President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has asked the State Department to list its workers who focus on gender equality and ending violence against women, in what’s being seen as an echo of an earlier request for the Energy Department to list employees who work on climate change.
…The team also asked the department offices to “note positions whose primary functions are to promote such issues” and to highlight any funds for the current financial year that are “already allocated to such programs and activities.”
The university did not make the findings of its Title IX–mandated EOAA investigation public, citing student privacy concerns, but local news station KSTP obtained and published the document on Friday.
The report lays out a nightmarish scene in which a drunk, initially reluctant female student consents to sex with two men at an off-campus apartment, only to have the encounter recorded on camera and shared that night. From there, the report says, the night devolved into a series of assaults. …Men whose identities were confirmed by interviews and cellphone messages obtained during the university’s investigation allegedly held her shoulders down and forcefully had sex with her.
…The university’s EOAA investigation found that four players had violated the school’s policy regarding sexual assault, eight had violated the sexual harassment policy, and 10 had violated the student conduct code by lying to investigators or obscuring evidence.
…If the alleged violations did occur, as the university’s investigation concluded, getting kicked off the football team is meager justice. But to the players, the suspensions were cause for righteous anger, and a boycott was the logical next step.
…At bottom, the Minnesota boycott was an old story smuggled in under the banner of social justice—not one of athletes mobilizing for justice, but of institutions closing ranks when one of their own is accused of wrongdoing. Note that the Minnesota coaching staff backed the players: a good tell that the boycott was something other than the cry of the marginalized.
Shehu says Smith is “currently sponsoring the education of 24 girls from Chibok, among them the first set of escapees from Boko Haram at the American University of Nigeria (AUN), Yola.” AUN is owned by Atiku Abubakar, Nigeria’s former vice- president. Given the high cost of tuition ($8,000 for an academic session minus housing and meals), AUN is typically regarded as a school for children of Nigeria’s elite. Smith has also “offered to pay for the education of the 21 released girls through negotiations and is offering to take responsibility for all the others who will hopefully be eventually set free,” Shehu says.
The younger Trump swears his foundation gives all of its money away to good causes. Which is true, if you don’t count the cash spent on Trump-owned resorts. Or the plastic surgeon.
In the late 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford of the Carnegie Institution of Washington stared, confused, at the punch-card readouts from their observations of the Andromeda Galaxy. The vast spiral seemed to be rotating all wrong. The stuff at the edges was moving just as fast as the stuff near the center, apparently violating Newton’s Laws of Motion (which also govern how the planets move around our Sun). While the explanation for that strange behavior didn’t become clear to Rubin until two years later, these printouts represented the first direct evidence of dark matter.
In an attempt to make Los Angeles parks seem super safe, City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell has proposed barring adults unaccompanied by children from entering playgrounds. It’s an effort, he said, to keep city parks “free of creepy activity.”
….It would bar any adult from sitting on a bench, exercising or otherwise enjoying public space near playground unless he or she brought a child along.
…His proposal is based on laws in place in a handful of major cities, including New York City, where police caused a minor uproar several years ago by ticketing people for sitting on playground-adjacent benches to eat donuts or play chess.
In German culture, she said, it was not appropriate for women to completely cover their faces and the full veil “should be banned wherever it is legally possible”.
“Obviously, when we have an incident where there is some type of assertion that a juvenile has been inappropriately touched, injured, whatever, that should take precedence,” Chief Joel Fitzgerald said at a press conference. “And for the 99.9% of our police officers in this police department, that would have handled that case differently, I thank them.”
So why is he not in jail then, Chief?
[The officer] “instigated that whole incident by being condescending to the woman about her son,” Alexander said. “You can see it in his his posture and in his tone. That’s what the people in the video are very sensitive to.”
What began as a dispute over littering rapidly escalated into a white police officer forcefully arresting a black woman and her two daughters in Fort Worth.
As Jacqueline calmly and reasonably explains to the officer what this man did to her 7-year-old son, she tells him that the man said he confronted her son because the boy threw a piece of paper on the ground. As she proceeds to tell the officer that the man then choked her son, the officer actually asks her, “why don’t you teach your son not to litter?” — then proceeds to basically tell the mother that the man had every right to choke her son.
…Jacqueline’s teenage daughter then steps in front of her to calm her down and separate her from the officer. Then, in that moment, everything took a terrible turn for the worse. The officer then starts grabbing and slamming everybody to the ground. He grabs the teenage daughters and handcuffs them. He grabs the mother, wrestles her to the ground, and arrests her as well.
Lee Merritt, an attorney for the woman, told the Star-Telegram that he wants the charges against his clients “dropped immediately,” calling them “completely manufactured.”
“We want to see the officer involved terminated from his position as a peace officer within Fort Worth and would also like to see him prosecuted criminally for his behavior — for his felony assault of my clients,” Merritt added. “We would like to see the individual who all this started from — the neighbor who assaulted a 7-year-old child — prosecuted as well.”
“The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Friends ‘coordinated’ or got in line.” And this coordination was not necessarily due to the “pressure of terror,” said Arendt, who escaped Germany in 1933. Intellectuals were particularly vulnerable to this wave of coordination. “The essence of being an intellectual is that one fabricates ideas about everything,” and many intellectuals of her time were “trapped by their own ideas.”
People rejected the uglier aspects of Nazism but gave ground in ways that ultimately made it successful. They conceded premises to faulty arguments. They rejected the “facts” of propaganda, but not the impressions of it. The new paradigm of authoritarianism was so disorienting that they simply could not see it for what it was, let alone confront it.
…Trump’s propaganda about Mexican rapists and Muslim terrorists operates in a similar way. The informed listener knows that most rapes are committed by perpetrators that are known to the victim. They know that most terrorist attacks in the United States are committed by non-Muslims, but the impression that those groups are not to be trusted ― that to trust them is taking an unnecessary risk ― remains.
The impressions born of the propaganda give birth to discussions that worsen the problem. Commentator Van Jones, for example, debated CNN panelists recently about discrimination against Muslims. To support his argument that Muslims are not the enemy, he cataloged many of the positive attributes of the Muslim community as if Americans that are hostile to Muslims are acting in good faith based on bad information rather than cherry-picking incidents to support their underlying prejudices. Jones reminded viewers and other panelists that Muslims have low crime rates, high educational achievement and high rates of entrepreneurship. The fact that it needs to be said demonstrates the relative power of the people asking the questions to those who must answer. It morphs questions about Muslims into a kind of Muslim Question that exists not to seek answers but to emphasize the otherness of the Muslim community and to limit its rights.
…Joachim Fest writes in his memoir Not I, “At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such state crimes were the most natural thing in the world.”
On the Joker: ….Add some inevitable PTSD into the mix and suddenly you see Ledger’s Clown Prince of Crime for who he really is: an ex-soldier who became disfigured, snapped, and later spent the entire movie killing mayors, district attorneys, and police commissioners, aka people who in his troubled mind were representatives of the government that sent him to war.
On Kirk: It’s a real mystery: After so many years of violating the law and Starfleet directives (often with his penis), how would anyone ever give Captain Kirk command of anything more complex than a broken down go-kart? How does a person even become such a reckless piece of shit with crippling authority issues? If you’ve paid attention to the title of this entry, you already know that the answer is “surviving a space-Holocaust.”
…The whoring, the insubordination, the apparent disregard for his own life … who wouldn’t turn out like that after his friends and family were killed by a space Nazi? And having to go through all of that when he was just 12? Kirk never had a chance, leaving him with only two ways to silence the traumatic voices in his head: living life to the fullest or manning up and boldly going to the nearest therapist’s office.
On Jack Sparrow: From their short conversation we learn that, many years before the events of the first Pirates film, Jack was working for the EITC until he was trusted with transporting “cargo” that turned out to be a shipment of slaves. So, being Jack Sparrow, he set them free, simply telling Beckett in the deleted scene that “People aren’t cargo, mate.”
…Jack Sparrow goes from a morally ambiguous asshole to an all-around decent person. When he delivers the line, he doesn’t ruin it with any of his trademark silly gestures, instead saying it in a kind of sad, matter-of-fact way, almost as if he had to explain to another person that water is wet.
Even though what he did resulted in being branded a pirate, you don’t hear any hesitation in his voice, because for all the shitty things Jack Sparrow might have done, he’d never condemn an innocent person to a lifetime of slavery. It’s probably the most character development he’s gotten throughout all four Pirates movies, and it made him look so cool that of course they had to cut it…
Respected journalists they may not and may never be, but no one can argue with the fact that the crew at Cracked are damn fine speculative pop culture theorists.
Once every couple of months, the quarreling masses of the internet put aside their differences for just a moment to completely and thoroughly ruin a person’s life.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed a bill that would give colleges the option of allowing concealed carry on campus and expand the areas where permit holders could carry a concealed handgun.
Prince Charles has issued a warning over the “rise of populism” in a veiled apparent reference to the election of Donald Trump and increasingly hostile attitudes towards refugees in Europe. The Prince of Wales said there were “deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s”, adding that “evil” religious persecution was taking place across the globe.
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 