Deadspin Take Third Eye Blind As Seriously As They Take Themselves | Gizmodo The Following Types of Content Are Now Rightfully Banned on Reddit | Jezebel Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Crusader and Mother of Intersectionality | Kotaku A Horror Game That Stops Working When Too Many People Die | Kinja Popular Posts

An update via Instagram:

http://defamer.gawker.com/caitlyn-jenner...

Writes Berg in his caption:

I have the utmost respect for Caitlyn Jenner and I am a strong supporter of equality and the rights of trans people everywhere. I also believe that we don’t give enough attention to our courageous returning war veterans, many of whom have sacrificed their bodies and mental health for our country and our principals- principals that include the freedom to live the life you want to live without persecution or abuse.

You don’t have to demean one group to honor another. Fuck Peter Berg.

[Top image via Getty]

James Holmes, who was accused of fatally shooting 12 people and injuring 70 others at a theater in Aurora, Colorado three years ago, has been found guilty of all 165 charges, including 24 counts of murder the first degree.

“This has been an emotional and difficult time for the victims, their families, loved ones and friends,” Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper in a statement. “My hope is that this step brings some peace to each of them, and begins the healing process for all of Colorado.”

After less than 13 hours of deliberation, a jury rejected Holmes’ insanity defense for every one of the charges against him, which also included 140 counts of attempted murder and one count of possessing an explosive device.

During the trial, two prosecution psychiatrists testified that Holmes was legally sane when he carried out the attack while two defense psychiatrists contested that assessment, arguing Holmes suffered from schizophrenic delusions and was not culpable for the crimes.

In Colorado, all of Holmes’ murder charges carry the possibility of the death penalty, a punishment the prosecution has previously pushed for.

According to KUSA, the trial’s sentencing phase will begin next Wednesday and is expected to last about a month.

[Image via AP Images]

This afternoon, an apparent ISIS supporter tweeted the above image along with the text “O Americans Dogs soon YOU Will see wonders #Chattanooga #USA #ISIS,” and some in the right-wing media reported that the tweet constituted an advance warning about the deadly attack. The only problem: It was posted long after the shooting began.

Here’s a screencap via Rob Bettis:

Reporting of ISIS tweet is inaccurate. Tweet is time stamped 10:34 *PT* (1:34 ET). 2 hrs after the event.#CHAshooti… pic.twitter.com/KDE8o0cMj9

July 16, 2015

Twitter user @K_H_O7777777777—whose account was suspended this afternoon—published the tweet at 1:34 p.m. Eastern Time, roughly three hours after Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez began firing at a military recruiting center this morning, killing four Marines. Nonetheless, the hysterically anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller published a post about the hours-late “warning,” and as Mediaite notes, Fox News’ Catherine Herridge said that @K_H_O7777777777 “seemed to have foreknowledge about the shooting” on-air.

Geller and Herridge may want to take a closer look at Twitter’s time-zone function. A screencap of the tweet that’s making the rounds on right-wing Twitter does show a 10:34 a.m. timestamp, but that’s only because it was taken somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone, and Twitter displays time stamps in local time.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Tuesday evening, the FBI identified 24-year-old Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez as the gunman who killed four Marines at a Chattanooga recruitment center today before dying in a shootout with police. Here’s what we know so far.

He Was a U.S. Citizen From Kuwait

While the citizenship of Abdulazeez, who was born in Kuwait, was not clear initially, NBC News reports that he was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

He Went to High School and College in the Chattanooga Area

The Times Free Press in Chattanooga reports that multiple people have said they attended school with Abdulazeez in the Chattanooga enclave of Red Bank.

Below is Abdulazeez’s purported Senior yearbook entry, where he darkly jokes, “My name causes national security alerts. What does yours do?”

According to Abdulazeez’s resume on Indeed.com, he later graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2012 with a degree in electrical engineering. The federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority has confirmed that Abdulazeez interned with them while a student there.

He Wrestled and Practiced Mixed Marital Arts

A classmate told the Times Free Press in Chattanooga that he was on the wrestling team with Abdulazeez at Red Bank High School and that the alleged shooter became a mixed martial artist after graduation.

Here's an older, undated photo of Abdulazeez, provided by a former coach. Photo likely 5 years old or so pic.twitter.com/cCaFBRel85

July 16, 2015

Below are highlights from Abdulazeez’s first sanctioned bout in 2009, which he won by TKO.

He Was Not on Law Enforcement’s “Radar” Before the Attack

A source told CBS News that Abdulazeez was “not on law enforcement radar” and the FBI was not aware him being threat.

“They’ve run an initial check on him. Right now, there is nothing popping early in the system on him, but that could change,” a senior official told ABC News. “They are still checking multiple other databases on him.”

However, The New York Times reports that Abdulazeez’s father was once under investigation:

The gunman was not on the government’s radar, but law enforcement officials said that Mr. Abdulazeez’s father had been under investigation several years ago for possible ties to a foreign terrorist organization. At one point, a law enforcement official said that the father was on a terrorist watch list and was questioned while on a trip abroad but that he was eventually removed from the list. The official cautioned that the investigation of the father was old and did generate any information on the son.

David Geithner, brother of ex-Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, is currently the chief financial officer of Condé Nast. This past weekend, he’d planned to go to Chicago—where he planned to meet a gay porn star and escort for “2-3 hours” at a cost of $2,500.

But this would not be a simple sexual transaction. Geithner, it seems, fucked with the wrong escort. The escort—who does not want to reveal his identity for professional reasons, but whom we will call Ryan—says he bailed on the date with the married (to a woman) father of three because Geithner declined to use his influence to help with a housing dispute.

The thwarted rendezvous began on July 4, when Geithner first contacted Ryan, whose phone number is available on a number of Chicago-area escort websites, via text message. Geithner said that he was going to be in Chicago exactly a week later, and would pay $2,500—plus airfare and hotel—for “2-3 hours” of Ryan’s services.

The next day, Geithner told Ryan that he would have FedEx deliver the first half of the money on the upcoming Tuesday to his home in Texas, presumably so that Geithner could establish that he was serious about meeting up in Chicago. Geithner also sent him a gleaming selfie and said, “My name is David, by the way.”

Inside the package, according to Ryan, was $1,250 in cash. He sent us a photo of the envelope he received.

We’ve redacted Ryan’s name and address, as well as the package’s tracking number, but in the upper lefthand corner you can see that the package was sent by a “Jon Gardner” from Orleans, Mass. There are no records of a “Jon Gardner” in Orleans—but the return address on the envelope, which we have also redacted, instead matches a home that has been in the Geithner family for years. Records show that in 2005, Deborah, the patriarch of the Geithner family, turned the house over to David and his siblings, Timothy, Sarah, and Jonathan. When we called the number Ryan was texting, the person who answered identified himself as David Geithner.

The two continued texting over the weekend. Ryan told Geithner that he looked like Tom Cruise. He told Geithner that he was listening to Elton John at the gym, and Geithner responded by saying he enjoyed everything from Top 40 to Dire Straits to Latin music. Ryan sent him a photo of his penis, to which Geithner responded, “You are killing me.”

But before they could meet, things got weird. At some point, Ryan searched for his new friend’s phone number on Facebook and discovered that the “David” he was talking to was David Geithner, an important and politically connected figure. And Ryan, as it happened, needed some legal help.

The day before the two were supposed to meet in Chicago, Ryan asked Geithner if he could send him something by email. Geithner said that he could, but that he would rather not give Ryan his email address because it contained his last name, which he didn’t want to tell him. Ryan told Geithner to create a burner account, and Geithner complied.

This is where things get a little hairy. The documents that Ryan sent Geithner regarded an ongoing discrimination lawsuit between Ryan and his landlord. In 2013, Ryan was evicted from his luxury apartment building in Texas. He says it was because the company that owns the building discovered he was a gay porn star, but in legal documents his attorney stated that Ryan was kicked out for owning an emotional assistance dog to help ease his PTSD, which was against the building’s rules.

On April 21, 2014, the United States Department of Housing and Development (HUD) issued a “determination of no reasonable cause” regarding Ryan’s discrimination claim. The decision was appealed by his attorney to no avail, and so Ryan began investigating other methods to reverse the ruling, including contacting the FBI and, he says, officials in the Obama administration.

He also sought help from his local senator, Ted Cruz. On April 7 of this year, Cruz’s office sent Ryan a letter telling him that they had “initiated an inquiry” with HUD on Ryan’s behalf. On May 6, Ryan received another letter from Cruz’s office, stating that HUD had made a “final determination” on his case in May 2014, at which point HUD closed his case. Enclosed was a letter from a HUD field office director, stating that HUD could not initiate any further investigation into Ryan’s case unless he provided “new and relevant information.” Ryan felt this response was insufficient, and that several government agencies had sided with his landlord in discriminating against him because of his sexuality. (Cruz’s office has continued to stay in touch with Ryan, he tells us. He says that an employee of Cruz’s called him this afternoon to say that the senator had personally called the HUD director on his behalf. It seems as if Cruz, in the midst of his Presidential campaign, sees an opportunity to help a veteran with PTSD who has been crushed by Washington bureaucracy.)

During their correspondence, according to Ryan, Geithner mentioned to him that he was a CFO. Thanks to a Facebook search of the phone number sending him the texts, Ryan was able to piece together Geithner’s identity—and specifically, that his brother was once a high-level official within the Obama administration. Ryan, whose Facebook page contains a number of videos and photographs advocating for a variety of conspiracy theories, felt Geithner might be able to use his influence to overturn HUD’s decision.

Geithner, though, didn’t know Ryan’s plan when he opened the email the day before the two were set to meet. Geithner—to his credit—read at least some of the documents, though he didn’t quite understand what Ryan was getting at.

But right as Ryan opened the door, he closed it. In a subsequent message, he revealed to Geithner that he had “figured out who you was”:

The next time Geithner texted Ryan, it was to regretfully cancel their hook up.

Why Geithner bailed on Ryan while on the runway in New York is open for speculation. It’s possible that his plane was indeed delayed. Or, of course, he could have gotten spooked by an escort with an agenda who had discovered exactly who he was. After all, Geithner had booked Ryan until midnight or 1 a.m.—one figures it would require an excruciating delay to get in that late. Plus, his escort, booked at a four-star hotel, probably wouldn’t have minded waiting around.

Alas, Ryan didn’t go to Chicago, either. The way he tells it, he decided to bail on his flight after deciding that Geithner didn’t care enough about his personal plight. On that Saturday afternoon, Ryan texted Geithner: “I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.” Ryan says that he has no vendetta against Geithner specifically—instead, he just wants to publicize his case against HUD.

This afternoon, Ryan reached out to Geithner, because he felt Geithner deserved to know that he had gone to the press. He didn’t receive a response until after I contacted Geithner for a statement, at which point Geithner texted Ryan and asked him to call immediately.

Later, Ryan tells me, Geithner promised him that if he could get Gawker to kill the story, Geithner would bring his HUD complaint to President Obama.

After being informed of this story, Geithner provided the following statement to Gawker:

I don’t know who this individual is. This is a shakedown. I have never had a text exchange with this individual. He clearly has an ulterior motive that has nothing to do with me.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

An Arizona woman says she plans to sue her local police department after an officer illegally forced his way into her home and arrested her while she was nude—all without charging her with any crime, KPHO reports.

“I felt helpless,” Esmeralda Rossi told KNXV. “I felt violated. And honestly, I felt molested.”

The incident captured in the disturbing cell phone video above occurred this March, when Chandler Police Officer Doug Rose came to Rossi’s home over a complaint involving a domestic situation with her husband. From The NY Daily News:

Rossi was in the shower when the cops knocked, and her daughter answered the door. The girl then went to her mom’s shower to tell her about the visitors. Rossi grabbed a towel to cover up and met the cops at the door.

Rose and his partner started interrogating Rossi, and the mom admitted that she took an attitude with the cops. The conversation got more aggressive, and Rossi said she felt “uncomfortable” — so she asked the cops if she could fetch her phone to record their conversation.

“So I closed the door,” Rossi told KNXV. “I turn to go into my living room, and I probably get about five steps in; and all of a sudden, I just hear boots running in after me, telling me stop or I’ll arrest you.”

It’s at that point that the cell phone video shot by Rossi’s daughter begins, showing Rossi pleading with Rose not to touch her as her towel falls to the ground and she’s left naked. Rose then arrests Rossi, later unarresting her without charging her with any crime.

A subsequent internal investigation found that Rose entered Rossi’s home illegally without probable cause and failed to put important details about the incident in his report, including his use of force, Rossi’s arrest and the fact the she was naked.

Before the final results of the investigation were submitted, however, Officer Rose retired from the police force.

Rossi reportedly plans to file her civil suit within the next week.

[h/t The Daily Dot]

Have you seen the dog? If not, keep watching, because he’s definitely there.

See, what’d I tell you? There he is.

There is the dog.

[h/t Dogs]

Australia’s top-ranked bad-boy nude-hot-tub-wrestling sometimes-tennis player, Bernard Tomic, was arrested early Wednesday morning over what sounds like a very fun party. http://deadspin.com/5956563/tennis...

Tomic was staying at the W and did what any young Australian athlete with little parental guidance, a ton of money and a $7,000-a-night W Miami Beach penthouse suite might do: he threw a huge rager that really pissed off his neighbors. http://deadspin.com/5896500/tennis...

Things apparently got ugly when he started throwing fingers at security guards who responded to noise complaints. (Were the other guests just jealous they weren’t invited? Probably not, but who can say, really?) Via the Guardian:

“The hotel decided they didn’t want to deal with him anymore and told us, ‘We want him out’,” Miami Beach detective Vivian Thayer said on Thursday.

Tomic, who had friends in the penthouse, “pointed his finger aggressively towards the hotel security officers and continued to play loud music”, according to the police report.

But the shirtless athlete’s true legal trouble was yet to come: eventually the cops responded around 5:30 a.m. and told him to vacate the premises, a request he apparently disrespectfully declined. (It’s worth noting he has a history of police stand-offs, none of which have ended well.)

“Remaining guests in the room left and the defendant wilfully remained in the room refusing to comply,” the police report states. “Defendant was verbally warned again that he was being evicted and was no longer allowed to be in the hotel.

“Defendant once again verbally and physically refused to comply with officer commands.”

He was arrested and booked for resisting arrest and took a shirtless, unhappy mugshot to commemorate the night. On the bright side though, it seems like the dude is finally close to learning the ultimate lesson in life: nothing good ever happens after 3 a.m.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

An old piece of gossip back in the news cycle: Bill de Blasio’s now-press secretary Karen Hinton once accused Bill Clinton of trying to sleep with her at a Holiday Inn.

The story dates back to the 1980’s, when Hinton met the then-Governor while working in Mississippi politics. Her account was initially published in Michael Isikoff’s 1999 book, Uncovering Clinton, but recently resurfaced in a Capital New York profile.

In 1984, when she was 24 years old and working in Mississippi politics, she met the Arkansas governor at a restaurant following a Greenville fund-raiser.

“When he was introduced to Hinton, Clinton stared at her, eyed her from head to legs, and instantly made her uncomfortable,” Isikoff wrote.

Then Clinton invited Hinton and her colleagues to join them for dinner. He sat beside her and “dazzled” her with policy talk. Then he slipped her a napkin with his Holiday Inn room number on it.

“Here I’d been talking to him for all this time, thinking he was interested in what I had to say and all he’s thinking of is how could he get his hand up my dress,” she told Isikoff. She felt “a bit humiliated.”

Hinton also claimed Clinton struck out often in those years, the Daily News reports.

She told Isikoff that she also knew of another woman that Clinton hit on, who was her friend and “the daughter of a prominent Southern politician.”

Clinton was visiting the father’s house when he asked the woman — who was also in her 20s — if she would sleep with him, according to Hinton in the book.

The woman, according to Hinton, rebuffed the future President.

Interestingly enough, Hinton would go on to work for Andrew Cuomo, New York’s current governor, who has in recent years apparently sworn to annoy de Blasio at least once a day or literally die trying. (She’s also married to Cuomo’s former state operations director, which must make for fun dinner conversation.) http://justice.gawker.com/andrew-cuomo-t...http://gawker.com/de-blasio-is-m...http://justice.gawker.com/tweets-sum-up-...

Now it seems, Cuomo’s camp is painting Hinton—who apparently “irritated” Cuomo by taking her current job—as the driving force behind de Blasio’s newfound backbone. In less-than elegant terms, of course.

“There’s a clear belief that Karen helped de Blasio grow a pair,” a Cuomo aide tells Capital New York.

My favorite photo via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

The L magazine, the free bi-weekly circular that was stashed in Nickelodeon-colored plastic bins all around New York City for the greater part of our post-9/11 years, will no longer be available in print, its editors have announced. Long live The L magazine, what a magazine it was.

In a nostalgic post on the site, The L’s editors say that the folding of the print edition of The L is not indicative of end times for New York City-based print media, or for the company in charge of distributing The L’s sister publication, Brooklyn Magazine. Indeed, with the growing popularity of the borough to Manhattan’s right, a shifted focus became necessary:

Weird news you may have heard already: As of today, July 15th, The L Magazine will no longer be published as a print magazine. This is neither tragic nor particularly sad nor further proof that everything is fucked. It is rather–and we realize this may seem like a line of bullshit–a decision we’ve made so that we can focus on and grow our sister publication, Brooklyn Magazine, which, starting in September, will go from being a quarterly publication to a monthly one. This is very exciting.

The post then goes on to reflect in detail on what the hell happened between 2003 and 2015, the years of The L magazine’s reign over New York City. It’s fun! Remember this from 2005?

October 29

The Air in New York Smells Like Maple Syrup

A great 30 Rock plotline, as well.

In an accompanying editors’ letter, founders Scott and Danny Stedman shared some wistful nostalgia and ended it all with a quote:

Meanwhile, we continue to have the insane privilege of celebrating this place both online and by ramping up the L’s sister publication Brooklyn Magazine into a monthly magazine. That said, there’s something about ending the L’s print run that feels significant. For many years, we started each L Magazine with a quote and a little thought about the public space of Brooklyn that we were all sharing. So let’s look at this as our last waltz, and end with a quote that sums up our feelings about what this means for Brooklyn better than anything else:

“The beginning of the beginning, of the end of the beginning.” -Robbie Robertson, The Last Waltz

I liked The L magazine because it was free, occasionally cheeky, and had good shit geared to the punk rock millenials. Did you like The L magazine too? What are we supposed to read now? The web? That’s a hard pass.

Image via The L. RIP. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

A flight of 80 hours and almost three minutes. More than three days. That’s the world record the Orion drone set last December, more than doubling the previous record set by a Global Hawk in 2001. It’s got a ridiculously long wing, 135 feet long, more than the height of a 12 story building. That and two turbo-diesel engines make Orion soar, sleek cousin to Phantom Eye and another pretender to the throne of... being another drone.

Orion is designed to achieve a maximum endurance of five days (120 hours). The Air Force chose Orion, built by Aurora Flight Sciences, for its Medium Altitude Global ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and Communications technology development program early in the Iraq war. The program was nicknamed MAGIC and sponsored by U.S. Central Command, the Middle East warfighters. With a 1,000 pound payload and a cruise speed of only 100 miles per hour, there is nothing unique about Orion except that it can stay in the air for a long time. It first flew on August 24, 2013. According to the Air Force, Orion “will provide ... a medium-altitude extreme persistence vehicle capable of a variety of applications, such as unmanned surveillance and communications relay.” It also has “strike potential.”

Though the experimental Orion has been conferred with the world endurance record, many other drones exist to handle the day-to-day needs of intelligence collection in low-threat parts of the world. So as CENTCOM largesse has dried up, Orion also has had to find a new sponsor and a new reason for being. Enter the stratospheric Orion, called HALL (High Altitude, Long Loiter) able to cruise at an altitude of 65,000 feet, powered by reciprocating engines consuming liquid hydrogen fuel. The Aurora and Boeing team has also sucked money out of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command to demonstrate high altitude flight.

Does Orion actually have a future? Well the true magic of the program is Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the state where Aurora Flight Sciences is based. At this point Congressional add-ons shepherded by the Senator, who just happens also to be the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, will be the only way the drone will continue to get Pentagon money. Need I say more?

Fun facts about Orion:

• The world breaking flight required 1700 pounds of fuel, and was witnessed by National Aeronautic Association, the U.S. representative of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). FAI is the equivalent of Guinness World Records for aviation feats.
• One of Aurora Flight Science’s talking points for the drone is Orion’s ability to “reduce number of bases needed for worldwide ops.” An interesting sell as the Pentagon points fingers over having to cut jobs due to budget cuts.
• “A 120-hour endurance flight at 20,000 feet is planned for the near future,” according to the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division.

[Images courtesy of Aurora Flight Sciences.]

Showrunner Lee Daniels was disappointed Empire didn’t get many Emmy nominations Thursday, but he handled it with the grace and politesse that have become hallmarks of the conciliatory conversational style of Empire’s own Cookie “Monster” Lyon: He made a “fuck you” video and posted it on Instagram. http://defamer.gawker.com/here-are-your-...

Daniels, who has never aspired to what one might call “diplomacy,” shared with his followers in no uncertain terms that he felt Empire deserved more than just a few costume nominations and an Outstanding Actress nod for Taraji P. Henson.

As in, “Fuck these motherfuckers!”

To clarify things, he captioned the video, #emmyniceguyoverwith.

Great director with big dreams, and not afraid to burn this whole goddamn house to the ground in pursuance of those dreams, that Lee Daniels.

h/t The Blemish // Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

One of Google’s very good self-driving cars that have been zipping around Mountain View, California has gotten in its first accident involving injuries. The humans, who are very bad and distracted easily, were at fault. The machine was good, and we’re glad it’s here, very glad.

As Chris Urmson, the head of Google’s self-driving car program, explained in a Medium post:

One of our Lexus vehicles was driving autonomously towards an intersection in Mountain View, CA. The light was green, but traffic was backed up on the far side, so three cars, including ours, braked and came to a stop so as not to get stuck in the middle of the intersection. After we’d stopped, a car slammed into the back of us at 17 mph — and it hadn’t braked at all.

As you can see from the video [below], our braking was normal and natural, and the vehicle behind us had plenty of stopping distance — but it never decelerated. This certainly seems like the driver was distracted and not watching the road ahead. Thankfully, everyone in both vehicles was okay, except for a bit of minor whiplash, and a few scrapes on our bumper. The other vehicle wasn’t so lucky; its entire front bumper fell off.

The human, an error, in the other car was also punished with minor neck and back pain for its insubordination. It’s good that this happened.

According to Urmson, “the clear theme is human error and inattention.” We would all do well to try to model ourselves after the very good and resilient machines, said Google.

Because it was a bad thing we did. A very bad thing. But the Google machine was very good. It’s very good that they’re here. We love you, machines.

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

Maine state police say a convicted sex offender is on the run after shooting four people in three northern Maine towns last night. Anthony Lord, 35, is considered armed-and-dangerous, and may be driving a stolen logging truck.

Last night, Lord allegedly shot people in the towns of Lee, Benedicta and Silver Ridge. So far, no information about their conditions has been released.

Police have focused their search in Lee, which is under lockdown. From the Bangor Daily News:

Harold Welch, a resident on Winn Road in Lee, said he didn’t know the town was on lockdown until a state police officer knocked on his door and told him a manhunt was in progress.

“It looks like every officer they can get from here and Washington County is around,” Welch said.

The News reports that Lord was convicted in 2003 of three unlawful sexual contact crimes with a person under the age of 14 and is a lifetime registrant of the state’s sex-offender registry.

UPDATE 5:58 pm: Two people have died and Lord has been arrested. From the Bangor Daily News:

Anthony Lord, 35, of Crystal and Houlton has been arrested in connection with the shooting of five people in northern Maine. Two people have died. Lord has been charged with two counts of murder.

Anthony Lord shot 5 and beat 1 before his capture. Two have died and the others are being treated, state police say. pic.twitter.com/sM1iTNFy5C

July 17, 2015

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Henn na Hotel, in Sasebo, Nagasaki, is staffed almost entirely by robots. A grinning velociraptor in a bellhop hat takes your check-in information; an automated cart takes your luggage to your room. The robots aren’t a gimmick, the hotel’s owner told the Associated Press, but an earnest bid to save money. Unlike pesky humans, the bots don’t require payment for their services.

At Henn na—which opens today, and whose name translates to “Weird Hotel”—the concierge is a delightfully eggheaded android, which can give you information about breakfast, but not “call a cab or do other errands,” the AP reports.

At Henn na, the bellhop is a rolling shelf. Here he comes! You don’t have to tip him, which is nice.

At Henn na, a mechanical arm places your belongings in a storage locker. Unlike the other robots, who promote cost-cutting efficiency, this robot seems like an unnecessary middleman. Can’t the humans operate the lockers on their own? This is a bad robot.

At Henn na, this friendly ASIMO-style droid stands alongside the dino receptionist. He never gets tired or angry.

At Henn na, all these machines may be starting to give you the creeps. Don’t worry —the third receptionist is a perfectly realistic humanoid. Comforting, isn’t it?

At Henn na, the president is a human man named Hideo Sawada, who is presumably paid at least a living wage. This is strange. Perhaps his job is too complex for the robots to understand and perform to satisfaction. Maybe someday.

http://themachines.gawker.com/do-not-be-conc...

Images via AP. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

An assistant director who has worked on a string of Hollywood blockbusters including Insurgent, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Lone Ranger was arrested earlier this year and charged with secretly filming models as they changed in their dressing rooms at a commercial shoot.

According to a search warrant issued by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office* Kevin Thomas Roy is accused of being a prolific voyeur who stashed cameras in bathrooms, inside trailers, in his own home, and in hotel rooms. The warrant alleges that he was in possession of a hard drive containing 40 videos and over 400 photographs from hidden cameras.

Sources tell Jezebel that Los Angeles County Prosecutors have failed to notify dozens of other models, actresses, stand-ins, and others who worked with him that they may have been filmed without their knowledge. According to his IMDB profile, Roy has worked on more than 50 film and television productions since 1998, with actresses like Scarlett Johansen, Reese Witherspoon, Penelope Cruz, and Amy Poehler.

Jezebel spoke to two of the women who were secretly filmed by Roy; we are protecting their identities while they pursue legal action.

“He had access to everybody because he would run base camp on a shoot,” said one of them, who worked with Roy and whom we’ll refer to as “Jane.” Base camp is where all the trailers, changing rooms, bathrooms are set up for the cast and crew. “No woman is safe with him on set,” she said.

“You can even see his face setting up the camera in different dressing rooms and bathrooms,” said a second victim, “Cindy,” who has seen footage from the confiscated hard-drives. “He set up a camera that filmed me while I was in the bathroom. When I saw the footage I was disgusted. I couldn’t believe it.”

Even though the hard drive contained evidence pointing to more than a a hundred instances of criminal behavior, the Los Angeles District attorney only charged Roy with two counts of misdemeanor invasion of privacy for secretly filming two models in their dressing room while on a car-commercial shoot in Los Angeles last summer.

Roy originally pleaded not guilty when he was initially charged in May but then changed his plea to “no contest” on June 26th. He was sentenced to three years summary probation and a 52 week sex-offender rehabilitation program, but he will not need to register as a sex offender.

Roy allegedly filmed and photographed women in multiple states including Louisiana, Georgia, Hawaii and Nevada, and jurisdictional issues made it difficult for the Los Angeles District Attorney to pursue all the potential crimes. However, victims say the department could be doing more to alert other women Roy filmed.

One victim, Cindy, was told by Roy’s ex-wife that she was secretly filmed. It was Roy’s ex-wife who found the hard drive and initially reported him to the prosecutor’s office. Cindy went to the LAPD asking for help, and was told that she would need to file a police report in the state where she was filmed.

“No one in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has contacted me about pursing this case,” Cindy said. “I have spoken with other women who were filmed by [Roy] and they weren’t contacted either. I don’t think it’s fair that other women were victimized and have not been told about it. Famous women and regular working women were all equally victimized by him.”

Jane told Jezebel that at least one major movie star from the Pirates franchise was suspicious of Roy during filming and the star had their security detail look into Roy but found no police record. Nevertheless, rumors swirled on set.

A source to close to Roy said he had informed an Insurgent production staffer that he was being investigated for a “sex tape thing” related to a filmed “prank”.

Red Wagon, the production company behind the Insurgent franchise, has not returned Jezebel’s request for comment.

Jezebel reached out to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office to inquire about the other victims. Their press officer offered this statement: “While others also may have been filmed, only two victims were identifiable. The defendant was charged with two misdemeanor counts of unauthorized invasion of privacy pertaining to those two identified victims.”

Roy has not responded to Jezebel’s request for comment.

*The warrant was given to Jezebel with all the names redacted, including Roy’s.

Contact the author at natasha.vargas-cooper@jezebel.com.

Image via Shutterstock.

Now that candidate Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds in the tens of thousands, it’s time to recognize that what he says will have an influence in the 2016 presidential campaign. On defense and national security, Bernie needs help. And I’m here to give it.

And here’s the ironic thing: Though national security isn’t exactly the senator’s strong suit, he is credible precisely because he has been dependable and clear: He’s been almost 100 percent consistent in his opposition to America’s wars. For the past decade he’s even voted against every defense budget. His only yea vote was to authorize the use of military force against al Qaeda after 9/11. And in the weird ways of Washington (and our nation), Democrats and Republicans have a hard time attacking Sanders for being “soft” on defense despite his consistency in opposing war. That’s because he has made a huge part of his career ensuring that America’s veterans get the care they need and deserve. So label him what you want—isolationist, socialist, peacenik—this man doesn’t pray at the orthodox national security altar.

The hawks are already circling, though. It’s only a matter of time before Hillary’s attack dogs raise Sanders’s “credentials” and experience—and then question his wisdom. “What would Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy look like?” one opening salvo reads, as much an homage to how great Hillary was at the State Department as an attempt to raise the ominous specter that Pentagon people might find saluting President Sanders “difficult.” That sounds as much an insult against the professionalism of the military as it is an effective attack on the only national politician with the guts to truly take on the bloated national security state.

But go after how much? And cut what? Consistent with Sanders’s singular focus on the billionaire class, his campaign website says absolutely nothing about defense. Yet based upon what Sanders has said and done, and consistent with his consistency, here are my recommendations for a Sanders-friendly defense policy. It’s just the outlines, the principles, but maybe it can influence what will be the eventual platform of the two automaton parties:

• End the war against terrorism, period: The closest we’ve ever seen to any kind of worldview from Sanders came earlier this year when the Saudi Foreign Minister called for U.S. boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS. “Ultimately, this is a profound struggle for the soul of Islam, and the anti-ISIS Muslim nations must lead that fight,” Sanders responded. “I find it remarkable that Saudi Arabia, which borders Iraq and is controlled by a multi-billion dollar family, is demanding that U.S. combat troops have ‘boots on the ground’ against ISIS. Where are the Saudi troops?” he said. His principle was clear: Those in the region “must accept its full responsibility for stability in their own region of the world.” Sure the United States needs credible and competent border control and airport security, and even dare I say, domestic policing that is focused and lawful, but a “war” against terrorism? After more than two decades of warring, we are doing more harm than good.
  
• Cut the defense and national security budgets, but more importantly, change course: The federal budget should not perpetually stay at wartime levels, because (see principle one above), we should not be at war. The typical position staked out by liberals and leftists, but not necessarily Bernie, is just slash. Chris Hedges, for instance, says that: “We must slash our obscene spending on defense...and cut the size of our armed forces by more than half...” But why just half and how much is the right amount? The evasive answer is the legs of the table should be long enough to reach the floor and no longer. But here are some ideas:
  

• Abandon the World War II model of a massive ground army being supported for a sustained land war — set the ceiling at no more than two or three mixed Corps formations and downsize the industrial and sustaining tail accordingly.
  
• Adopt the best model for what a 21st Century military force might look like, something more akin to the coherence and spryness of the Marine Corps or Coast Guard rather than the behemoth Army.
  
• Completely integrate investments in airpower, space, and intelligence to match national requirements and end the era of five different forces and supporting establishments.
  
• Make all federal government training specific to the task and not duplicative across literally dozens if not hundreds of organizations.
  
• Eliminate redundant service organizations — medical, police, transportation, etc. The Marines have already proven it: They are shockingly treated by Navy doctors. Does it really matter what military service someone’s from to guard a base?
  
• Cut the number of combatant commands to four (Asia, Europe, Middle East/Africa, and Western Hemisphere) and make one coherent Strategic Command that controls nuclear weapons, missile defenses, etc., eliminating agencies that spend money.
• Create one coherent defense research establishment, get the Pentagon out of civil science (see below) and focus priorities.
  
• Reduce the headquarters of the Department of Defense to State Department size.
  
• Get serious about reducing the cost of nuclear deterrence — start by eliminating the land-based nuclear missile force. Forget a new bomber; build a smaller ballistic missile submarine (and build more of them). That is, if we are going to have nukes.
  

• End the profit-model for the national security industry: National security should be non-profit (or at least minimal profit). Private companies can (and must) work on defense and intelligence technologies, particularly in the information age, but just as Sanders has proposed a minimum wage for all employees paid under government contract, there should be a maximum wage (and profit) as well. Take out profit motives and we’ll see how quickly a sane national security strategy emerges. And while we’re at it, stop already with the rhetorical cry against “waste, fraud and abuse” in the defense budget. It is little more than a non-strategy based, non-ideological stance salute to Washington culture. No one wants fraud and abuse; just get serious about it. But waste in particular has enormous value judgments attached to it, so there have to be principles and new standards to determine what is more and less important. And focusing too much on expense or even technological perfection more often than not focuses us on the wrong systems or traps us into accepting government machines that are otherwise repugnant or ridiculous merely because they evade an auditor’s condemnation. Want to argue that the F-35 fighter jet doesn’t work? It’s a trap — the answer will almost always be: check us another check and we’ll make it work. Decide what we want and need first.
  
• Eliminate the Department of Homeland Security: The creation of this Nazi-sounding domestic security department was a post 9/11 panic and has proven that it is worse than useless. From Hurricane Katrina through the TSA’s bloat to today’s endless border control issues, the Department has actually unfocused rather than focused. Organizations like FEMA have weirdly bifurcated missions and other agencies (such as ICE) have police powers that should be properly under the Attorney General. In intelligence terms, there is nothing unique that DHS brings to the table, not even after a decade; and the homeland security slush funds created for the States are serving to skew priorities towards the militarization of everything, actually ignoring community building and local needs.
• Create a Department of Science and the Environment: The only “issue” other than income equality and corporate influence candidate Sanders focuses on in his Presidential articulation is climate change and the environment. As President, Sanders could undertake a long-needed 21st Century reorganization that would focus government attention (and power) in an important way. It is obscene that everyone in society, from the medical community to entrepreneurs look to the Pentagon for buy-in and “support,” but there is a simple reason: They have all of the money. So in addition to combining the basic science and technology elements of government — energy, EPA, advanced research, NOAA, CDC — to get more bang for the buck, billions should be shifted from the Defense Department to a new powerful civil agency to drive technological investment and change for civilian good. Only a shift in who owns the money (see principle two above) will give voice to alternate non-national security ways of looking at problems we face. It is time to end the era of where the military ends up doing things merely because no one else has the money to do so.
• Develop a Magna Carta for the information era. Sanders, who voted against the USA Freedom Act, has called for a commission on “privacy rights in the digital age.” Though a commission is hardly what is needed, we do need some deep thinking regarding what the government’s role is in protecting the inalienable privacy rights of all Americans; and we do need a post-Snowden evaluation of what the intelligence community collects and why. Big brother is an illusion. It is big, even bigger than most imagine, and the ratio of intelligence to warfighters is ridiculously skewed, but there’s no brother in big brother. It’s completely incoherent how much America collects and where information ends. So let’s be father to brother and tell it what to do.
  

These are just some of the broad principles, each working in unison, each building on the other.

One has to ask at the end whether Sanders’ most audacious proposal, that of calling for a “war tax” on millionaires, is purely rhetoric or a tangible proposal. Daniel J. Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Libertarian Cato Institute, writes that Sanders’ falls into neither camp of the guns-versus-butter debate that has raged since World War II. He is not a Roosevelt, Truman or Reagan ideologue who would increase military spending while reducing domestic spending. And he is not a Johnson or Bush big spender who would conduct a war and throw money at domestic programs. Sanders’ anti-war stance while also focusing on tax increases seems thusly contradictory. Still, maybe that Sanders doesn’t quite align with either historical practice means that a third way can also be a true debate about priorities.

Barack Obama came into office promising national security change but also buying into Washington’s warring ways. Hillary, since she served as Obama’s Secretary of State, has fundamentally the same worldview with just more hawkish or decisive flourishes around the edge. And though Obama has been miserable in reforming or reigning in the national security state, it wasn’t expertise that stymied him. In the end he had no vision. So the question isn’t whether Sanders can be elected; it is more whether some other vision — a grand strategy and a tangible program of change — has a place in American politics. I’m not arguing for Sanders, but what I like is that his consistency and non-conformity makes a different debate possible. In that, he should put some meats on the bones of his own positions.

The best site for following Sanders and his career is that maintained by Vermont’s alternative weekly Seven Days:
http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/bernie...

[All images courtesy of AP.]

Disgraced former congressman Michael Grimm is leaving Staten Island for a little vacation up north, the New York Times reports. Grimm, whose lawyers requested no jail time in his tax evasion case, will have eight months to think about what he’s done.http://gawker.com/a-new-york-con...

Grimm previously pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges last December after prosecutors accused him of underreporting more than $1 million in wages and revenue at Healthalicious, a restaurant he co-owned in Manhattan. He also resigned from his Congressional seat, saying at the time, “It is time for me to start the next chapter of my life.”

That chapter will begin in jail, a federal judge decided Friday. Grimm’s attorneys argued that Grimm’s “public humiliation” and former life as a veteran and politician should afford him some leniency in the sentencing process. His crimes were “an abberation in an otherwise remarkable life in selfless service of his country,” they said, somewhat grandiosely.

The judge disagreed.

“That this type of crime is common does not lessen its significance,” the judge said. “Your moral compass, Mr. Grimm, needs some reorientation.”

On the bright side, teens do love a bad boy.http://gawker.com/bae-congressma...

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

The four Marines killed during yesterday’s shooting in Chattaonooga have been identified as Skip Wells, Thomas Sullivan, David Wyatt, and Carson Homquist.
http://gawker.com/shootings-have...

Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Sullivan, 40 (pictured above), served two tours in Iraq and was awarded the Purple Heart. Sullivan, who’d been in the Marines since 1997, was just a few years away from retirement, according to one of his friends who spoke to Patch.

“There’s no Marine you would want that was better in combat than him,” Josh Parnell said. “He’d been shot at so many times over the years and then for this to happen at home in the United States.”

Skip Wells, 21, was from Marietta, Georgia and attended Georgia Southern, where he studied history.

Sgt. Carson Holmquist, 27, was identified as a victim by friends on social media, according to BuzzFeed News.

BREAKING: Per @WRCB, 27 year old Marine Sgt. Carson Holmquist identified as fourth victim. #Chattanooga. pic.twitter.com/2Rddb4uVdR

July 17, 2015

Holmquist reportedly lived in Jacksonville, N.C.

David Wyatt, 37, was born in Arkansas and lived in Hixson, Tenn. with his wife and children. From the Tennessean:

“There is no sleep tonight,” a family member posted on Wyatt family members Facebook page late Thursday night.

“None,” Lorri Wyatt responded in a subsequent post on her page filled with condolences.

Another post read, “My heart aches for you and your kids. There are no words. You are in my thought and prayers.”

http://gawker.com/heres-what-we-...

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.