which a police officer shot Brown, an unarmed teen-ager, in Ferguson, Missouri, Prestia recalled that there were conflicting stories about what happened. And the incident took, he said, “one minute in time.” In the case of Kalief Browder, he said, “When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it’s unbelievable that this could happen to a teen-ager in New York City. He didn’t get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk...

“Wow. Clickhole” by Dan Kois

If you’re an avid Internet reader, you may not recall the moment when you first noticed ClickHole, but you definitely remember the moment your jaw first dropped at ClickHole. For me, it was the article “7 Classic ’90s Toys That Weren’t Fun Anymore After 9/11,” a tour de force mocking the generation-pandering I constantly saw on my Facebook feed. (“When those towers went down, something in you died forever and now Furby is nothing more than some fluff and plastic.”) I loved its audacity; I hated the reminder that online media, which I both make and consume avidly, panders so grossly to readers’ generational identities and employs such banal emotional shorthand for real-life tragic events. That is to say, when I read it, I simultaneously laughed and felt bad. It turns out this is the platonic ideal of a response to a ClickHole story.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...

“The People vs. Nan-Hui Jo: Domestic Violence Victim Becomes Criminal” by Alyssa Jeong Perry

Nan-Hui Jo’s story looks different ways as the light changes. In the eyes of the state, she’s a child abductor, an undocumented immigrant facing deportation; in the eyes of her friends and supporters, she’s a domestic violence victim who lost her immigration status because of one abusive partner, who may lose her daughter because of another. Jo’s relationship to Charlton and the subsequent child abduction case has been described as a “cross-cultural love story gone wrong,” but her supporters took to Twitter to call it a horror story—a tale of a woman victimized by two men as well as the immigration and criminal justice systems.

http://jezebel.com/the-people-vs-...

“What Is Code?” By Paul Ford

The World Wide Web is what I know best (I’ve coded for money in the programming languages Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, Clojure, and XSLT), but the Web is only one small part of the larger world of software development. There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7 million are hobbyists.) That’s roughly the population of the greater Los Angeles metro area. Imagine all of L.A. programming. East Hollywood would be for Mac programmers, West L.A. for mobile, Beverly Hills for finance programmers, and all of Orange County for Windows.

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-...

“Why Did a Black Baltimore Grandfather Die in Police Custody” by Collier Meyerson

Tyrone West died in custody before police-involved deaths were prominently covered by media outlets and before before the rallying cry of “black lives matter” entered into our collective conscience. If he died in the same circumstances today, his story would make headlines across the country. Two years ago, his death barely registered beyond local media.

“Tyrone was the first child in the family. He was the glue to my family. He kept everybody laughing and was involved in church and believed in God,” Tawanda Jones remembered of her brother — a father and grandfather — as she choked back tears during an interview.

“There was nothing I didn’t enjoy about my brother,” she said. “And for them to try and paint him like he was a monster and deserved what he got is more disgusting and more heinous than the crime.”

http://fusion.net/story/149188/w...

“15 Important Questions About Baron Davis’s New Jheri Curl” by Rembert Browne

Before getting to the degree of wetness, it’s important to note his head looks like it’s covered with 5,000 eyelashes. An assortment of loose parentheses. Urban silly string, if you will. As for the wetness, it’s absolutely not wet enough. Baron’s forehead looks dry, which is a Jheri curl sin. At proper wetness, the wearer should always look as if they’re fresh out the steam room, en route to the sauna.

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/1...

Rock-and-roll dad Dave Grohl fell off the stage while playing Gothenburg, Sweden’s Ullevi Stadium on Friday night, breaking his leg. The Foo Fighters frontman got bandaged up backstage and finished the set sitting down. Is this metal, or nah?

Not metal: Falling of the stage.

Metal: Breaking your leg.

Not metal: The Foo Fighters, if we’re being honest.

Metal: Finishing the set with a broken leg.

Thank you Gothenburg. That was amazing. pic.twitter.com/BXvuxIfVEv

June 12, 2015

Conclusion: This is metal.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Aaron Rushing was a freshman then. He had dark skin and cottony dreads that mostly covered his eyes, and sometimes his mouth—although not enough to conceal his gentle and knowing smile. His eyes were puppy-doggish, steady. Later I would learn he was a virtuoso on the guitar and a rockstar on stage, but that afternoon I was waiting for him in the stairwell, collecting my thoughts, trying to figure out what to say to him about this poem, this worrisome poem, he had turned in.

Poetry reveals the world to a student and also reveals the world within them to the page. The world that Aaron unraveled in his poem had an accomplished sense of rhythm and image, but also brimmed with grim street knowings. Not celebrating the violence and degradation of gang life, but instead the brotherhood, the strength, the belonging, the malice.

Part of Aaron’s world had been revealed when he wrote a narrative essay about being racially profiled in Walgreens one summer afternoon. His soda-pop revelry was disrupted by anxious security guards. “They thought I was a ticking crime bomb,” Aaron wrote. Thankfully, the story ended without incident, but it did stick with him. After giving an account of what happened, Aaron seemed much more concerned with understanding and explaining the way prejudice had likely formed in the people in the store. Since he was a young black male from a high-crime neighborhood, Aaron explained that it was only natural for him to be viewed as a suspect. Rage and fear trembled beneath the lines of the story, but Aaron showed warmth to those who had shown him none. He made an effort to tell the story in a way that left the possibility for not only his innocence, but also the innocence of those who judged him guilty. Dr. King would be proud. And that’s why his poem was so troubling.

He was jogging up the stairwell when I stopped him. I told him that I thought his poem had a lot going for it, but some of the rhymes needed tightening and that, more importantly, I wondered what the piece was actually trying to say. It seemed to want to celebrate the lives of the people it talked about, but it spoke little of the consequences these very same people were inflicting on themselves and the people around them. I asked him if he knew the implication of that message. If that’s what he was trying to represent to the world. I don’t remember Aaron saying much. I can see him nodding respectfully, arms slack at his sides. I wanted to ask him more, about the poem, about his life, but I didn’t. I could tell Aaron wasn’t going to say much, he never really did. I asked him if he understood what I was saying; he said he did. Then he went to get his guitar and headed to class.

Some weeks later, I was grading the revised final drafts of the poems that were a part of the portfolio project. Grading student work is taxing because the flood of words seems endless and behind each word is a person, in a moment, straining to be heard. Assessing and grading are a part of the job, but the more important work is witnessing the human behind the words. I sighed when I saw Aaron’s portfolio: just one poem of the required five. Despite being a solid B student, I knew his grade was going to suffer because of this. Then I read the revision of his poem.

The Hood

by Aaron Rushing 5-14-13

Small green grass,
Smelly dirty trash
Big tall red apartments
Vicious Rottweilers barking.
Drug dealers or slangers
Black males with the bangers
Everybody wants to sell
Black males killing themselves.
Everybody got a set
Rep his set ‘til the death.
Talking ‘bout they took your son
Well, they can’t take what you don’t let.
But the hood was his first friend
The first friend that he met,
Say he’s gonna cap somebody
When it’s you don’t get upset.
Bullets flying, mama’s crying
And it’s still his brother’s dying.

It’s kind of fun,
But after a while
You just get tired, tired and tired.
They’re on the outside looking in, I guess,
To them he’s just so stupid.
If his brothers wrote this poem
This is how they’d say they do it.
All well big moe
Amor de ray
Latin kings.
Gang greetings
Social pacts,
Go to kevo
Get some packs.
Flipping birds
Counting stacks.
But he gotta put in work,
Gotta represent his set
Through the colors on his shirt.
Chopping bricks
That’s a start.
But he gotta play his part,
And they not snake-friendly
They eliminating narks.
Never ever lack
Gotta always watch your back,
Stay alert and keep a strap.
GDK, BDK
Cracking treys all day.
Rep the six, he get popped
Drop the five, he get dropped.

He ain’t grow up in the hood
The hood grew up inside him,
He got love for the hood
I guess he’s married to the streets.
He was born a human beast
Spitting words over beats.
He was born to evade
Jumping hurdles, making leaps.
He was born on the bottom
He aspired to have it all,
But when moving too fast
There’s a greater chance to fall.
He was blind to his dreams
He could do nothing but stall,
Stay stagnant
Couldn’t move.
He was born on the bottom
He ain’t have nothing to lose.
The hood stay noisy
You can call him very rude,
So he just lit another pack
Just to lighten up his mood.

In the words of his brothers
In the words of the dead,
He just wrote what he heard
Like in this poem he just read.
Don’t make judgments, don’t assume
If you ain’t got nothing to prove
That you can fill the same one’s shoes.

I was stunned. The revision was carefully attentive to language and image, but it also deepened the complexity of the voice. No longer a celebration about street life; now it soberly described the psychological means by which a young man was trapped.

The speaker knows his audience will impart the question of “Why?” onto his poem, his experience. He also knows this audience likely has brought along their own answer, one that’s tied to assumptions and biases that have little to do with the particularities of his experience. If you’re living in a world where you don’t have to constantly prove yourself, you can’t understand those that do, he replies.

This piece doesn’t need the audience to ask “Why?”; the question already lives at the heart of the poem. Why does the boy get wrapped up in a life that ends in such misery? Why him? Especially when he sees the consequences of this misery all around him? Each time I read the poem, I trip over these lines in the beginning:

Talking ‘bout they took your son
Well, they can’t take what you don’t let.
But the hood was his first friend
The first friend that he met

The speaker interrupts the parent’s grief to remind them that they let this happen by allowing the hood to be “his first friend.” The severity and flippancy of this section gives me pause. It leaves me with questions about how, exactly, does a parent “let” their child be taken? What is the speaker suggesting has been or has not been done? The speaker doesn’t say; maybe the speaker doesn’t know.

It’s disturbing how inevitable the whole tragedy seems. The speaker tells us about all the things that were predetermined at the boy’s birth: He was born a human beast; He was born to evade; He was born on the bottom (x2). Like he had no choice, no agency. That lack of agency is reflected in other lines: He was blind to his dreams; He just wrote what he heard; He could do nothing but stall;

Although Aaron’s essay was concerned with his misperceived guilt by security in Walgreens, his poem was about the inherent guilt of the child, and family, who falls victim to the streets. I suppose this shouldn’t be all that surprising because it’s hard to convince a kid that being denied a chance at innocence is not the same as being born guilty.

A fellow teacher and friend, Edgar Aguirrre, once told me that you lose your innocence the moment you choose not to look at the truth in front of you. In that way, innocence is not simply for the young and uninformed, but an opportunity that all of us have when we choose to question the world and ourselves more closely. Ironically, for Aaron, writing this poem about the lost innocence of a child ended up revealing his. He realized, probably even before I said anything, that his first draft did not wholly examine his lived experience. His second draft allowed us to delve into the sorrowful fraternity of men lost and abandoned, men who are marked for containment and death. Instead of the mask of celebratory bravado, Aaron questioned this experience.

As his teacher, it makes me think more about the students in front of me and their relationship with their own innocence. Inquiry-based learning is the latest pedagogical dogma, but the part that resonates with me is that schools should not only develop academic tools to critically examine experience, but also provide an environment where a student can perceive their own innocence. An environment where a child can be courageous with the questions they ask themselves, the questions they ask the world. Our children are questioned, judged, and condemned so often that they start to see questioning as an external and fruitless process. Why ask yourself a question when the answers are always the same: guilty. Our children need to know that innocence can exist in any present moment, as long as we open ourselves to our questions. They don’t stop nightsticks or hollow points, but our questions can unshackle our souls from a world that fears us. A world we fear. That’s an awesome power.

In Aaron’s case, this wasn’t enough to save him.

On May 19, 2014, just about a year after he turned in his poem, he was shot and killed in an alley on the South Side of Chicago. I don’t know all the particulars of what was going on in his life the Sunday afternoon he was killed, but I do know that his commitment to school, and the guitar he loved, had wavered. He transferred schools and was getting closer to the streets. Discourse around this kind of tragedy always seems to be about how the young person should have known better, which, of course, is a judgment on their intelligence and moral character. But for me, Aaron’s poem shows he did know better, I just wonder if he felt better. Did his heart know that he had alternatives? Did his heart know that his destiny wasn’t written in tombstone? Did he know how courageously innocent he was? Aaron Rushing was a tremendous writer, artist, and human. He is dearly missed.

Abdel Shakur is a writer and teacher. His fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in Santa Clara Review, 2 Bridges Literary Review, Glint, Scissors and Spackle, The Other Journal, and Indiana Review. You can find more of his work at misstraknowitall.blogspot.com and @misstraknowit

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

Struggling artist, activist, and educator Rachel Dolezal is having a moment. Today, on Ebay, bidding on two pieces of art, allegedly by Dolezal herself, starts at $5,000. The seller invites you to “Own a Piece of History!”

The two pieces are thematically and aesthetically similar. One is of an older black man; the other is of a young black boy, Both pieces are done in charcoal on elk hide, “bridging Rachel’s youth spent hunting elk in Montana with her deep involvement in the black civil rights movement,” according to the seller’s description. Uh huh.

Bidding starts at $5,000, but you can drop a cool $50,000 to buy either right now. Half of the proceeds from their sale will go to Habitat for Humanity, the seller writes.

Image via Ebay. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

An escaped circus elephant killed a German man early Saturday morning in the woods near Buchen, the Associated Press reports. The man was 65 years old; the elephant is 34 years old: her name is Baby, and she is an African elephant. She was captured and returned to the circus.

Police are investigating the incident. “There’s evidence of third party involvement,” Heidelberg police spokeswoman Yvonne Schmierer said. “Either someone forgot to shut the enclosure, or the elephant was released intentionally.”

According to the AP, a German news agency reported that Baby has injured people before. In 2005, elephant researcher Joyce Poole told National Geographic News that she’d heard stories, during her 30 years in Kenya, about elephants intentionally attacking humans.

“I have always believed that these are elephants who have suffered some severe trauma at the hands of man,” Poole said. “An elephant whose family members are killed by people is unlikely to forget it very quickly—just as you or I wouldn’t forget if an elephant killed a member of our family.”http://gawker.com/peter-singer-i...

“Much of what elephants feel, think, and do is acquired through social learning,” she said. “If a matriarch has a bad experience with people, her behavior will be adjusted accordingly—either more fearful or more aggressive depending upon her own personality.”

Photo credit: Ryan Poplin/Flickr. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

On Friday Alexander M. Kozak, a security guard Coral Ridge Mall in Iowa, shot a woman three times in the back. Court records from Kozak’s Saturday morning arraignment show that the murder was likely premeditated, done in retaliation over complaints about sexual harassment.

River City radio station 1630 KCJJ reports:

Kozak had been a security guard at the mall but was fired earlier in the day due to complaints of sexual harassment of store employees. It’s believed he targeted the woman, who reportedly worked at the Iowa Children’s Museum, because her complaint was the last in a series and led to his firing.

After he was fired, Kozak drove to his apartment to retrieve his gun and returned to the mall where he shot and killed the woman. According to the Gazette, police have not yet released the name of his victim. The paper reports that she was shot around 7:30 p.m. and taken to University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, she was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Image via Getty.

Rachel Dolezal’s adopted brother Ezra told Buzzfeed News that his sister warned him not to out her as white when she moved to Spokane. “She just told me, ‘Over here, I’m going to be considered black, and I have a black father. Don’t blow my cover,’” Ezra said.

Dolezal left Montana—and her parents—for Spokane in 2012. “She wanted to make a new life for herself but she took it to the ultimate extreme,” Ezra—who identified himself as “25 percent black” to the Washington Post—said. “Not only did she move out to Spokane, but she created a whole new identity for herself.”

“She puts dark makeup on her face and says she black,” he told Buzzfeed. “It’s basically blackface.”

Ezra also offered an explanation for Rachel’s apparently intimate knowledge of black women’s hair. “My younger sister Esther is fully African-American and Rachel used to do her hair a lot. She really enjoyed it, so she already knew a lot about hair products and started applying them to herself,” he said.

The Associated Press reports that Dolezal has announced that she will address the controversy at a NAACP meeting on Monday.

Image via Facebook. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.