Man in goat suit seen living among goats in Utah mountains - "he could be in danger as hunting season approaches
UPDATE: A man spotted in a goat suit in the mountains of northern Utah has been identified as a hunter preparing for a Canadian archery season"
Are Douglass Mackey’s Memes Illegal? - "In 2016, a Florida man named Douglass Mackey (using the online alias “Ricky Vaughn”) allegedly conspired to distribute a meme aimed at deceiving pro-Hillary voters.Four years later, Mackey is now being prosecuted (as to this and as to other memes) for violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a federal law that punishes conspiracies “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person ... in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution”—namely, the right to vote. Lying to voters in a way that keeps them from voting, the theory goes, is a crime.Is this sort of prosecution constitutional? After all, people often lie in political campaigns. Candidates do it, activists do it, political operatives do it. Can election lies simply be outlawed?Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has never resolved the question. It hasn’t resolved the big-picture question: When can the government punish lies? It hasn’t resolved the medium-size question: Can the government punish lies in election campaigns? And it hasn’t resolved the particular question: Can the government punish lies about the mechanisms of voting, and in particular about how to vote?... Much humor, for instance, consists of knowingly false statements being said as satire or hyperbole. Such statements are usually obviously, ridiculously false, which is what makes them funny. One classic example is “Democrats vote Tuesday, Republicans vote Wednesday” (or vice versa); it’s sometimes offered as an example of deception, but my sense is that it’s usually a joke, precisely because readers know that a general election is one day for everyone, rather than different days for different parties. Many people may have viewed Mackey’s meme as a joke as well, though the government’s evidence suggests he was hoping to actually be taken seriously by some voters. (The prosecutors allege that a small portion of his audience may indeed have been taken in, but the question in conspiracy cases is whether the defendants sought to achieve the goal, not whether they actually achieved it.) Courts have dealt with this “lie or satire?” question in other cases, often involving libel. Consider New Times, Inc. v. Isaacks, a 2004 Texas Supreme Court case. The backstory was that a 13-year-old had been arrested and kept jailed for five days on a “terroristic threats” charge, for writing a story about a school shooting—in response to a Halloween assignment from a teacher who had asked the children to write a scary story. The incident drew criticism of the judge and prosecutor who authorized this... On one hand, the legal system did end up properly distinguishing a lie from a joke. On the other, it took years and doubtless a lot of money to get there, with four judges (the trial judge and three intermediate appellate judges) ruling one way and the nine Texas high court judges ruling the other. That’s a sobering reminder of the danger posed even by laws that ostensibly target falsehoods... to the extent it is a precedent, the breadth of the Mackey indictment is disquieting"
The Associated Press Says It Will Capitalize ‘Black’ But Not ‘White’ - "“White doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does”... 'Some proponents believe that keeping white lowercase is actually anti-Black, saying it perpetuates the idea that whites are the default race.'... Language has been a battleground of late. For instance, while the Oxford Dictionary defines the phrase “low-hanging fruit” as “a thing or person that can be won, obtained, or persuaded with little effort,” a college professor says the term is racist. “For African-Americans, if you say ‘low-hanging fruit,’ we think lynching,” said Mae Hicks-Jones, an adjunct faculty member of Elgin Community College in Illinois.“Grandfathered” is also racist, she said, according to a report this week in The College Fix. To Hicks-Jones, the phrase “grandfathered in” is reminiscent of a grandfather clause, which privileged white people’s right to vote over that of black people during the Jim Crow South.Then there’s the “Masters” golf tournament. Rob Parker last month wrote a Deadline piece headlined “We’ve Lived with ‘The Masters’ Name Long Enough.”"
If you keep hearing dog whistles, you must be the dog
Parasite found in cat poop linked to higher brain cancer risk in humans - "The parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which reproduces in cats and most often spreads to humans through raw meat, may increase the risk of brain cancer in humans... This was the first prospective study — that is, one that examined T. gondii exposure before cancer diagnosis — to report an association between T. gondii exposure and glioma development, the authors wrote. This study design allowed the researchers to avoid the possibility that a glioma-parasite link was actually due to gliomas increasing the risk of infection with the parasite."
Empathy represses analytic thought, and vice versa: Brain physiology limits simultaneous use of both networks - "New research shows a simple reason why even the most intelligent, complex brains can be taken by a swindler's story -- one that upon a second look offers clues it was false... These findings suggest the same neural phenomenon drives the explanatory gap as occurs when we look at a visual illusion such as the duck-rabbit, he continued. The drawing of the head of the animal can be seen as a duck facing one direction or a rabbit facing the other, but you can't see both at once."
Once again, emotion and reason are opposed
Never Accept a Job That Uses Brain Teasers in Your Job Interview - "as anyone who’s tried to mentally count the number of windows in Tokyo while they’re in the hot seat probably knows, these types of questions say more about the narcissism and sadism of the job interviewer than they do about the applicant. Or as professor Scott Highhouse of Bowling Green State University put it, the “use of brainteasers in the hiring process provides little information about the suitability of the job applicant but considerable information about the callousness of the interviewer.” The researchers set out to study this phenomenon because these questions are known to be pretty ineffective, and yet they’re still asked anyway. And it seems like there’s a relatively straightforward answer for why this is: Because the askers are dicks! Or, more precisely, the researchers explained the brain teasers as stemming from “a callous indifference and a lack of perspective‐taking” within the company’s hiring... In their defense, it’s not as if traditional interview questions are all that great in the first place. As the science writer-turned professional poker player Maria Konnikova put it back in 2013, job interviews, in general, are plagued by a decontextualization problem. In other words, what we do in job interviews isn’t often all that similar to what we actually do on the job.Creating an interview process that hews closely to the kind of work you do on the job is perhaps easier said than done, and that’s one reason why hirers are starting to experiment more with gamification, or using gaming mechanics, to try and simulate a would-be hire’s working environment. But even this approach can run into problems and may end up advancing hires who are simply good at playing these games. Which is all to say that for all their imperfections, the good ole’ fashioned resume and job interview is probably going to be around for a while. Instead of trying to game the process or guess what sorts of questions are going to be asked by reading Glassdoor, you’re better served focusing on the little things that go into making your first impression, things like being on time, being dressed properly, and asking a thoughtful question. As Konnikova notes, the first minute or so of your interview may be all that matters anyway"
Laura ️⚧️ on Twitter - "Raping and drugging men is a good thing according to twitter"
"Men cannot be raped because they have privilege. … "
Rotherham police chief ‘admits to ignoring child abuse over race fears’ - "A senior police officer admitted his force ignored the Rotherham child abuse ring for fear of increasing ‘racial tensions’, it has been reported.The admission was made after the police watchdog upheld six complaints against South Yorkshire Police by a former child victim, according to The Times.The chief inspector is said to have described the abuse as ‘P*** shagging’ that had been ‘going on’ for 30 years in a document quoted by the newspaper, adding: ‘With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.’"
"We don't discriminate" Two Men Spray Black Paint Over Chinese Characters On Street Signs In Penang - "In photos shared by Sin Chew Daily, the men were pictured spraying black paint over the Chinese characters on the Gat Lebuh Armenian street sign. The photos are said to originate from a video posted in a Facebook group where one of the men said, “According to the constitution, Bahasa Malaysia is our national language, not Mandarin. I’m sorry, but if you want to arrest me, then feel free to do so”. “We live in Malaysia and do not practice racial discrimination,” added the man after committing the act of vandalism."
Australian music group The Wiggles apologises after culturally insensitive song ‘Papadum’ resurfaces - "Australian children’s music group The Wiggles founder Anthony Field has apologised over an old video of the group’s Papadum song.The music video originally shown in 2014 features singers donning traditional Indian attire and holding the thin flatbread in various positions and repeatedly singing Papadum throughout the song.The presence of an Indian actress in the video, just holding the thin flatbread while smiling too, left many upset.The music video has sparked criticisms from many for the culturally insensitive song and its lack of proper content on the Indian thin flatbread."
It's only a matter of time before Racial Harmony Day gets cancelled
Naturally, they should have sung about how racism is bad to "educate" kids
Five myths about Christopher Columbus - The Washington Post - "2. Columbus was Italian...
But when Columbus lived, there was no such thing as an Italian; Italy did not exist until 1861. The best evidence suggests that the explorer was born in a village near Genoa, which is part of Italy today. To his deathbed, he proudly claimed Genoa as home. In Columbus’s lifetime, Genoa was a fiercely independent republic with its own language, currency and overseas colonies. Its commercial ties to Castile and Aragon, in modern-day Spain, were intimate. Genoese trading colonies in Seville, Barcelona and Lisbon were sizable. Some Genoese who married locally were naturalized Castilian, Catalan or Portuguese subjects...
3. Columbus was a successful businessman and a model leader...
Columbus quickly made managerial mistakes, some fatal. He planted a colony on the north shore of Haiti and named it La Navidad. When he returned on his second voyage, everyone at “Christmas town” was dead. Columbus launched another settlement, named La Isabela for his royal patron, that met much the same fate.Archaeologists have found that La Isabela was constructed like a hybrid Genoese-Portuguese trading post of the sort found in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Africa. It was intended to survive by trade rather than self-sufficiency, prompting inhabitants to engage in suicidal raids on neighboring indigenous villages. Columbus’s misunderstanding of local economies and his failure to adapt to local conditions cost not only Spanish lives but also countless indigenous ones.
4. Columbus committed genocide...
Columbus was clearly no friend of native peoples, but a document discovered 10 years ago in Simancas, Spain, suggests he was an equal-opportunity tyrant. Witnesses testified that his brief government of Hispaniola was marked by routine cruelty not only to the native Taínos but also to Spaniards who defied or mocked him. A woman who reminded Columbus that he was the son of a weaver had her tongue cut out. Others were executed for minor crimes. Colonialism is never pretty, and in his treatment of native peoples, Columbus was following Spanish and Portuguese trading and slaving practices. We may charge him with genocide by negligence (if there is such a thing), but it is harder to prove intent. Columbus wanted living and multiplying subjects to tax and govern. He was not interested in depopulating newly acquired territories."
Let’s Not Say Goodbye to Columbus - "To dismiss Columbus’s heroism and daring accomplishments, however, is to revel in ignorance. A closer look at Columbus’s own writings indicates that he straddled the line between medieval and modern. Columbus understood himself as less an agent of Spanish imperialism than as a purveyor of Christian evangelicalism. He embarked on his first voyage excited by biblical prophecy, determined to fulfill an eschatological vision that he believed would usher in the millennium. Hungry for status, believing himself chosen by God, he failed to realize his prophetic dreams—and his discoveries led to unforeseeable consequences. The burden of their causation cannot fairly be blamed on him, however, as if he were some bow-backed Atlas bearing responsibility for all the crimes of the world.After 1492, powerful forces were unleashed over which human agency had little or no control. The demographic disaster experienced by the New World’s indigenous peoples stemmed largely from the unintended consequences of pathogenic agents that had accompanied Europeans and Africans to the Americas. Columbus critics often use him as a stand-in for all of European or Western civilization. But we shouldn’t forget that he sailed from a world of war, colonization, servitude, and immiseration to another world of war, servitude, colonization, and immiseration. Neither the Aztecs nor any other polity of indigenous peoples qualifies for sainthood. Hernando Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors could not have taken central Mexico so quickly without the assistance of tens of thousands of indigenous allies eager to free themselves from brutal overlords who, according to one scholar, ran a “theocratic anti-state whose rigidity might have made Albert Speer faint.” Several decades before Columbus’s arrival, for example, the Huaxtecs of the northern Gulf Coast revolted against their Aztec oppressors and were crushed. The victors marched tens of thousands of captured men, women, and children to the Aztec’s capital city. The adult males were connected by cords that passed through perforations in their nostrils. For days, thousands of Huaxtecs, perhaps more than 20,000, were sacrificed at ceremonial centers before capacity crowds. Their hearts were cut out, Apocalypto style, with dull stone knives. The Maya and the Inca also showed a predilection for bloodletting.Whatever the net balance of Columbus’s demonstrable sins when weighed against his remarkable achievements, his “Enterprise of the Indies” set in motion the formation of an Atlantic world with sustained and intensifying contacts between peoples on four continents. Over the ensuing centuries of exploration, successful and not, the design emerged of an orderly system of trans-Atlantic commerce—one that, along with considerable human suffering, also brought enormous and undeniable benefits to the world’s peoples. Determining who won and who lost defies any simple calculus. The point on Columbus Day should not be to ignore or absolve Columbus, the Spanish, or anyone else of their prejudices or their complicity in horrible acts, but to appreciate the complexity of history in all its unsentimental and tragic unloveliness. On Columbus Day, we might reflect on how it is the extraordinary self-criticism brought about by the concept of personal freedom that germinated in Western culture—and Western culture alone—that has permitted modern critics to excoriate Columbus. “I, like the more honest of my race,” wrote Derek Walcott, a writer of African descent who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, “give a strange thanks . . . for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift.” Amen."