Days before going on the shooting spree that left three dead in Colorado Springs this weekend, the man law enforcement officials anonymously confirmed as the shooter uploaded a Youtube video and wrote a blog post—both included rambling thoughts on religion but no mention of the impending violence.

On Thursday of last week Noah Jacob Harpham, 33, published a piece on his blog called titled, “Is my Dad in a Cult? Even Worse, Is It Satanic?!” The next day, he uploaded the video at the top of this post to Youtube, addressing, apparently, the same issues raised in his earlier blog post.

Then, on Saturday, Harpham walked through the streets of Colorado Springs, CBS News reports, calmly shooting people who begged for their lives:

Witnesses said the gunman first took aim at a young man riding a bicycle, and shot him several times and left him face-down on the sidewalk. Police found him with his backpack still on.

The shooter then roamed the streets with a AR-15 rifle in one hand and a revolver in the other. About a half-mile away, he turned suddenly, shooting two residents on the porch of a home for women in recovery. He then continued down the block as police closed in, shooting out the window of a squad car before officers fired back.

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, the 6’5” Harpham described himself as “a big friendly giant” and identified as a Christian and recovering alcoholic in a profile on dating website eHarmony.com.

Aspects of his recovery are apparently documented in his mother’s memoir, Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk, the Gazette reports. Harpham attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at 543 E. Platte Ave, where two women, also in recovery, were killed on Saturday.

“In the last two months, he dropped out of the program,” one AA at a vigil on Sunday told the Gazette.

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

On the sweltering plains of humanity’s early days, pre-industrial tribesmen acquired rich animal protein for their diets via persistence hunting. Working carefully in groups—and taking advantage of the stamina, sweat-cooling, and water-carrying advantages humans have over terrestrial ungulates—they would divide their faster, stronger prey from its group, and then pursue it at a sustainable running pace over great distances, until at long last it collapsed from total exhaustion and could be dispatched at close range with no resistance.

An antelope could take hours upon hours to bring down this way. At a sprint, it could race beyond a hunter’s sight in minutes, forcing pursuers to track it through the brush at a run to stay close enough to prevent it from resting. At the end of the hunt, if it was successful, the hunters were left with the heavy carcass of a large animal, many miles from their more stationary families, in the open, and where a scavenging lion or pack of wild dogs might come along to contest the kill. This was how people got meat. The alternative was not having meat. A failed hunt meant keeping an exhausted eye out for edible seeds on the long walk home.

Here is a video of Mike Huckabee, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, using a shotgun taller than my six-year-old son to bring down a pheasant that sure appears to have been deliberately released into his firing line from maybe 15 yards away from where he stood, waiting for it.

What is this behavior? Calling this “hunting” is absurd and baldly incorrect. From that range, with that gun, in those circumstances, Huckabee might just as well have placed the bird’s cage in the center of a helipad and dropped a piano on it. If this is “hunting,” then I was “fishing” when I went to the supermarket yesterday and bought a pound of EZ-peel shrimp. They weren’t cooked! I’m gonna mount one on the wall to memorialize our epic clash.

Listen. I don’t think the pheasant much cares whether this was a particularly sporting way to kill it. My aim here is not to speak for the pheasant, but to remark on the meager and degraded notions of outdoorsy masculinity that would lead a far-right presidential candidate to release a video of this sad, staged, risk-free execution—to bring reporters and photographers along on it in the first place!—rather than hiding all evidence of it from public view out of shame. This is not a demonstration of hunting prowess—Stevie Wonder could have made that kill, for chrissakes—but of mere, bare willingness to fire a gun at a living thing. Get a load of Rambo over here! He didn’t even use a Stinger surface-to-air missile to take down the dumpy game bird practically duct-taped to the end of his gun for him. Sedate Vladimir Putin and maneuver his face onto Mike Huckabee’s stationary fist at high velocity and he will punch the fuckin’ teeth outta that guy.

Christ. Somewhere Michael Dukakis is watching that video and scoffing. Mike Huckabee makes the guy who shucks oysters down at the wharf look like Hugh Glass.

Video via Huckabee campaign; top image via screencap

[CORRECTION: This post originally referred to the pheasant as a captive; photojournalist Mark Kauzlarich, who was in attendance, claimed in a tweet that there were no captive pheasants on the game reserve.]

Contact the author at albert.burneko@deadspin.com or on Twitter @albertburneko.

Citing Jewish law, Israel’s agricultural minister, Uri Ariel, has proposed a solution to what he sees as a population control problem that has begun to encroach on the country’s God-given right to peace and happiness: an overabundance of kittens. The recommended solution? Forcibly displacing the fluffy, offending race from their native land.

According to Ariel, spaying and neutering (the current method of combatting the overpopulation) is in direct violation of Jewish law. Specifically, it violates God’s commandment that all animas “be fruitful and multiply.”

So in an effort to make both sides happy, the minister has recommended taking the budget currently used for the humane, medically approved practice of spaying and neutering and using it to “transfer dogs and cats of a single gender (all the males or females) to a foreign country that is willing to accept them.”

Why would a foreign country possibly agree to accept a sudden influx of kittens into its borders? Well, in prior deportations, when Israel sent “voluntary” (they also had the option to choose prison) asylum-seekers to Rwanda and Uganda, it sweetened the deal for these third-party countries with cheap arms and weapons training. Of course, as +972 notes, the expelled populations were then left to live in the streets in dire conditions.

Then again, there’s always the Gaza Strip.

[h/t +972]

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

“Wall Street tends to understand the transactional much better than deep customer relationships...Natural grocers, like high-end retailers, have a relationship with their customers that goes way beyond the transactional and is very hard to put a value on.” Hmm okay sure, but what’s up with the photos in this story?

A man who was thrown from his car in a traffic accident and died after landing on a freeway sign was doomed by the least effective ritual animal sacrifice you can even imagine, reports the Los Angeles Times.

20-year-old Richard Pananian of Burbank apparently overcame some serious, unspecified health concerns, and his family decided the thing to do was get down with some old-timey animal sacrifice action to protect him from harm. Specifically, the family performed a matagh, in which a lamb is sacrificed to God for health, or forgiveness, or, in this case, “to protect him from harm and evil,” according to the New York Daily News.

That was October 25. On the morning of October 30, fate’s cruel sense of humor took charge:

He was driving southbound on the 5 Freeway just north of California 134 when his Ford Fiesta rear-ended a pickup truck and overturned, said Officer Edgar Figueroa, a California Highway Patrol spokesman. The CHP said Pananian was not wearing a seat belt.

Minutes before the crash the Highway Patrol reportedly received a phone call about Pananian’s Fiesta driving erratically. Pananian—who, according to family, always wore his seatbelt—was not buckled in at the time.

Pananian, who was a car aficionado, had even installed a racing safety harness for his driver’s seat, his cousin said.

Pananian was ejected from the car when it rolled, eventually landing on a freeway sign high above the road. Rescue crews needed a ladder to remove the body from the scene.

You’d like to think a lamb sacrifice would buy a person more than five days of protection, you know? Pananian’s cousin, Armen Kardashian, agrees:

“I find it ironic that 5 days after this offering to God, not only did God choose to take this young man’s life, but decided to make such a spectacle out of it,” Kardashian wrote. “If God works in mysterious ways his way remains a mystery to me and has crushed this family as a whole.”

Pananian’s family has set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds due to “unexpected financial burdens.” You have chuckled at the circumstances of this young man’s demise. You know what to do.

[Los Angeles Times] [New York Daily News]

Image via AP

International baby boy Justin Bieber has made his requests known.

During an acoustic version of his single “What Do You Mean” in Spain this week, he ordered his idiot fans, who had foolishly chosen a meter that the tiny prince did not see fit, to clap in proper tempo.

“Stop, stop, stop,” cried the little lord, to a crowd of the deaf.

[Screenshot via YouTube]

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

The Tax Justice Network’s biennial ranking of the world’s friendliest tax havens for super-rich individuals and businesses looking to hide their assets is out. Folks, this one is a banger, with the United States leapfrogging Singapore, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands to take 3rd.

Here’s this year’s ranking:

10. Dubai / UAE

9. Bahrain

8. Germany

7. Lebanon

6. Luxembourg

5. Cayman

4. Singapore

3. USA

2. Hong Kong

1. Switzerland

Exciting stuff! But hey, Exactly how much money is there hidden around the world, anyway? Some estimates, via The Guardian:

The scale of hidden offshore wealth around the world is difficult to assess. The economist Gabriel Zucman has put it at $7.6tn (£4.9tn), while the TJN’s James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey, estimated three years ago it could be more than $21tn.

Anyway, you may have noticed—possibly with some surprise?—that the United Kingdom didn’t crack the top ten. Well! TJN explains: “Though the United Kingdom isn’t in our top ten, it supports a network of secrecy jurisdictions around the world, from Cayman to Bermuda to Jersey to the British Virgin Islands, whose trusts and shell companies hold many trillions of dollars’ worth of assets.”

“Had we treated the UK and its dependent territories as a single unit it would easily top the 2015 index, above Switzerland.”

You have also been surprised to see the United States so high on the list, despite it having won, as The Guardian reminds us, major disclosure battles with big, secretive Swiss banks in recent years.

“Though the US has been a pioneer in defending itself from foreign secrecy jurisdictions it provides little information in return to other countries, making it a formidable, harmful and irresponsible secrecy jurisdiction,” TJN reports.

Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada are particularly egregious offenders. “The US has not seriously addressed its own role in attracting illicit financial flows and supporting tax evasion.”

A 2013 New York Times story examined how Delaware came to be the new Cayman Islands. “Two million corporations are formed each year in the United States, more than anywhere else in the world,” Richard Murphy, a senior adviser at the TJN, said at the time. “Delaware, in turn, is the biggest single source of anonymous corporations in the world.”

“Why go to the Caymans when you can just go down the street?”

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

Just two days after Halloween, Activision’s spending a whole lot of money on candy—the publisher announced tonight that they’ve bought Candy Crush developer King for $5.9 billion. Yes, that’s BILLION.

The mega-acquisition has to go through approval in Ireland, where King is based, but Activision says they anticipate that everything will be official by spring of 2016.

So why is the video game publisher, best known for mammoth series like Call of Duty, spending this much money on such an unusual acquisition? Well, Candy Crush is one of the most lucrative games in the world, earning some $1.33 billion in revenue in 2014 alone according to a King financial statement. The studio, which operates Candy Crush and a number of similar games including Bubble Witch and Farm Heroes, grossed $529 million in the second quarter of 2015. They’ve also got access to a HUGE network of casual gamers that Activision can now access for all sorts of purposes.

Also, as Activision points out in a press release, this gives them a pretty solid monopoly on The Biggest Brands In Gaming:

Activision Blizzard believes that the addition of King’s highly-complementary business will position Activision Blizzard as a global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms, and positions the company for future growth. The combined company will have a world-class interactive entertainment portfolio of top-performing franchises, including two of the top five highest-grossing mobile games in the U.S. (Candy Crush Saga®, Candy Crush Soda Saga™), the world’s most successful console game franchise (Call of Duty®), and the world’s most successful personal computing franchise (World of Warcraft®), as well as such well known franchises as Blizzard Entertainment’s Hearthstone®: Heroes of Warcraft™, StarCraft®, and Diablo® and Activision Publishing’s Guitar Hero®, Skylanders® and Destiny, along with over 1,000 game titles in its library.

Said Activision CEO Bobby Kotick in the same press release:

The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment. With a combined global network of more than half a billion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audiences than ever before.

Wait until Activision’s parents found out how much they just spent on this free-to-play game.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

We live in a sick world, ruled by a sick God.

When a centipede eats a cockroach, it doesn’t do so mercifully. It eats chunks of the cockroach’s body first, relishing in the power it wields over an inferior and fewer-legged arthropod.

This video is even sicker than it looks at first glance, too. Reddit users pointed out that the cockroach was actually glued to the rock — an unwitting prey with no way of escape. Upon closer inspection, it does look as though the roach has, indeed, been glued in place to await his fate.

Animals are cruel, but people are crueler.

h/t Reddit

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

An Idaho rancher was killed when a conflict with sheriff’s deputies over the fate of an aggressive, injured bull apparently escalated into a shootout, reports the Associated Press.

The incident began Sunday with a Subaru station wagon running into the bull on a highway in Adams County. The bull was reportedly injured in the crash, and the driver and passenger in the Subaru required emergency services to help pull them out of the wrecked car.

“The bull was very agitated and was aggressive to emergency services, as well as the other cars coming up and down the highway,” Adams County Sheriff Ryan Zollman said.

The bull reportedly charged responders as they worked at the scene, and the decision was eventually made by sheriff’s deputies to put the animal down. Before they could act, the bull’s owner, 62-year-old Jack Yantis, arrived on the scene. Idaho’s KTVB.com reports that Yantis was called by emergency dispatchers who believed the bull was his. He was armed with a rifle.

What happened next is still under investigation, but Zollman said there was an altercation and Yantis and both deputies all fired their weapons.

Yantis was fatally wounded and died at the scene. One of the deputies suffered a minor injury.

Council, where Yantis lived and where the shootout took place, is a town of roughly 800 people. The rancher’s death is described as a big loss:

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first officer-involved shooting that Adams County has ever had,” Zollman said. “This is going to be a big hit to this community. The gentleman involved, Mr. Yantis, was a well-known cattle rancher around here. It’s just a sad deal for everybody involved, for the whole community.”

The deputies have been placed on paid leave. The driver and passenger in the Subaru were transported via air ambulance to a local hospital. The bull, sadly, was shot and killed at the scene.

[Associated Press] [KTVB]

Image via AP

On Monday, federal investigators announced that wreckage found over the weekend, 15,000 beneath the surface of the sea, had been identified as that of El Faro, the cargo ship that went missing during Hurricane Joaquin last month.

No survivors have been found after El Faro sank, east of the Bahamas, on October 1st, with 33 people aboard. From the Associated Press:

Sonar indicates the ship landed upright, which could help crews recover the ship’s voyage data recorder, or “black box,” the NTSB said.

Crews sent down a remotely operated vehicle to confirm the wreckage after sonar images picked it up on Saturday. The U.S. Navy will continue searching the wreck site and debris field on Tuesday with the vehicle and its underwater video cameras.

The “black box” could hold a wealth of key information including audio from the bridge during key decision-making moments, and comments from the captain and others about the condition of the ship.

In the days after the ship’s disappearance, the AP reports, the U.S. Coast Guard recovered one body floating in a survival suit, but none have been recovered since then.

“My head wants answers, but my heart wants to stick to my vision of hope, stick to my vision of him being out on an island out there,” Deb Roberts, the mother of El Faro engineer Michael Holland, said. Identifying the ship’s wreckage “does make it very difficult.”

Four families have filed lawsuits against Tote Marine, the ship’s owner, and Michael Davidson, the ship’s captain, alleging that the ship was improperly maintained and mishandled—allegations which Tote Marine denied in court filings submitted in U.S. District Court last week.

Image via TOTE Maritime via EPA/NBC News. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Gizmodo About That KKK Dox | Kotaku Where to Buy Great Video Game Artwork | Jalopnik Why Do We Regulate Supercars? | Deadspin Mike Huckabee Goes “Hunting”

After years of stonewalling, Bill Cosby will speak—under oath—and on the record—again. This time, his testimony will be compelled by the manicured hands of former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who just secured the right to depose him sometime this month.

Dickinson says Cosby raped her at his home in Lake Tahoe after she accepted a glass of wine and what she thought was a pill for menstrual cramps during a 1982 encounter.

http://gawker.com/janice-dickins...

“The next morning I woke up, and I wasn’t wearing my pajamas, and I remember before I passed out that I had been sexually assaulted by this man,” she told ET last November. “Before I woke up in the morning, the last thing I remember was Bill Cosby in a patchwork robe, dropping his robe and getting on top of me. And I remember a lot of pain. The next morning I remember waking up with my pajamas off and there was semen in between my legs.”

At the time of her disclosure, Dickinson had no legal claim against Cosby because the statute of limitations on his alleged sexual assault had already run.

That is, until Cosby unwittingly handed Dickinson a legal gift: He issued a statement through his former attorney, the Los Angeles powerhouse Marty Singer, calling Dickinson a liar.

Now Dickinson, who is suing Cosby for defamation, will get to question both men to determine if they knew or should have known Cosby’s statement was false. The judge ruled both depositions should occur by Nov. 25, the New York Times reports.

“Defendant Cosby knows that he drugged and raped Ms. Dickinson. He knew that calling her rape disclosure a lie was a false statement,” Dickinson alleges in her suit.

Cosby’s new legal team, headed by former Assistant Attorney General Monique Pressley, say they intend to appeal the ruling.

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

Michael Lohan, the famously estranged father of Lindsay, is doing about as well as you’d expect, which is to say: not good. TMZ reports that child services took his two young children away last week following a “blowout argument” with his estranged wife, Kate Major.

(Major, you may recall, is a former Star reporter who left celebrity journalism to date Jon Gosselin before settling down with Lohan.)

http://gawker.com/5512199/kate-m...

Lohan married Major just one year ago and shares two children with her: Landon, two, and Logan, 10 months. They are currently living in Florida. Per TMZ, “the Florida Dept. of Children and Families (DCF) sent social workers to Kate’s apartment in Boca Raton Wednesday after obtaining a video of some sort of extreme argument Michael and Kate were having” in front of the children.

According to TMZ, the children were put in foster care overnight and then released to their grandmother, Lohan’s mother Marilyn Lohan.

Lohan had some typically polite things to say about the whole situation, which he claims was a “set up” by Major. He told TMZ that Major “is a proven alcoholic, a liar...and an abuser. I have so many videos of her abuse, her lies and admitting her lies and saying she’ll lie and do anything she can to set me up.”

Both Lohan and Major are due in family court today to discuss a custody plan for their children.

Lohan is also a father to Lindsay’s siblings Ali, Michael Jr., and Cody, and her half-sibling Ashley Horn. They all seem to be doing okay, except for Michael Jr., who was arrested in New York City last week for using a forged state parking permit. Lindsay, of course, is the same.

http://jezebel.com/lindsay-lohan-...

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

After a high-profile book tour that included a blockbuster interview on 20/20, Leah Remini’s memoir about her life in the Church of Scientology, Troublemaker, was released Tuesday. The book is a quick read (the final 50 pages or so are just photos), but covers a lot of ground—from Leah’s mother first explaining Scientology to her at a young age, to her bizarre friendship with Tom Cruise and other celebrities in the church.

But these aren’t the kinds of juicy stories one might see on blind gossip sites. While Lawrence Wright painted a terrifying portrait of Scientology in Going Clear, Remini’s first-person account skips most of the horror and presents the Church as a sad, soul-numbing place led by some people whose behavior is almost too strange to be horrifying.

http://www.amazon.com/Troublemaker-S...

Though Remini goes into detail about how she came to join the church, her time in the Sea Org, and how she balanced Scientology and her career, her stories about fellow celebrities are why some people (including myself) felt inclined to grab a copy at midnight. Here are some of the most memorable passages.

On being at Tom Cruise’s house when he really wants cookies:

Once when Angelo and I were over, Tom decided he wanted to make cookies. He walked into the kitchen, where a batch of prepackaged cookie dough had been prepared and was sitting on the counter, a perfect loaf ready for cutting and baking. Tom was looking for flour and other ingredients and must not have seen the cookie dough, and he instantly got angry.

“Guys, where’s the cookie stuff?” he said, furrowing his brow.

His assistants came running in wanting to explain that it was right there, on a nearby counter, but all one of them could say was, “Uh, Tom.” They both grew more flustered, and Tom got angry. “Goddamn it!”

Looking at the dough sitting on a cutting board, obvious to all of us except Tom, I wished his assistant would say, “Hey, the stuff is right under your nose, dumb-ass.” But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Instead, Katie whispered something to Tom, who repeated, “Can I just get the stuff for the cookies, guys?”

On how it feels when Tom Cruise asks you to play hide-and-seek:

As the dinners continued and we spent more time with Tom, I came to think of him as a big kid with his loud laugh, high energy, and goofy ideas of fun. Like when he invited some Scientologists and a few other celebrities like Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, to his house and announced he wanted to play hide-and-seek. At first I thought he was joking, but no, he literally wanted to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of grown-ups in what was probably close to a 7,000-square-foot house on almost three full acres of secluded land.

“I can’t play—I’m wearing Jimmy Choos,” I said.

“Well, good,” Tom said with his signature grin. “So you’re It, then.” And with that he tagged me and ran to hide.

“Huh?”

On finding baby Suri Cruise on the bathroom floor during a wedding:

When I opened the door, I found three women, including Tom’s sister and his assistant, standing over the baby, who was lying on the tile floor. I didn’t know if they were changing her diaper or what, but the three women were looking at her like they thought she was L. Ron Hubbard incarnate. Rather than talking to her in a soothing voice, they kept saying, “Suri! Suri!” in a tone that sounded like they were telling an adult to get her shit together.

On sitting next to Jennifer Lopez at Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise’s wedding:

Tom stood there with that everything-is-great look plastered on his face even as the crowd grew uncomfortable. Finally Jennifer leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Do you think Katie’s coming?”

On what happens when you ask Tommy Davis (a Scientology official) about Shelly Miscavige:

“You don’t have the rank to be asking about Shelly Miscavige,” he replied, and with that he shut down the conversation.”

On what happens when Katie Holmes doesn’t like how you acted at her wedding:

Jasmine, the MAA conducting the interrogation, showed me the Knowledge Report written by Katie Holmes, in which she referred to my behavior during the wedding weekend as “very upsetting,” and accused me of disrupting the party, which she claimed was a “poor example to others.” She went on to say, “[She] made the party all about her,” and concluded the report with reference to the fact that all of this so-called bad behavior “disturbed me greatly.” Jasmine told me I was a bad example for Scientologists and then asked me, “What do you say about this report?”

“What do I say about this childish report that looks like it was written by a seventh grader with all the exclamation marks?”

On who you think about when you leave Scientology:

During this confusing early period, I sometimes felt adrift, but I had one figure I kept front and center in my mind to keep from going crazy: Nicole Kidman.

That’s right, Tom Cruise’s ex was my guardian angel. Although I never met her or attempted to meet her, I thought about her a lot. While I stared at the dark ceiling at night, unable to sleep, I would say to myself, “Remember Nicole Kidman. She was declared an SP and left the church, and she’s doing okay. Her career is still going, and she has a husband and family… Just remember Nicole Kidman. She left and she’s okay…

But I think my favorite quote had nothing to do with Scientology at all.

On Jennifer Aniston during their early days of acting:

Jennifer Aniston and I had become friendly from seeing each other so much at various auditions. She was normal, unlike most other actresses, who, if you tried to make small talk, like asking where they were from, would accuse you of trying to “psych them out.”

I didn’t expect my main takeaway from a memoir about Scientology to be how friendly Jennifer Aniston is, but here we are.

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

The good thing about class consciousness is that you begin to realize that no matter how long you went to school, your problems are fundamentally the same as all the other people whose bank account balance is as low as yours.

Duquesne University is a Catholic school that is doing its very best to offend the sensibilities of Jesus. For years, the school’s adjunct professors have been trying to unionize. Due to the fact that adjunct professor is a shitty low-paid job with no job security! A pretty good reason to unionize! And for years, Duquesne has been fighting their attempts to join together to protect themselves, claiming that such a union of low-paid professors would actually infringe on the school’s religious freedom.

http://gawker.com/christian-univ...

Go figure!

And now, Duquesne has taken an even bolder move: last week, the school abruptly announced that ten of its 11 English Department adjunct professors are being laid off. This is the same department described as “ground zero” for the union campaign. Of course, the school says that these layoffs have “absolutely nothing to do with the union.”

Why would you even think that? Paranoid....

Anyhow, the union has now filed complaints against the school for unfair labor practices—namely, you know, laying off a bunch of professors committed to unionizing while the school has a case pending before the National Labor Relations Board about its ability to weasel out of allowing its employees to unionize, due to Jesus. This would be real rat bastard behavior if true, which, needless to say, it is not, because the school was not thinking about this at all when it laid all those people off. Why would you even think that? (In These Times quotes this simple explanation from one Duquesne English department administrator: “Stinnett explained that there was no ‘directive given to me ‘not to re-hire the adjunct faculty,’’ but that adjuncts were simply at the bottom of the list, and there turned out to be no courses for them.” Ok?)

Grad students and adjunct professors all over America are currently unionizing and it’s not real hard to see why.

[Current photo of Jesus: Flickr]

Killings in New York City have jumped 350 percent compared to this time last year, the New York Post claimed yesterday. It’s a classic Post argument: bloody, provocative, and utterly false when divorced from its own narrow and purposefully misleading premise.

Under the headline “Killings in NYC spike,” a team of three Post reporters conveyed the impression that the city is in the throes of a historically murderous period—surely thanks to mayor Bill de Blasio, the publication’s enemy number one. Their argument appears legit at first glance: During the week ending October 31, 2015, there were seven killings in the city, compared to just two slayings over the same seven-day period in 2014—less than a third as many.

But comparing murders week-to-week puts an arbitrary window on the data and tells us hardly anything at all. For whatever reason, last week was a particularly bloody one, and the Post cherry-picked it in the service of making New York City look violent and in need of saving—the editorial project it has labored over since the 1970s, which has reached surreal new heights under de Blasio’s mayoralty. It’s true that murders are up from last year, but the “spike” is close to six percent, not 350.

To illustrate the feebleness of their argument, let’s look at the NYPD’s most recent weekly crime report, which documents the seven-day period ending October 25, 2015—shifting the article’s window backward by six days. This seemingly minor tweak produces startlingly different results: during that week, there were five murders, not seven, and over the same period in 2014, there were 10. A rag with a different agenda could use these numbers and produce a totally different headline: “Murders in NYC down by half.”

NYPD records for years past similarly deflate the implication that killings are skyrocketing. In 2013, there were eight murders during the week ending November 3, and in 2012, there were two, a police spokesman who was miffed about the Post article told me. (The department’s weekly reports run from Monday to Sunday, making this the closest available seven-day period to the Post’s.)

Judging by the last week of October alone, you’d think the murder rate in New York has peaked and valleyed wildly in recent years: it leaped by 400 percent from 2012 to 2013, floored again from 2013 to 2014, and went back up by 350 percent this year. These percentages are misleading in two ways: they highlight unrepresentative data and visually inflate what are actually pretty small numbers. In this case, a 350 percent increase means just five people. When you zoom out and look at an entire year’s data, the number of homicides in New York City has declined steadily every year since 2010. New York may end 2015 with more homicides than it had in 2014, but it will take a major crime wave to beat the number from a mere three years ago.

That the city saw seven murders last week is worth noting, but statistically, it means almost nothing when considered in context. Fortunately for the Post’s reporters, meaning and context are not high on their employer’s list of priorities.

Photo via AP. Chart by Jim Cooke.

From WCYY Radio in Portland, Maine comes what is purportedly “A Bad Encounter With Funny Man David Sedaris.” But is it?

Here is what WCYY describes as the “bad encounter” between Sedaris and one “Karen,” a WCYY employee:

From Karen’s Facebook page:

I attended the October 21, 2015 show in Portland, Maine. It was my third time seeing him in Portland. (now my last time seeing him) My first time at the book signing table. I was really looking forward to meeting him.

DS: “What’s your name?”
Me: “Karen”
DS: “Do you have children?”
Me: “I have a dog”
DS: “What’s his name?”
Me: “Cosmo”
DS: “How old?”
Me: “He’s 12.”
DS: “Oh, he’ll die soon. Yes, he’s 12, he’ll die soon.”

After the conversation, he proceeded to draw a gravestone with R.I.P. Cosmo on it. He said he was drawing weeds that will grow there because she’d forget about him and get another puppy. She was shocked and pretty much speechless.

Heh.

Get over it, Karen.

[A photo of the Sedaris drawing in question can be found here. Photo via Getty. Now put your own inane opinions about the propriety of this incident in the comment section below. What do you think? Cling fiercely to the illusion that the world wants to know.]

Oh the shame: even Taco Bell is distancing itself from a marketing executive caught on camera drunkenly assaulting an Uber driver, explaining in a statement that the company has fired the man and “encouraged him to seek professional help.”

The video, uploaded to YouTube on Friday, shows the Orange County driver attempting to follow directions from his passenger, 32-year-old Benjamin Golden who, until this weekend, worked as a corporate manager at Taco Bell.

Golden, who appears intoxicated in the video, apparently refused to input his destination on the Uber app, opting instead to give the driver verbal directions.

Eventually the driver—deeming Golden too drunk—pulls over and asks him to exit the vehicle. Golden starts to open the door, changes his mind, and starts pummeling the driver. The beatdown ends when the driver pulls out a can of Mace.

Golden was arrested nearby and reportedly booked on misdemeanor charges of public intoxication and assaulting a taxicab operator.

For shame! For real—Taco Bell felt it was bad for the brand:

“Given the behavior of the individual, it is clear he can no longer work for us. We have also offered and encouraged him to seek professional help,” the company said in the statement published by the Los Angeles Times.

He is, one imagines, still welcome to do takeout.

Image via YouTube. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

“Exposure Doesn’t Pay Your Rent,” goes the headline on a recent blog post at The Rumpus, a literary website that doesn’t pay its writers.