The AP reports that two people died and 15 were injured on Monday after severe weather caused a circus tent to collapse in Lancaster, New Hampshire. Yesterday, storm winds caused a tent to collapse at a festival in suburban Chicago, killing one and injuring more than a dozen others.

The online ecophages known as Minions have already conquered the internet, much of Iraq and death itself. Now, it seems, they are finally coming for the rest of the world, starting with Ireland.

Escaped Minion at Omni in Santry may seem hilarious but its a dispicable breach of health & safety @DubCityCouncil pic.twitter.com/w443usabzb

August 3, 2015

Whatever you’ve been reading about Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, don’t believe it, okay? No matter what some yellow journalists are telling you, Will and Jada are doing GREAT and the only people fit to say otherwise are Will and Jada themselves.

Will took to Facebook this afternoon to set the record straight:

Under normal circumstances, I don’t usually respond to foolishness. (Because it’s contagious) But, so many people have extended me their “deepest condolences” that I figured - “What the hell... I can be foolish, too!”

So, in the interest of redundant, repetitious, over & over-again-ness... Jada and I are...

NOT GETTING A DIVORCE!!!!!!!!!!!!! : -)

I promise you all - if I ever decide to divorce my Queen - I SWEAR I’ll tell you myself!

‪#‎Dumb‬ People Should Have to Wear Scarlet Ds

: -)

My king has spoken.

— Jada Pinkett Smith (@jadapsmith) August 3, 2015

King? King? I’m sorry—when did the reigning ruler of Bel Air die and why did no one tell me?

[US Weekly]

Britney Spears is not a girl, not yet a women, but is still under conservatorship of her father, an arrangement that might go on indefinitely. Jamie Spears has been his daughter’s conservator since January of 2008 and, according to Gossip Cop, “reportedly everyone is so satisfied with how things are going, there seems to be no reason to have the conservatorship end.” [Gossip Cop]

L O L: Taylor Swift celebrated Karlie Kloss’ birthday by posting a photo that barely features Karlie Kloss, but prominently features her boyfriend Calvin Harris. [Instagram]

• The progeny of Ice T and Coco shall be called...Chanel. [People]
• Will and Jada Pinkett Smith might not be getting divorced, but Halle Berry and Olivier Martinez are DEFINITELY on the road to ruin. [Radar]
• Liam from One Direction talked about Louis from One Direction’s baby, is not mad at Zayn (formerly of One Direction). [Billboard]
• Emma Watson talked about being a Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women. [E! News]
• Eminem has traded pills for exercise. [THG]
• The Robert Pattinson/FKA twigs nuptials are STILL ON. [Gossip Cop]

Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

Images via Getty and Instagram.

In the coming year, a number of both experienced legislators and relative neophytes will ask for your support as they seek election as President of United States. There is, however, only one candidate who truly deserves your vote: Cop and baby skunk with yogurt cup on head.

It’s true, neither cop (Rochester Police Officer Merlin Taylor) nor baby skunk with yogurt cup on head (“Skunky”) have filed the necessary paperwork to formally run for the office. Indeed, Taylor and Skunky have yet to even suggest their candidacy in an unofficial capacity.

And yet.

Taylor/Skunky 2016.

[Images via Facebook]

Opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent those of Gawker or its greater editorial staff.

The corner bodega is the latest victim to Manhattan’s ever-ascending cost of living and operating an independent business, having been supplanted in some cases by chain supermarkets and pharmacies. That means even more premade Duane Reade bacon egg and cheese sandwiches for you, you filthy animal.

According to a statistic quoted in the New York Times today, 75 of the city’s roughly 12,000 bodegas have closed this year, many of them in upper Manhattan. That’s a pretty small number. The bodega isn’t facing extinction any time soon, but times are apparently tough even for those owners whose businesses are surviving, and it’s hard to imagine them getting better.

The leading cause of death, of course, is rising rent. José Alvarrado, who shuttered his 169th-street outpost after only eight months of business, told the Times that his landlord hiked rent by $100 every month and told him he wouldn’t be able to renew his five-year lease. An owner in Harlem said changes in the neighborhood have forced him to consider converting to a health-food model, with a “salad bar, fresh juices, that kind of thing.”

Do you really want to live in a city where rubbery meat from a pharmacy is your best option for breakfast? Yuck. Buy a coffee from the guy on the corner on your way into work today. If you live in a reasonable neighborhood it’s probably 50 cents for a small, and it’s at least as good as whatever they’re selling at Rite Aid.

Image via Pete Jelliffe/Flickr. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Last month, scientists at a UN conference delivered a sobering warning: To prevent catastrophic warming of the planet, we must reduce all carbon emissions to zero by the end of the 21st century. Today, the Obama administration announced its plan to get there.

This afternoon Obama detailed a new clean energy plan that calls on the US to cut carbon emissions from power plants by a third by 2030. “There is a such thing as being too late when it comes to climate change,” President Obama said in today’s address, which he said was two years in the making. “The science says we have to do more.”

Acknowledging Science, Finally

The announcement of the Clean Power Plan is significant because it puts the the country’s focus on moving towards renewable energy. But it’s also notable because Obama specifically acknowledged carbon as a pollutant. There are plenty of restrictions on certain chemicals being released into the atmosphere from power plants, but as Obama pointed out, there has been no regulation from the federal government on carbon. Until now.

In outlining his plan, Obama noted many of the disturbing climate science trends that NASA and NOAA have been studying for years. We’re setting climate records in the worst possible way. 2014 was the warmest year on record, 2015 is already on track to beat it. So far, 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000.

Climate change isn’t just causing problems in the future, it’s costing the US money and loss of life in the form of extreme weather events like floods, droughts, wildfires, and major storms. And it will get worse: Even if we halted all carbon emissions today, the most conservative estimates have forecasts still have sea levels rising significantly, possibly as much as 10 feet by 2100.

A Simple End With Complicated Means

The goal of the plan is simple: By 2030, carbon emissions from power plants will be reduced in the US by 32 percent.

Why go after power plants specifically? Because they’re the single largest source of carbon pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in the country. (Cars are #2, and I’ll get to that in a second.)

But it’s also because energy consumption can be reduced through consumer-side efficiency standards, which would end up reducing the amount of energy needed overall, an excellent side-effect of the rule. Targeting power plants also will help catalyze technological advances across industries and get the US thinking about where its energy is coming from, and at what cost.

The State-By-State Challenge

The brilliance—or the downfall—of this plan is that it leaves concrete action up to the states. Each state will be able to put together its own plan for cutting emissions which will be approved by the federal government in September of 2016.

This is good because it acknowledges that not every state is starting from the same place—some states already do have quite stringent emissions standards—and also that each state has a different technological path to cut emissions—sunny states will lean towards solar investments, for example. The White House has put together a series of fact sheets for each state with detailed information about the advantages each state brings to the table.

But this is also where it gets tricky. Flexibility is important, but the concern is that by leaving it up to the states, some of the action will get bogged down in politicized debates about how best to achieve the goal. However, it’s definitely possible: Here’s a detailed roadmap showing how all 50 states could do it.

This proposal to switch all energy in the US to renewable sources by 2050 is by Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer who heads up Stanford’s Atmosphere and Energy Program

Obama was also smart to frame the plan not as a climate change solution—which always makes people’s eyes glaze over and/or fight about the facts—but as a solution to other problems the country is facing. Switching to renewable energy will aid national security, fix the economy, and most importantly, improve public health. It will save the typical American consumer money—up to $85/year, says the administration. For those who are worried how the plan will affect the traditional energy industry, Obama claims that a growing renewable energy industry will create even more jobs.

It’s Not Just About the Economy, Though

Even stronger is the social case for clean energy. Obama’s team has been working closely with the Environmental Protection Agency to tie the plan directly to healthcare issues, demonstrating how it will prevent premature deaths from exposure to coal plants and protect children from developing childhood asthma. In a statement that garnered some of the loudest applause in the entire announcement, Obama reiterated something well-known about “dirty energy” (and he did say “dirty energy” at least once): It has been proven to hurt the US’s low-income and minority populations the most.

The EPA is touting the health benefits of additional pollution reduction, via EPA

And that’s another important thing to remember. Obama has proposed a few other pieces of his climate legislation aimed at cutting all greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28 percent by 2025. These would specifically impact everyday life for many Americans, like new vehicle emissions standards, a solar training program, and way to help the coal industry make the transition to renewable energy. With the EPA finalizing today’s rule, one part of the plan is moving forward. But it obviously needs more comprehensive support.

In his statement today, Obama said that China was introducing stricter emissions regulations because of the rules that the US was putting in place. Whether to not that proves to be true, it does point to the fact that this is a global effort where the US has a lot of influence. In December, leaders will convene at the COP 21 conference to continue international climate talks. For the first time, the US will have a chance to be a leader in this conversation.

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File

Deadspin Craig James Sues Fox Sports For Religious Discrimination | Gizmodo Rob Rhinehart’s Latest Attempt to Make You Buy Soylent Is Terrible | io9 The New Spider-Man Reboot Won’t “Revisit” His Origin Story At All | Kotaku Twitch Streamer Fakes His Own Joke Swatting, Gets Banned |

A man now in his 60s claims that Edward Heath, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and died in 2005, raped him when he was 12 years old in 1961. Officials are also investigating claims that a police department worked to hide allegations of child sex abuse from Heath in the 1990s.

The unnamed man claims that Heath picked him up as a hitchhiker in Kent after he ran away from home as a boy, then took him to a “very posh” apartment in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, where they had “full penetrative sex,” the Daily Mirror reports. The man, who according to the Mirror was later convicted of child sex crimes himself, said that he didn’t know who Heath was until he saw a picture of the then-leader of the Conservative Party alongside Margaret Thatcher in a newspaper, and that he was ignored by social workers when he reported the incident two months after it happened.

The UK’s Independent Police Complaints Commission, a national police watchdog agency, is investigating separate sex abuse allegations against Heath. The Telegraph reports that a retired Wiltshire police officer claimed last summer that senior officers in his department ordered prosecutors to drop a case that would have seen Heath’s name “dragged through the mud” in the 1990s. The defendant in that case, which was dropped, was the operator of a brothel who threatened to expose Heath, according to the Guardian.

The IPCC will work to determine whether an active coverup took place, and the Wiltshire Police department is asking anyone who believes they may have been a victim of Heath’s to come forward.

Greater London’s Metropolitan Police are also investigating Heath as part of Operation Midland, a larger investigation into alleged sex abuse by influential men in politics in the 1970s and ‘80s, the BBC reports. Tom Watson, a Labour MP, told the BBC that he referred allegations against Heath that he had received to the Met Police in 2012.

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

Dotty Washington Post columnist and cane-waving oldie Richard Cohen still has his memory, thank god. And that memory is full of him hanging out with politicians. Has he told you about it?

He begins,

Some years ago, I worked out with Joe Biden. He lifted weights while I pedaled a stationary bike, and I can report that the vice president of the United States, if he has kept up his exercise regimen, should be in splendid shape.

This is the sort of “inside info” that you need to play in the “big leagues” of political analysis.

My workout session with Biden occurred about a decade ago at the splendid Italian resort of Villa d’Este on Lake Como, where we both were attending a conference. Biden and his wife, Jill, flew in with John McCain and his sidekick, Lindsey Graham. We all had a grand time. You cannot ask for better company than Biden, McCain and Graham. They know how to laugh.

Another good political column, by a national political columnist.

Louis Tomlinson had sex with a woman once—it’s true. He said so on live television. http://defamer.gawker.com/one-directions...

One Direction performed on Good Morning America this morning and, once the band left the stage, GMA contributor (I guess) Michael Strahan congratulated Tomlinson on his supposed impregnation, about which not a single member of One Direction has spoken a public word.

Via Us Weekly:

“Louis, from one father to another I want to congratulate you on your upcoming fatherhood. So how are you feeling?” Strahan, 43, asked.

“Thank you,” Tomlinson, 23. “Obviously it’s a very exciting time. So thank you.”

Oh shit, Michael Strahan.

Was Strahan ignorant to the fact that no One Direction member had, until that moment, publicly confirmed Louis Tomlinson’s supposed impregnation? Was Strahan ignorant to the fact that everyone assumed they were all most likely waiting on some sort of blood test? Was Strahan ignorant to nothing, nothing at all—did he know full well that he was getting literally the scoop of a lifetime, oh my god, we’re SCREAMING?

I don’t know.

Hats off to you, Michael Strahan. You’re charming on Live! With Kelly and Michael.

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

The late Marissa Cooper (1988 - 2006) left her grave in Orange County this past weekend and traveled to New York to attend a singles mixer for “elite” white people who use the dating app “The League.” Though she cannot be seen in these photos from the event, Page Six reports that her presence was felt by other partygoers.http://gawker.com/heres-what-a-p...

From Page Six:

Mischa Barton ended up at a Hamptons mixer for dating app The League, dubbed “high-end Tinder” on Friday night. The actress had been at Surf Lodge for a dinner hosted by Google Play Music, but later breezed by the mixer at the same hip location for The League...

It’s amazing how easy party hopping is once you’ve left your corporeal frame behind. Unfortunately, Coop did not find her soul’s eternal mate at the mixer. According to Page Six, “Barton...mingled with a few guys, but doesn’t use the dating service.”

Of course not.

Photo via Fox. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

After knocking out Meek Mill last week with successive diss tracks, Drake took the stage Monday night at OVOFest, his annual hometown celebration, to enter the fatality code and Finish Him. http://defamer.gawker.com/meek-mill-no-r...

With memes mocking Meek’s defeat flashing on the big screen behind him, Drake came out wearing a classic “Free Meek Mill” t-shirt (remember when they were friends?) and performed both of his Meek disses back to back:

Drake put Meek Mill on the #OvoFest screen pic.twitter.com/DdGB78te61

August 4, 2015

Backstage, Drake and Kanye West laughed their asses off at a Meek joke Will Smith showed them on his phone. The saddest rap beef is officially over.

Drake, Kanye and Will Smith backstage at OvO Fest laughing at Memes clowning Meek Mill pic.twitter.com/2s8heC1A9b

August 4, 2015

The plan made me feel dishonest and creepy, so it took me a long time to send my novel out under a man’s name. But each time I read a study about unconscious bias, I got a little closer to trying it.

I set up a new e-mail address under a name—let’s say it was George Leyer, though it wasn’t—and left it empty. Weeks went by without word from the agents who had my work. I read another study about how people rate job applicants they believe are female and how much better they like those they believe are male.

The thing I was thinking of doing was absolutely against the rules, the opposite of all the advice writers get, but I wasn’t feeling like a writer, and I hadn’t written in weeks. Until last winter, I had never faced a serious bout of writer’s block or any meaningful unwillingness to work. A blank page had always felt to me like the moment the lights go down in a theater—until the day it didn’t. I was spending more time crying on the phone than writing and I had no idea how to get back to work. Every paragraph was a negotiation—my instinct leading one way, and then a blast against it—don’t do that, you’ll confuse people. No one wants to read that kind of thing.

So, on a dim Saturday morning, I copy-pasted my cover letter and the opening pages of my novel from my regular e-mail into George’s account. I put in the address of one of the agents I’d intended to query under my own name. I didn’t expect to hear back for a few weeks, if at all. It would only be a few queries and then I’d close out my experiment. I began preparing another query, checking the submission requirements on the agency web site. When I clicked back, there was already a new message, the first one in the empty inbox. Mr. Leyer. Delighted. Excited. Please send the manuscript.

Almost all publishers only accept submissions through agents, so they are essential gatekeepers for anyone trying to sell a book in the traditional market rather than self-publishing. There are various ways of attracting an agent’s attention, but sending query letters is the most accessible. The letter describes the novel, the author, and usually includes the first pages of the manuscript itself—the equivalent of what a reader might see picking up a book in a store. Agents can let silence speak for itself, write back with a rejection, or ask to see the novel.

I sent the six queries I had planned to send that day. Within 24 hours George had five responses—three manuscript requests and two warm rejections praising his exciting project. For contrast, under my own name, the same letter and pages sent 50 times had netted me a total of two manuscript requests. The responses gave me a little frisson of delight at being called “Mr.” and then I got mad. Three manuscript requests on a Saturday, not even during business hours! The judgments about my work that had seemed as solid as the walls of my house had turned out to be meaningless. My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me—Catherine.

I wanted to know more of how the Georges of the world live, so I sent more. Total data: George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.

This was my second time going. I had written a novel before, and sent it around. Those queries had a pretty good response, though no one offered to represent it. All the agents who read it said it wasn’t bad, but that it had an essential structural problem. I couldn’t fix it, so I put it away. My short stories had also usually gotten some decent replies—some published, most rejected with a detailed “please send more” kind of answer. I figured that I was paying my dues, keeping on keeping on, having roughly the same experience any other young writer would have.

Sometimes it was hard to put away something I had believed in. But in general, I believed what I was told about my work.

This new book was different. I knew it was better than my older work—more ambitious, more interesting, more playful, more exciting. My writer friends loved it and sent it to their agents on my behalf, before I began sending query letters under any name at all. The responses trickled back with a number of similar rejections, mostly: “beautiful writing, but your main character isn’t very plucky, is she?” and of course, a lot of silence. Still hopeful, I started sending blind queries, hoping for at least a few enthusiastic readers. Meaningless silence turned into meaningful silence day by day. The few written rejections didn’t cite a coherent problem. My writer friends still promised it was a good book, that I should have faith in my work, that good news would be around the corner. It wasn’t.

Being rejected is par for the writer’s course. But what chilled me was the possibility that it was not a surface problem but an astigmatism in my understanding of human nature—that I’d written something better but somehow less meaningful, that I could make nice sentences, but what I think people do is not what people do. Every rejection letter mentioned the “beautiful writing,” which is the paint job on top of but not the engine of the book. I started writing short and angry paragraphs, and then not writing at all. The problem reached into every part of my mind—not only that I had written the wrong book, but that I was the wrong person.

That was when George came to life. I imagined him as a sort of reptilian Michael Fassbender-looking guy, drinking whiskey and walking around train yards at night while I did the work. Most of the agents only heard from one or the other of us, but I did overlap a little. One who sent me a form rejection as Catherine not only wanted to read George’s book, but instead of rejecting it asked if he could send it along to a more senior agent. Even George’s rejections were polite and warm on a level that would have meant everything to me, except that they weren’t to the real me. George’s work was “clever,” it’s “well-constructed” and “exciting.” No one mentioned his sentences being lyrical or whether his main characters were feisty. A few of people sent deeply generous and thoughtful critiques, which made me both grateful and queasy for my dishonesty.

No one person is responsible for the larger effect of the group response to my work, and presumably none of them want to be sexist. I emerged from this experiment with a few theories about the emergent gulf.

First, the agents may be acting both consciously and rationally, if it’s much easier for them to sell a book by a George, they would be more interested in George’s work, and more polite and encouraging to him. Second, it’s unusual for a man to write a book with a female protagonist, so maybe that made the book stand out. (I’d doubt that there’s any equivalent effect for a woman writing from a male point of view, however, so this is cold comfort.)

Third: with my name, maybe my novel was taken for “Women’s Fiction”—a dislikable name for a respectable genre—but not what I was writing. If an agent was expecting that, I’m not surprised he or she would turn away after the first page or two. A George wasn’t expected to be writing Women’s Fiction, so he was taken on his own terms.

Last, maybe the agents were subconsciously friendlier to George. Unconscious bias is difficult to overcome. Once I met an agent face to face, and we discussed the first 20 pages of the novel. He said it was good, but it was so ambitious he doubted that I would be able to pull off the whole book at that level, so he would have given it a form rejection if it had come through the mail. The difference could be in the gut assessment of how likely a George is to pull off something ambitious.

To some degree, I was being conditioned like a lab animal against ambition. My book was getting at least a few of those rejections because it was big, not because it was bad. George, I imagine, would have been getting his “clever”s all along and would be writing something enormous now. In theory, the results of my experiment are vindicating, but I feel furious at having spent so much time in that ridiculous little cage, where so many people with the wrong kind of name are burning out their energy and intelligence. My name—Catherine—sounds as white and as relatively authoritative as any distinctly feminine name could, so I can only assume that changing other ethnic and class markers would have even more striking effects.

The agents themselves were both men and women, which is not surprising because bias would hardly have a chance to damage people if it weren’t pervasive. It’s not something a few people do to everyone else. It goes through all the ways we think of ourselves and each other.

Whenever VIDA numbers come out counting how many men and how many women write for literary publications and people discuss discrimination in publishing—do women pitch less frequently? Are they more easily discouraged? Are they less daring, more eager to be liked, care less about speaking truth to power? Do they prefer small topics and small templates?—I’ve started to think that some large number of these women must be drummed out and bamboozled before they reach their mature work.

The pieces about VIDA counts often focus on the way established authors are treated. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay writes about the way women are sidelined at the highest levels—“where Jonathan Franzen lost the Pulitzer rather than Jennifer Egan winning the award.” In the “Second Shelf” Meg Wolitzer mentions the generation of august writers that came of age in a period of expanding interest in the stories of women’s lives—she lists Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Marilynne Robinson. During the apprenticeship phase of their careers, the larger culture was ready to see them as important, authoritative, and they were.

The interim period is also important, where writers are neither beginners fresh for the journey nor secure professionals with a known name. In between, where a writer is alone for a long time with her work, a “clever” might be enough to steer her toward a bolder plan, and a “not very likable” guides her back to conventions. A small series of constraints can stop the writer before she’s ever worth writing about. Women in particular seem vulnerable in that middle stretch to having our work pruned back until it’s compact enough to fit inside a pink cover.

There’s a fundamental change in how I look at my work now, how I look at the novel I already wrote and the one that I’m working on now. I quit sending out queries entirely, and used the critiques that George got to improve the book—a book I would have put away in frustration long ago if I hadn’t tried my experiment. The edited draft went to the agent who now represents me, after she got in touch about a nonfiction piece I had written under my own name. Patience, faith, playing by the rules—the conventional wisdom would never have brought me here.

Catherine Nichols is on Twitter.

Illustration by Joohee Yoon.

This past June, three Santa Ana police officers were suspended after a video surfaced of them joking about kicking a woman in a wheelchair “in the fucking nub” and eating (what appears to be) weed-infused edibles during a raid of a medical marijuana dispensary. And now, those same cops want to ban that video from ever becoming evidence—because they didn’t realize they were on camera.

In the video (which has been edited by the store’s attorneys), cops in masks are seen busting into what was an unlicensed dispensary. After escorting a patient with an amputated leg in a wheelchair out the door, one man asks a female officer “Did you punch that one legged old Benita?” To which the cop responds, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.”

At another point, the cops can be seen attempting to dismantle the various video cameras set up around the store. Clearly they didn’t do a very thorough job.

And it’s this shoddy attempt at shielding themselves from any prying eyes that they’re using as their argument for privacy violation. According to the cops’ attorney’s, because they’d thought they’d destroyed all the store’s video cameras, “all police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks.”

But as Matthew Papas, Sky High’s lawyer, pointed out to the OC Register, police regularly use video evidence in their own investigations:

It’s pretty pathetic for police to say if we don’t like something that it can’t be used as evidence... They knew they were on video. Just because they missed one camera doesn’t make it illegal.

But in the cops’ defense, it’s probably easy to miss a video camera or two when you’re that incredibly high.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Barack Hussein Obama II is 54 years young today. You are probably wondering (aloud to a stranger on the street at this very moment): What should I send Obama for his birthday? I’m glad you asked.

Here, a list of gifts to send President Obama:

• A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black
• A vaporizer
• A copy of Between the World and Me
• Advil (liquid-gels)
• A signed Michael Jordan Bulls jersey
• A gift certificate to Bonobos for new jeans
• A more cooperative Senate
• A copy of When Your Kid Goes to College: A Parents’ Survival Guide
• A karaoke machine
• A painting that you painted
• A copy of Al Green’s Testify: The Best of the A&M Years
• A John Boehner voodoo doll
  
• A new pair of Stacy Adams
• This
• A subscription to TIDAL
• More whiskey
• An American Flag do-rag
• A bag of peanut M&Ms
• A Patti LaBelle cookbook
• Taylor Swift tickets—GOOD ones!
• A gift certificate to a spa in DC
• A list of things you like about him very much
• This, too
• A weekend subscription to the New York Times
• A little suit, too small for him to wear but cute
• A pack of Newports
• A framed photo of Joe Biden
• Real Joe Biden standing really still in a big frame, like he’s a picture, and then he shouts “SURPRISE!”

All presents should be mailed to:

President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

[Image via Getty]

For reasons not readily apparent to me or anyone I know, celebukid and former Fashion Police scab Kelly Osbourne was a guest host on The View this morning. Like every time she goes on TV, Kelly offered a lot of useful insight to the discus—just kidding. During a conversation about Donald Trump, she confidently vomited up a racist comment about Latinos and then insisted she did not mean it “like that.”

In an attempt to scold Trump for his own racist comments about Mexican immigrants being “rapists,” Kelly idiotically offered a different generalized view of this group of people: they’re good at cleaning bathrooms! She explained: “If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?”

After a wounded “noo” from co-host Rosie Perez, Kelly defended herself, trailed off in spectacular fashion, and then tried to defend herself again:

In the sense that…you know what I mean? But I’m saying that in L.A., they always…No, I didn’t mean it like that! Come on! I would never mean it like that! I’m not part of this argument.

Amazing.

Please don’t be part of this argument, Kelly Osbourne. Don’t go on TV. Even if someone—an insane person—asks you to go on TV again, do not do it.

Update, 4:21 p.m.: Kelly admits on Instagram, “I whole-hearted [sic] fucked up today.” She also says she does not want to “bullshit anyone with lame excuses” directly before blaming Rosie Perez for stopping her “mid-sentence.”

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

The president’s new plan to fight climate change is modest at best, but it does open the door for states to impose their own versions of a carbon tax—the only thing that will actually work. Hurry up with it before we all die, idiots. http://gawker.com/a-carbon-tax-i...

Have you seen maps floating around social media that promise record-breaking snowfall this winter? They’re all fake, so stop sharing them. These ridiculous hoaxes have tricked millions of people into believing fake forecasts as fact, and it harms trust in actual science every time a new hoax goes around.

Destroy the Empire

Several hoax websites that bill themselves as “satire” created fake winter forecasts last year with the intent of preying on people’s snow panic to make the posts go viral. It worked and millions of people shared them, duping unsuspecting winter haters into believing fake forecasts that leave the real meteorologists to clean up the angry mess, but there’s one story in particular that just won’t die.

If this ordeal seems like déjà vu to you, welcome to my world. I wrote this same post last September under a different headline, debunking the same map from the same article written by the same con artists over at the same online hazmat barrel that bills itself as a “satire” outlet. The problem with a hoax like this is that it metastasizes like a tumor or a bad meme. Weather hoaxes can spread around the world before weatherpeople have a chance to turn on their computers to refute it. This particular hoax ran rampant last winter, it’ll run rampant this winter, and it’ll just keep going year after year until the sweet, merciful blow of a comet wipes out civilization once and for all.

The worst offender in the game of viral hoaxes is a website called Empire News, the grand purveyors of such crap as “Betty White Dyes at Home,” a story about Congress approving free cars for welfare recipients, and a story about Coca-Cola recalling bottles of soda with the name “Michael” on the label.

Last year’s Empire buffoonery was the map above embedded in an article titled “Meteorologists Predict Record-Breaking Snowfall Coming Soon.” The story cites two fake meteorologists with fake job titles who say that it’s a foregone conclusion that last winter would be atrocious.

Empire News’ fake snowfall map painted just about everyone with above-normal snowfall for the winter, expertly showing the I-95 corridor as receiving the worst snows, because that’s where the greatest number of winter-averse people live and where it would get the highest number of shares. It even showed “below-normal snowfall” for many parts of the country that see exactly zero inches of snow each year, because science!

Apparently knowing that their viral hoax was going to get immense pushback from meteorologists and really anyone with a basic knowledge of meteorology, the author(s) of the hoax threw in this poison pill to convince the readers not to believe the frustrated people trying to correct the damage done:

“[...] Several meteorologists are saying not to buy into what the models are showing. I can tell you from forty years of scientific weather research, they are doing you a disservice,” Dr. Scvediok told the Associated Press on Friday. “The Northeast, Ohio Valley, and Midwestern states will definitely get hit the hardest.”

Eleven months later, the post has nearly two million shares on Facebook and total clicks that likely sit up in the seven digits. Their hoax worked, reaching tens of millions of people and making meteorologists’ lives hell ever since. And that’s just the Empire News article, not including the dozens of copy cats that each got hundreds of thousands (if not a million or more) hits in their own right.

Radio Stations

Funny enough, radio station Facebook pages seem to be the worst culprit in the spread of this hoax. Some of the worst sources of misinformation—from weather to cancer patients looking for ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ to stories about animals or criminals on the loose—seem to be these radio stations, since they post whatever they can in order to maximize their reach. This teenage thirst for popularity gives cover to Big Bubba D from 105.6 KQUZ’s Morning Yodelthon, who has no qualms about posting fake weather forecasts that will get 657,000 shares in two days.

The latest incarnation seems to have started with 97.5 WQBE-FM out of Charleston, West Virginia. Give them a hand, folks. Not only do they play bad music, but they post bad stuff online. Bravo.

Boston, Stopped Clocks, and Bad Satire

One of the biggest issues I’ve run into in trying to combat this hoax is that people look at what happened in Boston last year—the city saw more snow in one season than they’ve ever recorded before—and they use that as proof to justify this meteorological legerdemain. It’s a nonsense argument that’s along the lines of websites that breathlessly report “THE SIMPSONS PREDICTED THIS 25 YEARS AGO” when something that happens in the real world tangentially relates to one of the show’s absurd story lines.

To top it all off, this site alleges that it’s satire in the same league as The Onion. There’s a difference between satire and intentionally lying to dupe people into visiting your website. The Onion is solid satire—it would be hard for a thinking person to see a story titled “Alarming Study Finds 60% Of Americans Don’t Know Where Their Next Value Meal Going To Come From” and think that, good golly, there’s an epidemic of people not being able to find a good 99¢ cheeseburger anymore. Telling people that almost the entire United States is going to endure a record-breaking winter with snow drifts to the roof isn’t satire, it’s lying. Three-year-olds do a better job at concocting a more convincing line of fiction when they break a lamp or pee in the cupboard.

Climate Prediction Center

Real long-range forecasts are notoriously hard to nail because it only takes a small shift in weather patterns to have a big impact on who sees a variation in temperatures and precipitation. If you’re eager to see what could be in store for the winter, here’s the trend predicted by the actual scientists at the Climate Prediction Center for the December-January-February time period. Keep in mind that this is five months away, a lot can change, and that this forecast is heavily influenced by the prospect of a strong El Niño lasting through the winter.

Temperatures

Precipitation

Winters in El Niño years tend to feature cooler and wetter winters in the southern half of the country where the subtropical jet stream sets up shop, while the northern part of the country—especially the northwest—tends to stay warmer and drier than normal, which is something they really don’t need this year. Remember that more precipitation doesn’t exactly mean more snow, either. It’s hard for the south to see snow in even favorable years, and this setup could make a 45°F rain a 35°F rain.

Show Me the Receipts

Check the credentials of the person or site in question before you believe the forecast you saw on Facebook or Twitter. It might take you an extra couple of seconds, but determining whether what you read is science or bunk is a pretty big deal. It’s bad enough when actual meteorologists mess up a forecast and incur the rage of an angry, over-expectant public, but when hoaxes like this spread like wildfire and then (obviously) don’t pan out, people take it out on meteorologists. “You said that there would be lots of snow this winter. You said we were in for record-breaking blizzards. You said that it would be bad this year, and it didn’t happen.” No, they didn’t say anything. Some sleazy hoax website said that, and you were too lazy to verify it for yourself.

Don’t be that person. Don’t erode the trust you and your friends and family have in real forecasts by sharing these hoaxes. People clamor for more and more accurate weather forecasts, but get upset when stuff like this happens. It’s incumbent upon the audience to figure out what’s real and what’s fake, what’s trustworthy and what’s not. There’s only so much meteorologists can do, and hoaxers know it.

[Images: AP, Empire News with “HOAX” angrily typed over it by the author, Facebook, CPC]

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