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Florida Mom Allegedly Plotted to Murder Homeless Man for Giving Her Grandkids Lice

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Florida Mom Allegedly Plotted to Murder Homeless Man for Giving Her Grandkids Lice

From the Daytona Beach News-Journal comes this very strange, highly concentrated dose of pure Florida: A New Smyrna Beach woman was arrested in an alleged murder-for-hire plot against her daughter’s homeless boyfriend after he alleged gave the daughter’s children lice.

Pamela Vanorsdale, 50, allegedly called her daughter’s ex-husband last Thursday and asked him to “pop” the homeless man, 22-year-old Dylan Loveless, in the head and chest. Loveless had apparently been abusive to Vanorsdale’s grandchildren, choking and chasing them, but when the kids came home with lice, that was the last straw.

The ex told police about her alleged attempt to hire him as a hitman, but she claimed she was “only joking.” Some of the things she was only joking about allegedly included: being able to provide the prospective hitman with a gun, wanting Loveless shot “in the head and chest,” being able to clean and dispose of the gun, and wanting the body dumped in South Carolina. She also “joked” that she could lure Loveless out of his homeless camp with the promise of work.

The plot never went down, though, because Loveless left his camp and Vanorsdale called to postpone until she could find him again.

She did have the gun she mentioned, although she never gave it to her ex-son-in-law. Her husband turned it over to police.

Vanorsdale is being held on $25,000 bond.

[H/T Miami New Times, Photo: New Smyrna Beach PD]


All I Need to Know About Pregnancy I Learned From Kim Kardashian

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All I Need to Know About Pregnancy I Learned From Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian is currently pregnant with her second child. This is great for Kim and Kanye West and also me personally, because Kim likes to share. While more guarded celebrities have gone to great lengths to conceal the havoc pregnancy wreaks on their otherwise flawless bodies, Kim is real—and a real wellspring of information.

During both of her pregnancies, Kim has spoken openly in interviews and on social media about the cravings, hormones, stress, weight gain, and malaise that comes with carrying a child to term. When fans doubt her bonafides—some suggested early on in this second pregnancy that she was faking it and using a surrogate instead—she produces receipts.

She is also not shy about sharing the darker elements of motherhood, for which I am grateful.

I have never been pregnant myself. Neither have any of my close friends or sisters, which makes the whole thing impenetrable to me. My mother has been pregnant before, obviously; out of politeness, she would never tell me the terrifying truth about it. Kim Kardashian would and does. Here’s everything she’s taught me to expect when you’re expecting.

Pregnancy Lips

This week, Kim revealed one of the many wild trappings of gestation: “pregnancy lips.” What are pregnancy lips? They’re these:

Apparently, when you’re pregnant, your lips get puffy. Who knew? They can also get more chapped than usual. During her first pregnancy, Kim parlayed this unfortunate side effect into a sponsorship deal with Eos lip balm.

According to Kim, “pregnancy lips” are about the best thing that happens physically during pregnancy. The rest...the rest is not good.

Placenta Growth

Did you know that your placenta can grow into your uterus? And stay there? Resulting in severe blood loss and the need for a hysterectomy directly after delivery?

This terrifying pregnancy complication is known as “placenta accreta,” and I learned about it on an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

In the ep, filmed earlier this year, Kim explained that her placenta “grew onto” her uterus during her pregnancy with her first child, North:

This doctor that I saw today told me every worse case scenario…he was like, “Ok, when you have your baby, this will be your last one, the problem is your placenta grew onto your uterus. So when you have another baby, your placenta will go right to that hole and then we’ll have a team of doctors waiting right there, to remove your uterus and put you into emergency surgery right there because you can’t bleed too much.’’

A nightmare none of us will soon forget.

Preeclampsia

Kim also introduced me to the pregnancy complication that is “preeclampsia,” which she suffered during her first pregnancy. Preeclampsia is when you get high blood pressure before delivery; it’s potentially fatal. Kim explained this all on an episode of Ellen after she gave birth to North.

“I had preeclampsia, which was really tough,” she said. “I had to deliver early...the whole pregnancy was so...I had a few medical issues, so it was really tough, and I gained a lot of weight.”

Swollen Feet

Before Kim Kardashian got pregnant with her first child, I was aware that your feet can get swollen during pregnancy. I was did not know that this could happen:

All I Need to Know About Pregnancy I Learned From Kim Kardashian

All I Need to Know About Pregnancy I Learned From Kim Kardashian

Kim captioned the following photo, “Swollen feet or a new Givenchy tattoo?”

Or?????

“I Wouldn’t Wish It Upon Anyone”

Kim obviously loves her child, and she was brave enough to get pregnant again. Does this mean pregnancy isn’t really that bad? Fuck no, says Kim. In the Ellen interview mentioned earlier, Ellen Degeneres asked her about “women who say that [pregnancy] is a beautiful thing.” Kim immediately responded, “They are lying. They are LYING to you. I’m telling you.”

She continued solemnly, “The pregnancy, I wouldn’t really wish that upon anyone. Anyone.”

Later, she told Elle UK, “My body just went crazy. After five months I swore I’d never get pregnant again. I got so huge and it felt like someone had taken over my body.”

I thank Kim for this real talk. If all these things happened to one of the most famous women in the world, who has access to the best medical care imaginable, there is no such thing as an easy pregnancy.

She’ll never be the same.

I’ll never be the same!

Thank God Kim Kardashian got pregnant, because now I never will.


Art by Sam Woolley. Photos via Splash News. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Terrible Writing About Hurricane Katrina: A Scourge Unto Itself

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Terrible Writing About Hurricane Katrina: A Scourge Unto Itself

Shortly after 8 AM on Sunday, August 29, 2005, the levees protecting New Orleans from the water that surrounds it failed. By 9 AM, the city’s Lower Ninth Ward was underneath six to eight feet of water.

My grandmother’s house, a small, yellow brick building on Charbonnet Street, filled with water, as did the homes of her neighbors. There, the water came in quickly, sweeping homes from their foundations, planting cars on rooftops, trapping people in their attics. The pace of flooding was similar near the the London Avenue Canal, which also failed. In Lakeview, right down the street from where I’d gone to high school, my best friend’s house filled up more slowly, rising inch by tortured inch. On the sliver of high ground that cuts through Gentilly, the neighborhood where I grew up, where my family and I rode out the storm, and where I now live with my husband and three children, water filled the streets and climbed the grass berms atop which homes sit, but did not ever get high enough to get into the homes themselves. Less than a block away, houses not built on Gentilly ridge, a narrow strip of ancient alluvial deposits, slowly filled up with four, five, six feet of water.

Water.

Everywhere.

In Central City. New Orleans East. Treme. Carrollton. Riverbend. Lake Vista. Pigeon Town. Broadmoor.

Everywhere.

And outside the city, on Jefferson Parish’s east bank, in St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Water.

In coastal Mississippi, a 30-foot tide flattened building after building, block after block, pushed the air from lung after lung. Took life after life.

This was a flood of biblical proportions.

And it was accompanied by another one. Before the water had receded, before the people of the Gulf South had time to even find—much less mourn—our dead, a textual flood had begun. Writers of all types—poets, essayists, activists, and, of course, journalists—were recording the history of the hurricane in real-time. They were writing up a storm.

And now, on the brink of Katrina’s 10th anniversary, as the people of New Orleans and other communities devastated by the storm commemorate, celebrate, mourn, and remember, we’re also reliving that textual flood, as are audiences across the nation.

We’re all drowning in Katrina coverage.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s important that we remember what happened, that we recognize our resilience, that we continue to hold our leaders and our countrymen accountable for abandoning us even as we express our continued gratitude for those who came to our aid.

But. Well. There’s been some pretty shitty writing.

At this point in the nonstop anniversary coverage, bad Katrina writing has become a genre all its own. Perhaps the best example is the word salad of horror Kristen McQueary wrote for the Chicago Tribune, a piece in which the author explains that she’s finds herself “praying for a real storm” like the one that left “the residents of New Orleans climbing onto their rooftops and begging for help and waving their arms and lurching toward rescue helicopters.”

Dear Ms. McQueary,

As a New Orleanian who was airlifted from her neighborhood in one of those helicopters you so crave, I want to let you know that I hope your prayers are answered. I hope you (and just you, not your whole city. Just. You.) do get your own Katrina. And I hope you drown in it. I hope you experience something infinitely more miserable, more terrifying, more painful than those the more than 1800 people who lost their lives in the storm and its aftermath.

Oh, and also, Fuck You.

Almost as soon as McQueary’s op-ed was appeared on the internet, the Gulf South came. For. Her. Via social media. She offered up a (weak ass tea non-)apology in which she explains that she was “sickened” to learn that her use of “metaphor and hyperbole” was “read to mean [she] would be gunning for actual death and destruction.” What was shitty, McQueary seems to say, was her bad writing.

But here’s the thing: even “good” Katrina writing can be shitty.

Take, for example, the work of investigative journalist Sheri Fink, who won a Pulitzer for her 2009 article, “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” which was funded and published simultaneously by The New York Times and ProPublica. In the article, Fink recounts the storm and its aftermath at a New Orleans hospital where medical staff allegedly euthanized patients who they thought could not be evacuated.

After the article was published, Fink continued her work and, in 2013, published a full-length book on the subject. That book, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, was met with praise from critics who championed it as “social reporting of the first rank.” The book won multiple awards, including the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ridenhour Book Prize. Just this year, Five Days won the PEN American Center’s John Kenneth Galbraith award for nonfiction (and $10,000).

Outsider audiences loved this fucking book.

But responses from audiences with local ties haven’t been so positive. A commenter on a local news site writes that “Fink has effectively capitalized on this tragedy. I can’t figure out why she hasn’t been exposed. She’s a vulture, picking at the bones of patients who died and swooping down to sully the reputations of the doctors and nurses who stayed in hell to help.”

I’ve yet to find a single New Orleanian who read Fink’s book by choice (I read it while working on a Master’s Thesis on Katrina literature). And, when I’ve asked my diverse resident friends and family members for their take on sections of Five Days, their responses have been overwhelmingly negative, a mixture of anger, frustration, and exasperation. How can someone who did so much research get so much wrong?

And Fink gets a lot wrong. In fact, there’s a factual error right there in her title. You’d be hard pressed to find a person in New Orleans who refers to the hospital at 2700 Napoleon Avenue “Memorial Medical Center” though that became its official name in 1996, after it was acquired by Tenet Healthcare. Instead, most New Orleanians in 2005 called the hospital “Baptist.” And Fink knows this. In her book, she explains that this “nickname” is rooted in the hospital’s history as a Southern Baptist institution. What Fink doesn’t explain is why she chose to disregard the community she wrote about, why she chose to prioritize official names over local nomenclature. And Fink’s not alone in this; she’s not even the worst one. The writer of a CNN article from October of 2005 doesn’t even take the time to mention that most locals called the hospital something else.

Now, before you start to argue that it’s just a name, that it doesn’t matter, that it’s not that big a deal, you need to understand something. People. Literally. Died. because of this name.

As Fink explains in her book, staffers at the hospital had access to satellite phones even after the levees broke, and were in contact with Tenet officials, FEMA, and other state and national agencies trying to coordinate evacuation and rescue. But the people passing along information, giving helicopter pilots their orders and clearances, coordinating ambulance service and transportation for NICU babies and elderly people on life support, didn’t know the city. They didn’t know the region. And, on top of that, they were trying to navigate using maps that had streets, highways, and landmarks on them, but they were flying over 350 square miles of water and rooftops. So, when outsiders sent rescue teams to pick up stranded patients, they gave orders to go to “Memorial.” But things move slowly in New Orleans, and, even though the hospital had been owned by Tenet for over a decade, its signs—and, perhaps most importantly, its helipad—still said “Baptist.”

Doctors and nurses stood on a roof in the dog days of August waving shirts and sheets as helicopters that could transport their fragile patients to safety flew over them. These were patients who had been carried through dark, hundred degree hallways up multiple flights of stairs (no power means no A/C or elevators), patients sitting in their own shit and piss (clean water and bedding don’t last long in an emergency), dialysis patients whose bodies were filling with toxins. And the helicopters that were their only hope flew over them. And left them. Because the pilots had orders to go to “Memorial.”

Sheri Fink reenacts through her writing a use of language that killed people. And she won a Pulitzer for it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have it out for Miss Praying-for-my-own-Katrina. Were I to employ the kind of hyperbole and metaphor that she so cavalierly uses as an entryway into her conversation about political and social reform in Chicago, I might say that I’m praying for the return of New Orleans’s famed voodoo queen Marie Laveau—that I’d like her help in making a doll of McQueary so that I could stick pins in her eyes from afar. Because: #Petty.

But it’s writers like Fink who do more damage. Writers like Fink who “investigate” us, who “research” us, who proclaim themselves as authorities by virtue of the time they spend listening to us even as they misrepresent us, as they ignore us, as they prove they have not heard a single word we’ve said. These are the writers whose narratives are respected and valued. And those narratives go on to shape public opinion and public policy. They crowd out the messier, more nuanced and complicated stories of marginalized people. They supercede—and then erase—local voices.

And local voices are important whenever we’re trying to understand a concept or an event that connected to a place. You can’t understand a place unless you understand the people who define and are defined by it. This is especially important in the context of New Orleans, a city whose unique geography, history as a French and Spanish (not British) colony, and strong connections to the Caribbean and the African Diaspora differentiate it from much of the rest of the United States. We are a city shaped by what historian Ned Sublette calls our “apartness.” New Orleans is “an alternative American history all in itself.”

If you’re going to tell a story of New Orleans—and not the story of New Orleans, because there is never a single story, and it’s dangerous to act like there is—you have to focus on the local.

But I want to be clear that I’m not trying to argue that people who aren’t from New Orleans or who didn’t experience the storm shouldn’t be allowed to write about it. It’s perfectly possible for outsiders to listen to us, to hear us, and to champion our voices as they tell our stories. And there are lots of outsiders who have done just that.

Take, for example, Chicago native Patricia Smith, whose heartbreakingly beautiful collection of Katrina poems, Blood Dazzler, was published in 2008. Like Fink and McQueary, Smith isn’t from New Orleans or the Gulf South. She didn’t experience the storm. But unlike Fink, whose prioritization of official, verifiable (and often outsider) sources hides local knowledges, and McQueary, who just straight up doesn’t seem to give a shit about what the people here experienced—she just uses us as clickbait for an article about urban reform in her city—Smith centers the voices of those who experienced Katrina. She writes persona poems in the voices of people like Ethel Freeman, who died in her wheelchair outside of the Convention Center. Ms. Freeman’s body, which her son, who was ordered to leave her there, had covered with a poncho, sat for days. Abandoned. Rotting. Alone. Smith channels Freeman in a poem, Ethel’s Sestina. Smith gives her Freeman a voice.

Ethel Freeman isn’t the only holder of local knowledge to get a voice in Blood Dazzler. Smith offers poems in the voice of the city, in the voice of Katrina herself as well as other historical storms like Betsy and Camille. There’s a dog Luther B. She includes that the voices of New Orleanians are different races, classes, and ages and from different neighborhoods. Smith channels the voices of people who are doubly and triply marginalized, even inside the city, when she writes a poem in the voice of a trans woman wading home through flood water. She writes about the most vulnerable members of society, like the 34 residents of St. Rita’s nursing home—34 people who, because they were old and feeble, were left to die. And she writes about about the powerful, channeling the voices of George W. Bush and the man he appointed to be director of FEMA, Michael “Heck of a Job” Brown.

Smith gives so many voices so much space to tell their stories.

I don’t think people will stop writing about Katrina. This time next year, we’ll all be talking about it again—though maybe, because the 11th anniversary isn’t as round and notable as the 10th, coverage will be slightly less ubiquitous. I’m sure that two years from now, when New Orleans celebrates its bicentennial, Katrina will loom large. The storm was, after all, the catalyst for the creation of what lots of people are calling a “new” New Orleans.

The textual flood that began when the levees broke will, I have no doubt, continue.

But I hope this time around, the textual flood is different. I hope that we can be a little more careful about how we write about the storm and people and places it devastated. I hope that the journalists and activists and thinkers who are investigating the people of the Gulf South have gotten better at listening. I hope we have fewer Kristen McQuearys and Sheri Finks. I hope we have more writers like Patricia Smith. I hope they’re more able to hear us.

Ed Note: Some language in the writer’s open letter to McQueary was changed after publication.


Terri Coleman reads, writes, and rages in New Orleans. You can find her on twitter @tfscoleman.

Image via Getty.

Ohio Cop Pulls Black Man Over for "Making Direct Eye Contact" 

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Former Ohio resident John Felton was pulled over by Dayton police in front of his mom’s house after he allegedly activated his turn signal less than 100 feet before making a right turn. Unable to believe an officer would stop him on such a piddling technicality, Felton asked the officer why he was really followed for several blocks and eventually pulled over.

“Because you made direct eye contact with me and held onto it when I was passing you,” the officer responded.

When Felton attempted to protest, the officer told him to end the discussion or face a citation for the not-quite-missed turn signal.

Felton is black.

Felton provided video of the stop, showing the officer’s ridiculous excuse for pulling him over, to the David Pakman Show. (The “direct eye contact” excuse is especially ridiculous considering that police have also stopped people for “suspiciously” avoiding eye contact in the past. It is impossible to win.)

And furthermore, Felton claims he didn’t even make the alleged eye contact with the cop.

“What?! I didn’t even see you,” you can hear him say in the video.

Felton believes he was stopped for being a black man with out-of-state plates—he now lives in Michigan:

“I got a nice car. I don’t know if he seen I was a black male. I feel like I was targeted, the Michigan car and it was about 11 o’clock at night,” he told ABC 22.

Dayton Police wrote on Twitter that they’re reviewing the tape, and Felton says a sergeant emailed him Thursday to get his side of the story.

[h/t Raw Story]

Staten Island Stinks So Badly Today That People Are Calling the Cops

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Staten Island Stinks So Badly Today That People Are Calling the Cops

New York City’s forgotten borough smelled very bad this morning. From St. George to Westerleigh to Dongan Hills, people are complaining about a stench that has been variously compared to fish, shit, garbage, and “some hoe.” Why? Nobody knows.

That Staten Island Advance reports that both the NYPD and the FDNY received “multiple calls” about the smell this morning, but the source remains unknown. How bad would your neighborhood have to smell to prompt you to call the fire department about it? Must be pretty damn stinky.

Live on the island? Still smelly? Tell us about it below.


Photo via MTA/Flickr. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

What to Do When You Find Out a Coworker Makes More Than You Do

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What to Do When You Find Out a Coworker Makes More Than You Do

Aaargh. You just found out that your coworker makes more than you do, even though you both do the same kind of work, you’ve been there longer, and you do a better job. You feel demoralized, insulted by your not-such-a-great friend employer, and resentful of your coworker. Before you protest, here’s how to handle the situation professionally.
http://lifehacker.com/the-company-yo...

Although it sucks to find out you’re not making as much as your coworker(s), the upside to this newfound knowledge is you can use it for positive change, whether you improve your job skills, get motivated to ask for a raise, or find a better job. Stay calm and follow these steps.

Step One: Assess the Situation and Don’t Flip Out

Your gut reaction might be to gripe about the situation to your manager or fellow coworkers, but take a step back to thoroughly think about it. As frustrating as it is, there might be fair reasons why your coworker earns more than you. Perhaps the market value or demand for the job has risen since you were hired, so the company had to offer more to newer applicants. Psychologist Art Markman says on Forbes:

[It] is actually quite common where people hired after you may end up making more money. While there is always the chance that this is related to gender, it may also reflect market forces. Right now, for example, the economy is good, and so there is a lot of competition for new talent. As a result, companies may need to offer high starting salaries to attract new hires. If you were hired in a softer job market, then you may have gotten a lower offer, because that was what the market would support. I see this a lot in universities where faculty who have been working at the university for many years may be getting paid about the same (or sometimes even less) than brand new hires, just because the market has gotten competitive.

I raise this potential explanation, because when you discover that you are being paid less than others who are doing a similar job, it is natural to assume that salary inequalities are a result of more nefarious forces. The problem with that assumption is that, if your company ultimately does agree to give you a raise, you might still walk away with a bad feeling.

So before jumping to conclusions, take stock of the situation. If you didn’t negotiate your salary well (or at all) but your coworker did, that could also explain the salary difference (even though that might not seem fair). Perhaps your coworker has more job responsibilities or additional qualifications like more up-to-date skills (which happens a lot in the IT world).
http://lifehacker.com/the-biggest-sa...

Once you’ve found the most likely reason for the salary difference, you can take steps to address it. You could take classes to improve your skill set, for example, or ask for additional responsibility so you’re on even ground with your coworker or new hires.

What if there doesn’t seem to be a fair reason why your coworker makes more? As with other situations where you feel you should be earning more, get ready to negotiate a raise. We’ll talk about discrimination and pay inequality—another possible reason for salary differences—in the last section below.

Step Two: Research How Much You Should Be Making and Ask for a Raise

Putting your coworker’s salary aside, you should know your value as an employee. This is a crucial step when you feel underpaid (and overworked), so you can be armed with the data that can help you get a raise—or decide whether or not to look for a different job. Several salary search sites can help you find the fair market value for your job, based on your location, experience, and education level, such as Salary.com, Glassdoor.com, and PayScale. Another resource is GetRaised, a free service that can tell you if you’re probably underpaid (based on the going rate for your job, not your coworker’s salary!) and help you create a script to ask for a raise (even if you’re afraid to do it, which you shouldn’t be).http://lifehacker.com/5843302/how-sh...

Once you know how much you could or should be making, ask for a raise, but don’t use your coworker’s salary as the reason why you deserve it. Keep the focus on your performance instead of comparisons between you and others.

Although it’s against the law for companies to retaliate against employees for discussing salaries with each other and Markman says “there’s nothing wrong with pointing out your knowledge of what others in the company are making,” when you make your raise request and mention others’ salaries, it can still piss off management, as some Lifehacker commenters have noted. If you work at a company where salary sharing is taboo, this might not help your case. Approach your raise request like you would in other situations where you feel like you deserve more.
http://lifehacker.com/do-you-talk-ab...

Here are some other tips to help you when asking for a raise:

If you get a raise and compensation seems fair, great! Mission accomplished. If not, read on.

Step Three: Consider Looking for a New Job or Taking Legal Action (If Appropriate)

If your raise is denied, there are still things you can do to make the situation feel fairer to you. Consider asking for other benefits, like flexible hours or working from home (which is the happiness equivalent of a $40K raise). You could also ask your supervisor what you could do to increase your pay and ask for a performance review a few months later.

When you feel like you deserve or need a raise, however, you should be prepared to quit if it doesn’t happen. But base your decision on what the job is worth to you, rather than what your coworker is getting paid.

All that said: sometimes salary revelations can reveal pay inequalities, as was the case when former Google engineer Erica Baker and coworkers shared a spreadsheet listing their salaries. The gender pay gap is real, particularly in some occupations, as are discrimination by age, disability, race, religion, and other factors that have nothing to do with your right to get equal pay.
http://lifehacker.com/the-most-commo...

If you believe you’re a victim of discrimination, Consumer Reports recommends filing a complaint with the Equal Employee Opportunity Commission, noting that:

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 resets the statute of limitations on discrimination complaints each time new paychecks are issued and enables employees to challenge pay discrimination that has been compounded by raises, pensions, and other contributions over time.

Maybe it seems like a long shot, but people are winning lawsuits against companies for violating the Equal Pay Act, although these kinds of lawsuits aren’t terribly common. It doesn’t help that most companies have a “do not share” policy when it comes to salaries.

The Case for Open Salaries

Perhaps transparent salaries is the solution to this riddled mess of salary differences, for both employers and employees alike. When Buffer made public its employees salaries, sharing how much each employee makes according to the formula “Salary = job type X seniority X experience + location (+ $10K if salary choice),” it got a lot of attention and a boatload of new job applicants. Often, companies say they don’t want employees to share their salaries because of privacy issues or they want to avoid employee issues around misunderstandings, but when salaries aren’t secret and the formulas behind them are clear, it’s easier to trust the company and work with your team. Transparent salaries also make us more satisfied with our jobs.

There are clear reasons why employers want to keep salaries secret, though—clear reasons that benefit them more than us. It’s tough when learning salary secrets can make you feel undervalued, but until your company adopts an open salary policy, your best bet is to always push for a salary that you know is fair for the work you do—or walk or sound the alarm if it is an issue of fairness.

Illustration remixed from originals by Creatarka (Shutterstock).

Prep School Rape Trial: Owen Labrie Acquitted of Felony Rape, Guilty of Misdemeanors

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Prep School Rape Trial: Owen Labrie Acquitted of Felony Rape, Guilty of Misdemeanors

A jury Friday acquitted 19-year-old Owen Labrie, a graduate of elite St. Paul’s prep school in New Hampshire, of felony sexual assault charges, but found him guilty of misdemeanor sex assault. Labrie had been accused of raping a 15-year-old fellow student in the school’s machine room last May. The AP reports the jury deliberated for eight hours.

Labrie’s defense claimed he’d had a change of heart and stopped short of having sex with the girl.

The prosecution argued Labrie had coerced his victim into the situation in the first place as part of the “senior salute,” an annual sex contest where St. Paul’s senior boys compete to bed underclass girls. The defense claimed the encounter was consensual and that girls at the school considered it an honor to participate in the tradition.

Four of Labrie’s friends also testified he told them afterward that he had slept with the girl, and that he’d used “every trick in the book” to convince her to go through with it.

“I wanted to boast to my friends afterward. I misled them,” Labrie said.

His victim, now 16, ran out of the courtroom during his testimony.

Labrie had been charged with three felony counts, each carrying a maximum 20-year sentence, and a number of misdemeanors, including “misdemeanor sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child, and using a computer to solicit or lure a child under the age of 16.” The judge dropped one of two endangerment charges, leaving 6 misdemeanors total—he was found guilty of three of them.

Labrie could face up to 12 months in prison and could be required to register as a sex offender, Boston.com reports.

“He wept after the verdict was read,” the AP reports.

Update, 2:30 p.m.: “Labrie was convicted of four misdemeanor counts: three sex assault counts and one count of endangering the welfare of a child. He was also convicted of a felony charge of using a computer to lure a minor for sexual contact,” the AP now reports, “He faces up to a year in jail for the misdemeanors and 3 ½ to 7 years for the felony.”

[Photo: AP Images]

Here's the Philosophy Essay Vox Found Too Upsetting to Publish

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Here's the Philosophy Essay Vox Found Too Upsetting to Publish

Vox.com recently commissioned an essay from Torbjörn Tännsjö, a professor of practical philosophy at Stockholm University, on the “the repugnant conclusion,” a belief that asserts our moral duty to increase the population size because, according to the argument, more humans means more happiness.

But after Tännsjö submitted the piece to Vox—and “after a period of silence”—Vox decided not to publish the essay, with the assigning editor telling him that several editors were uncomfortable with running it and “the concern is that people will misinterpret it as implying opposition to abortion rights and birth control, which, while I know it’s not your intent, is a real concern.” Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein published an explanation of why the piece hadn’t run, blaming it in part on the demise of a planned “new section for unusual, provocative arguments,” and stating that “Vox doesn’t have a policy against publishing pieces that are pro-life.”

With Tännsjö’s permission, here is the essay in full.


You should have kids. Not because it’s fun, or rewarding, or in your evolutionary self-interest. You should have kids because it’s your moral duty to do so.

My argument is simple. Most people live lives that are, on net, happy. For them to never exist, then, would be to deny them that happiness. And because I think we have a moral duty to maximize the amount of happiness in the world, that means that we all have an obligation to make the world as populated as can be.

Of course, we should see to it that we do not overpopulate the planet in a manner that threatens the future existence of mankind. But we’re nowhere near that point yet, at least not if we also see to it that we solve pressing problems such as the one with global warming. In the mean time, we’re ethically obligated to make as many people as possible.

This idea, that having children is a moral obligation, is controversial, so much so that it’s known in philosophy as the “repugnant conclusion.” But I don’t think it’s repugnant at all.

We have obligations to people who don’t exist yet

You might be thinking at this point, “Sure, more happiness sounds good. But morality is about helping people, and creating more people helps ‘people’ who don’t exist, not yet anyway.” This view is known as actualism. Only actual individuals have rights. We have not done anything wrong, unless there is an actual person who has a legitimate complaint to make against our action.

This means that, if I do not create a happy individual, even if I can do so, I do nothing wrong. A merely hypothetical individual has no legitimate complaint to make. This is the great appeal of actualism: it means that people have total freedom in choosing whether to reproduce or not. My view suggests that we have a moral obligation to keep having children; actualism let’s people do as they like.

I can’t help finding all this problematic. Imagine for a second that the Genesis story is actually true. Under the actualist view, Adam and Eve could have morally refrained from having children, even if, had they decided differently, billions of billions of happy persons would have been around!

Here is another consequence of the theory. Suppose I have a choice as to whether to have a baby at 15 or at 35. If I have the baby at 15, I’ll earn much less money in my career, the baby will go to worse schools and live in a worse neighborhood, and generally her life will be much tougher. If I have her at 35, I’ll be able to adequately provide for the baby, pay for college, and so forth. If I have the baby at 15, then, did I do anything wrong? I did not, by actualist reasoning. There is no one there to complain about what I did. The baby is, after all, happy to be around. By creating her, I did not violate her rights. And the hypothetical baby I would’ve had at 35 isn’t around to complain. But this cannot be right. If these are the options I have, I ought to wait. The world where I have a baby at 35 is just happier than the one where I have a baby at 15.

Why a world with many more people wouldn’t be so bad

The idea that people are morally obliged to have as many children as possible has some radical implications. The biggest is that a world in which many people—20, 50, even 100 billion—are alive, but each has a life that’s only barely worth living, is preferable to a world where only, say, 10 billion people are extremely happy. Let’s call these Big Bad World and Small Happy World, respectively.

This conclusion may seem ludicrous. Of course you’d rather live in a world where everyone’s happy than one where people are just scraping by! But this intuition is wrong.

Imagine that the end of Small Happy World is the end of humankind. Everyone’s as happy as can be, and then they all die. Meanwhile, in Big Bad World, the human race continues on for billions of years, at a level where life is worth living, but not spectacular. Would we not then feel that the Small Happy World people are doing selfish? Rather than going on with the human race, and accept the sacrifice that this means, they’re living high and not letting anyone succeed them. This is clearly wrong.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to get a grasp of what Big Bad World would be like. But the way people live there may be similar to the way we live. There are ups and downs in our lives. Perhaps a typical human life often ends up with only a little happiness as its net sum. Perhaps many lives end up with a negative sum. But then, is the Big Bad World so bad as one may at first have thought? It’s quite possible that people in Big Bad World aren’t living in abject poverty and misery, but instead have lives similar those of many affluent people living in rich, developed countries today.

Similarly, it’s difficult to imagine what it would be like to live an extremely happy life, containing much more happiness than our lives do now. It could be that the gap between a barely-worthwhile life and the happiest life possible is quite small.

Have more kids!

We have an obligation to go on with humanity, as long as we can, and as long as we create future individuals who live lives worth living. Procreative decisions are moral decisions, and we ought to see to it that, by our procreative decisions, we maximize the sum total of happiness. The popular idea that we may do as we see fit when we conceive children, as long as there is no one there who can make a legitimate complaint against us, is mistaken.

We ought to take all easy measures to procreate, such as signing up for sperm banks, having another child when we can take care of it, and so forth. Of course, we should see to it that we do not by our procreative choices make existing lives worth not living nor make lives worth not living. In the individual case, it is hard to know where to draw the line. But in many cases, having more kids is clearly better.

Torbjörn Tännsjö is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University. He has published extensively in moral philosophy, political philosophy and applied ethics. Among his most recent books are Understanding Ethics and Taking Life: Three Theories on the Ethics of Killing, both available in the US from Oxford University Press. This article draws on a chapter in Taking Life.http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Life-Th...

[Image via Getty]


I Love These Goddamn Stock Video Baboons and So Will You

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I Love These Goddamn Stock Video Baboons and So Will You

A solid meme for a Friday afternoon: Stock footage of baboons doing human things, paired with silly one-liner captions. They talk on the phone, they throw their computers, they gaze dewy-eyed into the distance and softly smack their lips in resignation. I love these goddamn baboons, and I can’t wait to share them with you.

The stock videos in question come from Getty Images, which has an astoundingly rich library of anthropomorphized primate footage. It’s unclear what prompted people to start captioning and tweeting them, or when patient zero arrived, but this morning they suddenly became unavoidable on my timeline. A few of the best examples I’ve seen are below.

You get it. You get it! Good monkeys. Good meme.


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

500 Days of Kristin, Day 215: It's So Easy

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500 Days of Kristin, Day 215: It's So Easy

This week, Kristin Cavallari posted a recipe for “homemade coconut kefir”—something you eat—on Instagram. “It’s so easy,” Kristin says.


She writes,

Homemade coconut kefir with pure maple syrup for a healthy, yummy snack. It’s so easy..all you do is mix one can full fat coconut milk with one capsule probiotic in a glass jar and let it sit on your counter for 24hrs (put the top on loosely). After a day, stir it, then let it sit for another 24hrs. Stir it again then put in the fridge. Kefir is soo good for your gut health

All you do is stir it for many hours—it’s good for your gut.

Will this recipe appear in Kristin’s forthcoming book, Balancing in Heels (formerly known as Balancing on Heels)? Find out in 285 days.


This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Report: No-Longer-Disgraced Rebekah Brooks Will Return to News Corp As UK CEO

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Report: No-Longer-Disgraced Rebekah Brooks Will Return to News Corp As UK CEO

In 2011, Rebekah Brooks resigned as CEO of the United Kingdom division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, amid the fallout from the company’s phone-hacking scandal. Today, London’s Financial Times reports that Brooks will return to that position.http://gawker.com/britain-s-phon...

After her resignation, things went more or less OK for Brooks, who had occupied several top positions at News Corp throughout her career. She received nearly $25 million in severance, and in June of last year a jury found her not guilty of illegally accessing the voicemail of a dead teenager. This past March, The Guardian reported that Murdoch was set to hire her to run a division of the company that sought out “new online investments.”

Though the Financial Times doesn’t mention that particular hiring ever happening, the paper says Brooks nonetheless remained a presence at News Corp, having talked about taking several positions at the company before reportedly giving in to Murdoch and coming back as CEO:

She has discussed a variety of jobs with the company over the past 12 months and at one point was close to taking a role that would have given her responsibility for Storyful, News Corp’s social media news agency, and other digital assets.

However, Mr Murdoch, News Corp’s chairman, was keen for her to return as News UK chief executive. She initially resisted his overtures but people familiar with the matter said he eventually won her over.

The timing of Brooks’ potential return is interesting considering that The Guardian reported today that England’s Crown Prosecution Service may bring “corporate charges” against the company that she would once again be running, based on a file it received from police on July 23 of this year. The Guardian estimates that News Corp has already spent $500 million between defense and settlements stemming from the first round of hacking accusations.

[image via Getty]


Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

George W. Bush Knows New Orleans Is a Great Place to Dance

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George W. Bush Knows New Orleans Is a Great Place to Dance

New Orleans, Louisiana: It’s a city that’s been through a lot, but in good times or bad, it’s a fantastic place to dance. Former President George W. Bush knows that whenever you visit, you’ll be welcomed by a hot band and an opportunity to get funky.

Here’s Bush on a previous visit in 2008, three years after Katrina:

George W. Bush Knows New Orleans Is a Great Place to Dance

Let the good times roll, as they say in this fun American city.

[Video: CNN]

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

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Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in Florida this morning in anticipation of Tropical Storm Erika’s arrival this weekend and early next week. The storm’s disorganized nature and erratic motion is making it a nightmare to forecast. Here’s what you need to know about Erika as it draws closer to the U.S.

A State of Emergency Sounds Worse Than It Is

Governors frequently declare states of emergency during natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, or any number of other awful things that can cause significant amounts of damage and human suffering. A “state of emergency” makes it sound like the state is falling apart at the seams—we are talking about Florida, after all, so it’s doing that anyway—but this declaration is a formality that frees up resources and funds to deal with the disaster. It also clears the way for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to get involved in dealing with preparations and the aftermath, because the states often don’t have the equipment or funds to handle disasters on their own.

The Current Forecast

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

Above is the current forecast from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), such as it is. No offense to the good men and women at the NHC, of course, but this is a very hard forecast to nail. Don’t focus too much on the exact track right now—Tropical Storm Erika is probably not going to do what they expect it to do.

We demand perfection from an imperfect science. I know that it has to be frustrating as hell to live in Miami or Key West right now and look at this forecast knowing that the storm more than likely won’t do what the forecast is showing. This is an atypical storm that both humans and computers are having a hard time figuring out.

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

Florida is still firmly within the cone of uncertainty—not to mention a growing chance of tropical storm force winds, as shown above—so it’s necessary for anyone in or near the Sunshine State to keep a very close eye on the storm’s developments (or lack thereof) through the weekend. Your best course of action—forecast or not—is to prepare for the potential of a tropical cyclone that will produce gusty winds, very heavy rain that leads to flooding, and power outages. It’s better to be ready for a non-event than it is to be caught off-guard by a strong storm.

If the storm survives Hispaniola and ever actually makes that northwestward turn, the water is plenty warm for this thing to start strengthening, and it would eventually move toward the United States.

It’s Battling Dry Air and Wind Shear

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

For its entire life, the storm has battled the scourge of dry air and wind shear. Dry air was a significant problem when Erika first formed—as with Danny a few days before it—but Erika is a larger storm and proved surprisingly resilient to the lack of moisture. There’s still a good bit of dry air to the west of the storm, shown on the water vapor image above as warmer, brownish/orange colors. Dry air isn’t good for these systems. Tropical cyclones, by their very nature, need ample moisture to thrive.

Wind shear is playing the most significant role in Erika’s struggle these days. Unlike severe thunderstorms on land, which feed much of their energy from wind shear through the atmosphere, tropical cyclones need to be the only game in town. Any wind shear—strong winds in the middle or upper levels—will both knock the tops off the thunderstorms and blow existing thunderstorms away from the center of circulation. This is why we so often see lopsided storms in the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s why Erika’s center is almost always removed from the thunderstorm activity that makes the tropical storm a storm at all.

The Storm Keeps Faking Us Out

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

It’s been a while since we’ve had a storm that’s so messed up that it continuously moved off its predicted course. The storm hasn’t followed the National Hurricane Center’s official forecast since Thursday morning, with the center leaping west every time experts expected it to start moving northwest and pass through the Greater Antilles.

Why is it doing that? It’s weak and disorganized. The strength of the storm determines how the winds are able to steer a tropical cyclone. A stronger storm—one that has deeper thunderstorms surrounding its circulation—is able to tap into deeper wind currents higher up in the atmosphere. Weaker storms are shallow, so they’re driven by the steering currents closer to the surface.

Both the experts and the computer models have based Erika’s forecasts on the storm’s ability to strengthen and maintain its organization long enough to tap the steering currents in the mid- and upper-levels of the atmosphere. Those winds would take the storm northwest through the Bahamas and eventually toward the United States.

Instead, since the storm is such a mess, it keeps heading west in the lower-level winds blowing from the east. Tropical Storm Erika is like a boat adrift in the doldrums with a broken sail. They keep thinking the sail is going to fly skyward and take the thing northwest, but it’s just not happening. Not yet, anyway.

This tropical storm is a classic example of why the cone of uncertainty is so important.

Cone of Uncertainty

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

It’s been a long time since a storm has threatened this part of the United States, and many people don’t know what the cone of uncertainty is. It’s not their fault—we just don’t do a very good job of explaining it.

The cone of uncertainty is the margin of error in the forecast track of a tropical cyclone. The cones vary in color—the cone appears translucent white on my maps, but The Weather Channel’s cones are red—but they all mean the same thing: weather forecasts are imperfect, and while meteorologists are pretty good at figuring out the general direction in which a cyclone will go, it’s hard to predict the exact track a cyclone will take in a couple of days.

Forecasters are better at predicting the track of a cyclone one or two days out than they are predicting its track four or five days in advance. As such, the error in their forecasts (and therefore the uncertainty in the forecast) grows with time. These track forecasts have gotten pretty good in recent years, but they still have lots of room for improvement.

The above map shows the forecast for Hurricane Ike as it swirled in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico back in September 2008. The cone of uncertainty was very large for that storm—they had a pretty good idea that the storm would make landfall near Houston, but given their previous forecast track errors, they could be wrong and the storm could have wound up going anywhere from Corpus Christi to Lake Charles, Louisiana, or strayed even farther than that.

The cone of uncertainty is much smaller these days—a testament to improved forecast models and greater expertise among the meteorologists at the agency—but things don’t always go as planned.

Historically, the center of a tropical cyclone will stay within the cone of uncertainty 66% of the time. Five days out, the average track error is 240 miles on either side of the forecast point. This means, on average, the National Hurricane Center’s forecast position for the center of the tropical cyclone five days out is within 240 miles of its actual location 66% of the time.

Not bad! However, Tropical Storm Erika is the 34%.

Tropical Storm Erika Prompts State of Emergency in Florida: Here's What You Need to Know

The above map shows six forecast points for Tropical Storm Erika between Tuesday morning and this morning. Each X represents where the center of the storm was located at the time of the advisory, and each cone moving away from the center represents the National Hurricane Center’s cone of uncertainty surrounding their forecast track at the time.

Things started to fall apart on Wednesday night, when Erika started moving much farther west than forecast. It was originally going to brush the Leeward Islands and move north of the Greater Antilles. Then it crossed the Leeward Islands and was forecast to graze Puerto Rico. Then it was forecast to hit Puerto Rico, but instead it skirted south of the island territory. Then it was forecast to cross the eastern Dominican Republic, so obviously it went south of the Dominican Republic, where it sits and spins as of the writing of this post.

Pretty rough. The center of storms historically stay in that cone two-thirds of the time, but there are cases—like Tropical Storm Erika—where that just doesn’t happen.

Prepare Now

Even if it turns out that Erika falls apart or veers far away from Florida and the rest of the southeastern United States, you need to prepare now for this and any tropical cyclone that could threaten in the future. We’re still climbing toward the climatological peak of hurricane season—which is September 12—and storms are possible all the way through the end of the season on November 30.

If you live in an evacuation zone, get your plans ready just in case you’re told to evacuate and you decide to heed the warnings and orders of officials. Failing to evacuate when you’re told to do so can land you in a whole bunch of bad situations—remember that emergency crews will not come to your aid if the storm or flooding is so severe that it threatens their own safety. You’ll be put in a queue to come rescue/recover when the storm is over.

Like most people, though, if you’re reading this in an area vulnerable to hurricanes, you’re not in an evacuation zone. You might be far enough away from bodies of water that you don’t have to worry too much about freshwater flooding or storm surge at your home. That’s fine. During or after any storm, those affected are still vulnerable to power and utility outages for an extended period of time, not to mention the potential for vehicle damage, road closures, and businesses closed due to damage or power/utility outages.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of what you need to ride out any tropical cyclone and survive the aftermath:

  • Enough non-perishable food to last you and your family at least three days. It’s a good idea to have extras just in case.
  • Five gallons of water per person, which the CDC says should last you three to five days.
  • Fill up your bathtub(s) and sinks with water. If the water goes out, you’ll need these reserves to flush the toilet. (Kind of important!)
  • First aid supplies—enough to treat and bandage minor injuries, take care of stomach issues, and minor pain medication like ibuprofen or acetaminophen.
  • Flashlights and radios are important, as are enough batteries to power both for extended use. Hand-crank flashlights and hand-crank radios are especially useful (and they give you a great workout).
  • Personal hygiene is really important here—if the water goes out and you can’t take care of certain things in this department, it could make you or your loved ones very sick at a very bad time to get very sick. Depending on your needs, you should have hand sanitizer, baby wipes, toilet paper, napkins, paper towels, tampons and pads, dental care, deodorant, soap, and anything else you normally use to keep yourself feeling fresh ‘n’ clean.
  • Make sure you have enough of your prescription medication to last you several days after the storm. In the worst case scenario, it might be a week or longer before you can get a refill.
  • Cold hard cash. You won’t be able to swipe your card if the power, internet, or telephones go down, so you’ll need cash to buy things.
  • Make sure you have enough gas in your car to last you a while. Also, make sure your car battery is healthy and it’s not about to die. It would suck to lose power at home, only to lose power in your car shortly thereafter.
  • Gather your important personal documents—stuff like social security cards, birth/death/marriage certificates, insurance papers, deeds, mortgage papers, and computer backups—in one, water- and fire-resistant spot. Put them in container after container if you can. Make sure that the worst flood couldn’t touch them and you can grab them at a moment’s notice.

We’ll have to wait and see what Erika does in the coming hours and days before we start to really worry about what could happen to Florida (or any other state) if and when it draws closer to the mainland. Based on its erratic movement and disorganized structure, there’s a very real chance that the storm dissipates or moves away from land and this turns out to be a non-issue for the contiguous United States.

Pay close attention to forecasts from the National Hurricane Center this weekend. They issue full forecasts every six hours—5:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 5:00 PM, and 11:00 PM EDT—with position and intensity updates every three hours in between as long as watches and warnings are in effect.

And, as always, I’ll have updates for you here on The Vane all weekend as the situation evolves.

[Images: NASA, author, NOAA | Corrected to fix an embarrassing error. | Update: The forecast track map was updated to reflect the 5:00 PM advisory from the National Hurricane Center. ]


Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

If you enjoy The Vane, then you’ll love my upcoming book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, which comes out on October 6 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Police Officers Leave Reporter Accidental Voicemail About Her 'Fucking Giant' Tits

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Police Officers Leave Reporter Accidental Voicemail About Her 'Fucking Giant' Tits

A reporter in Colorado was treated to a delightful voicemail this week from a sheriff’s deputy, who has thoughts on her breasts, face, body, and accent. The one thing he lacks — the only thing, really — is a basic understanding about how to hang up his phone so he doesn’t leave accidental messages. And now here we all are, together, having a learning experience.

Chase Olivarius-McAllister is a reporter with The Durango Herald, a daily newspaper in Colorado. She is British and American and grew up in London. The relevance of that factoid will become evident in a moment here.

Olivarius-McAllister tells Jezebel that she called the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office a few weekends ago to get some routine crime statistics. Deputy Sergeant Zach Farnam called her back, leaving her a voicemail that includes about ten seconds of actual message meant for her ears. That was followed by ten seconds or so of highly embarrassing baby talk with a dog in the office, and then, well, it gets worse.

Audio of the call has been uploaded to YouTube, with captions:

Here’s a transcript, as best we can sort it out. There are at least three voices on the tape.

Farnam: My wife worked at the Herald. She fucking hated that bitch.

Second, unidentified police officer: She hot?

Farnam: Not hot. I mean, she’s got an OK body. I mean...

Unidentified 1: Giant boobs.

Farnam: Fucking giant, dude. I mean, not like quadruple Ds or anything. But at least a solid set of Ds, probably double Ds.

Unidentified 1: You know what? It’s that UK fish and chips. UK women have big tits. It’s how they’re — how they’re grown over there. I don’t know why.

Second Unidentified Officer: She is, uh...

Undentified 1: Why do they have fucked up teeth? I dunno, but it happens.

Farnam: I didn’t look at her teeth. But she doesn’t have like a real pretty face at all.

Undentified 1: She’s from the UK. She’s got huge tits.

Farnam: Yeah, and her skirt was like seven and a half inches long. And just.. extremely pale white. But, you know...

Unidentified 1: She’s a limey. A UK thing again. She literally grew up on a fucking island that’s always cloudy.

Unidentified 2: I don’t know why you have to be so hard on her.

Olivarius-McAllister didn’t, at first, hear the latter portion of the message, figuring it was just dead air. She forwarded it to her city editor, though, who did listen to the whole thing.

“He turned around the office and said, ‘These people are very opinionated about your body,’” Olivarius-McAllister said in an interview. “I thought he was joking. I listened to it and felt just utterly appalled.”

The Durango Herald was instrumental in helping current La Plata Sheriff Sean Smith get elected, running a lengthy investigation on how his predecessor Duke Schirard had been accused of domestic violence against two of his wives. Smith, a deputy in the department under Schirard ran on a platform of reforming the department ethically.

Olivarius-McAllister called the conversation “sickening,” pointing out that all three officers were on duty at the time.

“I felt incredulous that people who are in uniform, on the job, and trusted with protecting the public could express so much contempt for women,” she said. “The misogyny is horrifyingly casual. How can such attitudes not affect their police work?”

The reporter says she received a call from Sheriff Sean Smith, who said he was taking the incident “very seriously” and who told her the conversation was certainly “unprofessional.”


Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.

Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6

Twist-Ending Philly Bro Fight Is The Broiest Bro Fight Ever

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Click for the drunken stumbling and the incredibly inaccurate flurry of fists, stick around for the heart-warming finale.

[Philly.com]


British Music Festival Locks DJ in Cage After Mistaking Him For Rogue Fan

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British Music Festival Locks DJ in Cage After Mistaking Him For Rogue Fan

Evian Christ is a British producer and DJ who is perhaps most well-known for co-producing a song on Kanye West’s Yeezus. Today, he played a set at Leeds Festival in England, which is roughly equivalent to something like Lollapalooza. It probably would have been a great all-around day for Evian Christ had festival security managed to not lock him in a holding pen.

Then again, maybe temporarily imprisoning DJs isn’t the worst idea in the world.

[image via Facebook]


Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

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Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

George W. Bush’s decision to mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with a celebratory speech in New Orleans has raised a lot of questions. One of those questions is, “what the shit happened to his hair?”

Take a look for yourself:

This brief clip of George Bush forcing a stranger to interact with him certainly suggests that the former president is nearly bald on his scalp, with a slightly Trump-esque wisp of side hair combed over his largely bare pate. But one Vine cannot tell the whole story. Here are a few cropped, high-resolution photos of George W. Bush’s head, taken today in New Orleans.

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

Ten Years On: George W. Bush's Hair

Looking at these, it’s much clearer. George W. Bush is not really bald — yet — but his hairline has receded, and the remaining hair covering his frontal and mid-scalp regions has thinned and lightened. To my eyes, there’s no evidence of Bush employing artificial means to mask his balding. There is combing over happening, but it is not a particularly egregious combover. In fact, he still has quite a bit of fairly thick and dark hair hair for a man his age, and he doesn’t appear to have developed a significant bald spot on the crown of his head. But in a moving image, captured by (I assume) a phone camera, of an image captured by a television camera, shot from above on a bright day, then compressed for web and social sharing, the gray hair over his scalp is barely visible, and the thicker hair appears comically tall and “fluffy.”

Bush was in New Orleans to celebrate the successful exploitation of a crisis by corporatist ideologues and their allies in both parties.

Photos via Getty

3,000 Upstaters Want to Commit Economic Suicide by Seceding From New York

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3,000 Upstaters Want to Commit Economic Suicide by Seceding From New York

That attractive graphic up there represents a plan put forth by a group of liberty lovers who’d like to see New York state split into two “autonomous regions”: New York, below, composed of the city plus Long Island and Westchester and Rockland Counties, and New Amsterdam, above, composed of everything else. If that sounds appealing to you, you can attend their rally on Sunday.

Splitting up New York is not a new idea. Vermont only became a state after it successfully withdrew from New York in 1777, and in the 1960s, Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran a wacky New York City mayoral campaign premised on independence for the five boroughs.

This time around, it’s the far right leading the charge: groups including the Tri-County Tea Party and the local Oath Keepers will come together Sunday to demonstrate in favor of “reclaiming the economic opportunities Upstate has lost and restoring the liberties Upstate residents once enjoyed,” according to a statement.

Those lost liberties include the right to fracking and unfettered access to guns. SCOPE NY, one of the principal groups of the New Amsterdam movement, exists to challenge the SAFE Act, a set of lukewarm gun control laws Governor Andrew Cuomo signed after the Sandy Hook shooting. Nice timing.

Though the event’s organizers are billing it as a “secessionist movement” rally, they don’t actually want to form their own state. In order to sidestep the act of Congress that would be required to do so, they’re pushing for New York and New Amsterdam to become self-governing regions with a “token state government” above them, which “would have about the same power as the Queen of England!” a representative of the Divide New York State Caucus told Syracuse.com.

A Change.org petition in support of New Amsterdam has about 3,000 signatures at the time of this writing. They’ll need more than that to make their big red dream a reality. Namely, they’ll need the state government to sign off on it, which, of course, it will not.

If supporters are serious about splitting from the depraved metropolis below them, that also means splitting from their largest source of revenue. In 2009 and 2010, New York City and the rest of the non-New Amsterdam counties paid out $12 billion in tax dollars to struggling counties upstate. Good luck getting along without it.


h/t Gothamist. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Deadspin Wait, Floyd Mayweather Made How Much Money Last Year?

Loser Interviews Hater

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In one of the most simultaneously bleak and fawning ten minutes of television I have ever seen, former candidate for Vice President of the United States and current off-brand Fox News (OAN) personality Sarah Palin interviewed everyone’s favorite screaming steamed carrot, Donald Trump.

The interview consisted of a lot of Sarah Palin referring to Trump as “The Donald,” a lot of Donald Trump sitting in the foodcourt of your local mall, and a lot of softball questions asked in doe-eyed, glistening tones. In other words, it was exactly what you would expect of an interview between a belligerent media-magnet and a former punchline clinging to relevancy. I do not recommend enduring it by any means.

But! If you just can’t pass up the opportunity to wallow in communal misery, there were a few “highlights.”

Here is Sarah Palin asking Donald Trump how he got so big and strong.

And here is Donald Trump appearing (more) visibly uncomfortable (than usual) as he says, “You know me—I love the bible. I’m Protestant. I’m Presbyterian.”

You can watch the ten-minute interview in full above, or if you’d prefer something more to the point, absolutely any video of a public handjob.


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

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