plagiarism 101
If you’re ripping off someone else’s talk and forget to mention that your whole act is borrowed material, you should probably do it at a conference where that person is not the keynote speaker. Dan Meyer attended a session this morning that sounded very, very familiar…
headline of the day
Couple caught trying to blow up car with flaming TAMPONS
headline of the day, IV
North Korea To Punish Mourners Who Were Insincere
headline of the day
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
Memorandum
All:
Please disregard my recent emails. Forget about the phone messages, too. I know I sounded angry and excited, but I’ve had a chance to think things over and I don’t feel the same as I did when I said all of those hurtful words. I won’t apologize for the basis of my comments—I have a right to my own opinions, especially because they are correct—but regret your exposure to that barrage of toxicity. And the physical threats. You’ll notice I did not say “sorry.” That word is for the weak.
The world of the heterosexual
Commentary courtesy of Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), “Female Trouble” (John Waters).
I ain’t a cyclo-facist
but Bikesnob nails it:
It’s fascinating how readily we’ve come accept this notion that we must have respect for a car’s “power,” as though it’s some force of nature beyond all human control. Sure, someone who goes into the wilderness, starts poking grizzlys with a stick, and then gets eaten should maybe have a little more respect for the power of the bear, but that’s a different scenario. Oddly though, if a bear is just doing its bear thing and kills somebody we’ll go out of our way to destroy the bear. Yet if a human being kills somebody with a car we just charge them $42 and blame the victim.
from the moderated comments
Well, Fuck me… your still as stupid as before.
Downhill trike racing at 55 mph
Three guys going 55 mph down a mountain highway, with traffic, on tricycles, using the soles of their shoes for brakes.
the birth of a nation, part two
We have this horrible contemporary phenomenon in the Tea Party – a real menace not only to America but to the world. Because if it goes on like this, they will destroy our economy and they will destroy America. They have no democratic vision, and I don’t mean with a capital “D”, I mean with a small “d”. They frighten me. They’re like the early followers of Adolf Hitler, and I’m willing to be quoted on that. They are a sickening phenomenon. That is because they have not read deeply and widely enough. But then maybe they’re not to blame, because American education – even in elite universities – has become a scandal in my opinion. It has committed suicide.
Harold Bloom on the state of American democracy.
Previously, on clusterflock.
the birth of a nation
The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.
I don’t see how this isn’t a fundamental problem for the future of American democracy.
(via @fivethirtyeight)
pregnancy tourism for a master race
In the film, the lady tells us how she isn’t the first, and “definitely not the last” to travel this far to have an Aryan child, one who, she imagined, would grow up grateful for the gift of racially superior intelligence. She speaks of an organised system behind such pregnancy tourism, but refuses to elaborate. “It’s not wrong, what I’m doing,” she says, “I’m paying for what I want.”
The movie is called Achtung Baby: In Search of Purity, and is about German women travelling to Indian villages to get knocked up by men they believe are the last of the pure Aryans.
(via the browser)
Never fear, Pamela. God is with you too in this coming time.
I am running an email I received from an Atlas reader in Norway. It is devastating in its matter-of-factness.
Yes, devastating.
(via @mattyglesias)
“Now do you believe me?”
Denise lost her vision when she was three. Her last visual memory was of lights on a Christmas tree. No idea why, but her eyes were surgically removed and replaced with glass eyes.
Read more
‘This video is an actual voicemail from a woman that was kicked out of one of our Austin theaters’
For Deron. It immediately made me think of his recent experience at Tree of Life.
AA Bondy – Rapture, Sweet Rapture
I’ve been singing this all day.
I’d buy that app.
Fuck it I’ve heard enough, I’m going to make some killer android app that listens to every word you hear and uses Google’s voice recognition shit and some semantic networks and logistic regression crap and fucking starts chirping at you whenever it detects someone is hitting on you, make it look like an incoming call from captain obvious or something. It make take a while to accumulate enough training data to detect every subtle hint but it should pick this one up pretty easily. #
One of the 5,661 comments on From Male Redditors: What are some hints females gave you, but you didn’t get them until after you had your chance?
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quote out of context
…hurry up and be raptured already
stay classy Rush
The Japanese have done so much to save the planet. He’s right. They’ve given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are still recycling their garbage, and yet Gaia levels them [laughs], just wipes them out. Wipes out their nuclear plants, all kinds of radiation. What kind of payback is this? That is an excellent question. They invented the Prius. In fact, where Gaia blew up is right where they make all these electric cars. That’s where the tsunami hit. All those brand new electric cars sitting there on the lot. I like the way this guy was thinking. It’s like — it’s like Gaia hit the Prius in [inaudible]. It’s like they were in the crosshairs, if we can use that word, it does. What is Gaia trying to tell us here? What is the mother of environmentalism trying to say with this hit?
Mid-Century Preservation — or Not — in Chicago
Talk about your perfect storm for losing a piece of architecture! This building on S. State Street has it all: it’s in a busy area, it’s a retail facade, and it’s Midcentury in origin.
It’s slated to be remodeled into something forgettable. Blair Kamin wrote a an excellent summation of the who, what, why, and why-it-shouldn’t.
(From a chicago sojourn.)
(the ghost of) Paul Klee on Twitter
Long before Twitter there was Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine (1922).
MOMA’s description of it could just as easily apply to Twitter Inc.: «Upon closer inspection, however, an uneasy sensation of looming menace begins to manifest itself. Composed of a wiry, nervous line, these creatures bear a resemblance to birds only in their beaks and feathered silhouettes; they appear closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this “machine” is a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused.».
[ReTweeted from @5cense, which i've been "tweeting" daily from also before there was Twitter, Inc.]
Equal Protection Men’s Club
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia doesn’t think equal protection applies to women. Best comment so far:
If Scalia applies this logic to the 14th amendment, then he’d have to do the same for the 2nd.
I’m sure when they debated the 2nd amendment, it didn’t apply to much more than muskets. I doubt they had automatic weapons on their minds.
When we write laws now for automatic weapons, do we write in for the potential for laser pistols?
We need a constitutional amendment outlawing the potentiality of a Death Star. It could happen….
Mark Your Calendar
Other notable highlights:
Mr. T’s birthday, Montenegro’s independence or the Red Sox-White Sox game.
See you assholes on the 22nd.
More than 1,000 dead birds fall from sky in Arkansas
BEEBE, Ark. — Wildlife officials are trying to determine what caused more than 1,000 blackbirds to die and fall from the sky over an Arkansas town.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said Saturday that it began receiving reports about the dead birds about 11:30 p.m. the previous night. The birds fell over a 1-mile area of Beebe, and an aerial survey indicated that no other dead birds were found outside of that area.
Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe said the birds showed physical trauma, and she speculated that “the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail.”
The state fish and game people speculated that New Year’s Eve revelers shooting off fireworks in the area could have startled the blackbirds from their roost and that the birds might have died from the stress and terror of it all.
