Luke.stirling

A Caique Phoenix enjoying the thrill of seeing oneself in a mirror. [via]

Talking about making a fuss, those crazy boys at Goldsmiths have been at it again.

There’s a new J&M collection available! Wrong again, God boy (see sidebar) contains strips from Sept 2012 to November 2015, and it has a foreword by Ophelia Benson. You can buy it here.

This month’s raffle prizewinner is Steven from Manchester. He wins a signed copy of the new J&M collection, “Wrong again, God boy“. Congrats!

Scott Smith and his family moved from the USA to the Netherlands and discovered that despite living in the most heavily surveilled moment in human history, neither his old country nor his new one can figure out how to relate to them. (more…)

The Mozilla Foundation stopped active development of the Thunderbird stand-alone email client in 2012, a year before Edward Snowden's revelations about mass email interception by spy agencies sparked an exodus from webmail platforms. (more…)

https://youtu.be/W4BzJm4-Wo0

“Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name lyrics "and now you do what they told ya" sounds like 'break the chicken nuggets, daddy' in Japanese,” says Redditor seasalty_. “A television show made a video about it.”

New comic!

I hate this season.

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Here’s a question that would seem to have a simple, obvious answer: When is it ok to describe an alleged multiple murderer with a history of violence as a “gentle” man?

The correct answer is of course “never,” but the New York Times managed to get this question wrong in a profile of alleged Planned Parenthood killer Robert Lewis Dear over the weekend.

Here’s the opening of the story, preserved for posterity by journalist Jack Mirkinson:

Yep. A “a gentle loner,” except for all that violence and murdering. It’s a bit like calling someone a “Good Samaritan — who sometimes throws babies into traffic.”

After assorted folks on Twitter pointed out that “gentle” was perhaps not such a good adjective, describing-an-alleged-violent-murderer-wise, the editors quietly removed “gentle,” ultimately replacing it with “itinerant.”

But as Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) points out, this was not the only way in which the Times seemed to be weirdly giving a pass to Dear. Times writer Richard Faucett managed to work some strangely exculpatory descriptions of Dear into a profile of the shooter, as remembered by his ex-wife.

As Naureckas notes, we find the word “gentle” once again applied to a man who was, by all accounts, anything but gentle.

She recalled a big man, well-groomed, gentle and pleasant, but not much for chitchat.

The original headline to the piece,

Ex-Wife Recalls Colorado Gunman as Imperfect but a Good Man

And then there was this bit, echoing one of the standard ways in which people try to excuse domestic violence:

Mr. Dear could be angry at times, she said, sometimes angry with her. But he was the kind who usually followed a flash of anger with an apology.

Yeah, because THAT’S HOW ABUSE WORKS. Phony remorse is one of the primary ways abusers hold onto those they abuse. Hell, it’s one of the freaking stages in the Cycle of Violence:

While the Times has changed the headline of this piece, the rest of this language remains in the story, unchanged.

Naureckas makes the obvious but necessary point:

Needless to say, the New York Times is not in the habit of going to the family members of people accused of committing terror in the name of Islam and reprinting their fond recollections. Nor is that the treatment given to African-American men accused of killing cops. In fact, African-Americans killed by cops are more likely to get the “he’s no angel” treatment from the cops.

Yep.

 

The Kepler telescope has found 685 systems with 1705 exoplanets, and you can watch them whirr around together in this mesmerizing animation by astrocubs.

The data is from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. I made the visualization in Python: source code available here.

The fact that the worlds and systems we've observed are so different from our own is a limitation of our observations, not of the universe.

The orbits are shown to scale, but the planets are much larger than the orbits would suggest. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them. The planets are not to scale with one another, either. Also, the orbits wouldn't be perfectly circular, though I guess the animator might have made the simulation adhere to the laws of planetary motion an all the observed worlds have roughly-circular orbits. Of course the solar systems aren't this close tog—look, sshhhh, just watch it, it's pretty.

For nigh on a week, the internet hollered at Reader's Digest to remove malware from its website, to no apparent response.

The attack consists of a malicious script injected within compromised WordPress sites that launches another URL whose final purpose is to load the Angler exploit kit. Site owners that have been affected should keep in mind that those injected scripts/URLs will vary over time, although they are all using the same pattern (see IOCs below for some examples).

The website of popular magazine Reader’s Digest is one of the victims of this campaign and people who have visited the portal recently should make sure they have not been infected. The payload we observed at the time of capture was Bedep which loaded Necurs a backdoor Trojan, but that of course can change from day to day.

Dan Goodin got exasperated: Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days.

Reader's Digest has been infected since last week with code originating with Angler, an off-the-shelf hack-by-numbers exploit kit that saves professional criminals the hassle of developing their own attack scripts, researchers from antivirus provider Malwarebytes told Ars. People who visit the site with outdated versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and other browsing software are silently infected with malware that gains control over their computers. Malwarebytes researchers said they sent Reader's Digest operators e-mails and social media alerts last week warning the site was infected but never got a response. The researchers estimate that thousands of other sites have been similarly attacked in recent weeks and that the number continues to grow.

1.

If you would like an ill-informed passive-aggressive quip, go to 2. If you would like earnest outrage, go to 3. If you would like to hear the voice of reason that really isn't, go to 4.

2.

What give$, Readers Digest?

3.

They're probably being paid to do it, isn't that disgusting?

4.

Guys, it's Readers' Digest. They're all 120 years old and have no idea what a website is or why they have one.

Thousands of National Security Letters are sent annually, don't need a judge's signoff, and it's illegal to tell anyone you got one. What do they demand? Web browsing history, the IP addresses of everyone corresponded with, all online purchases, and more.

(more…)

I’m grossed out all over again. A famous male porn star has been accused of rape by multiple women, and guess what clueless men are saying now?

(Trigger warnings all over the place…it’s ugly stories all around)

So familiar…we got the exact same noise when women stepped forward to accuse Michael Shermer of rape and sexual harassment. The same crap about conference anti-harassment guidelines. You aren’t allowed to say anything — you’re supposed to sit back and wait for Official Law People to do everything, despite the fact that years may have passed, those Official Law People did nothing, the Official Law People have a reputation for trivializing sexual offenses against women…and women who actually had sex? Those sluts had it coming.

It gets worse.

Once a woman has had sex, apparently her “cavities” are all public property, not belonging to her anymore. There’s another, similar case going on: ex-fighter War Machine is in court, claiming that his brutal assault on ex-girlfriend Christy Mack wasn’t rape, because she was a porn star who liked rough sex. He broke her face and left her hospitalized, but he doesn’t think that was anything she should have objected to.

You can’t win. If women have sex, they become sexual property. If they don’t have sex, if they mention that they don’t want children, then failure to perform certain physiological functions is grounds for harassment.

Why aren’t all women throwing open their windows and screaming at the world? None of this makes any sense.

---

Ooh, also: I learned a new metaphor, the missing stair. That’s useful and powerful.

There sure are a lot of missing stairs in the atheist/skeptic communities, but we’re getting better about pointing them out. It’s too bad the landlords don’t do anything about actually fixing them.

I assure you: you’re seeing the image correctly. Jimmy Fortel presents this glorious retro television for all of your family flashback needs. Complete with bright colors, knobs, and no remote, this excellent little build is packed full of nostalgia.

And by nostalgia I mean that hideous (and yet so wonderful!) wall-paper.

Conveying raw strength with stance and proportion is something the recent Hulkbuster set did really well, but this “dreadnaughtwhammer” by chubbybots blows it right out of the water. It’s got so much going on, so I won’t zero in on all of it, but I have to point out the use of the brown barrel pieces on the arm as a great way to break up the shapes as well as proving some color variance.

Be sure to check out the builder’s photostream to see the progression of this model.

Well, it does happen occasionally. I’m pretty sure Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators were all correctly identified as terrorists, and I think Eric Rudolph was, too.

But in general? Because privilege. Anyone who argues against that wants to sell you something.

She knows what’s up.

On November 27, a mass shooting left three dead and nine wounded at a Planned Parenthood clinic just miles from the headquarters of the Religious Right flagship, Focus on the Family. Was the shooting exactly what conservative Christian presidential candidates and members of congress wanted? Maybe, maybe not. But it is what they asked for. Republican members of the Religious Right incited violence as predictably as if they had issued a call for Christian abortion foes to take up arms. Inciting violence this way is called stochastic terrorism:

“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.”

In an incident of stochastic terrorism, the person who pulls the trigger gets the blame. He—I use the male pronoun deliberately because the triggerman is almost always male—may go to jail or even be killed during his act of violence. Meanwhile, the person or persons who have triggered the triggerman, in other words, the actual stochastic terrorists, often go free, protected by plausible deniability.

She’s also not afraid to name names.

We can be confident that communications teams for Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and others are scrambling at this very moment to figure out the nuances of plausible deniability—weighing how best to distance themselves from the violence that killed a police officer and two others without making their protestations of surprised dismay sound as hollow as they actually are—without actually denouncing the disgust and dehumanization of women who have abortions and those who provide them.

But of course they’re going to get away with it. They’ve got obedient masses who were trained in the churches to obey authorities.

The man who murdered people in a Planned Parenthood clinic was a “gentle itinerant loner”, accorded to the New York Times. He went to church, read the Bible cover to cover, and had an assortment of guns, so I guess he couldn’t have been that bad. He just wanted to be left alone.

At least they don’t say he’s crazy, the usual go-to excuse when a white man goes on a misogynistic murder spree. Progress! But they still don’t take that necessary next step of noting that someone who tries to intimidate people with violence is, of course, a terrorist. Terrorism is only a word to be deployed against Muslims, it seems.

But still, you can read between the lines. You know how after a psychopath is caught, there’s usually a litany of interviews with former neighbors saying how he was such a perfectly normal, ordinary guy? Not with Robert L. Dear.

Mr. Davis said he was unsurprised to see Mr. Dear, whom he described as “a pretty poorly adjusted guy,” emerge as the suspect in the Colorado shooting.

“I think I would have thought he was a guy who would go on a rampage,” he said. “We were very wary.”

The most chilling line to me was just a few words from Dear:

On Cannabis.com, the writer said in December 2005: “AIDS, hurricanes, we are in the end times. Accept the LORD JESUS while you can.”

Have you ever noticed that while Americans will freak out over Muslims praying on an airplane, we think nothing of the huge army of death-cultists in our midst, people who are certain the world is going to end soon (and welcome its destruction!) and who want to steer our representatives and policy towards Armageddon? No big deal. A bunch of smiling used car salesmen live among us, own whole television networks, serve in congress, and they grin and assure us that our death is imminent and well-deserved, and we shrug and ignore them until one snaps and opens fire with his constitutionally protected semi-automatic rifle.

It’s so reassuring to know that the New York Times will report our demise in its blandly neutral tone, as long as the shooter is good white Christian.

We atheists don’t need better leaders; we need leaders who are willing to step back and stop dominating the conversation, and dominating badly. Once again, Richard Dawkins has bungled the big conversation we ought to be having. Once again, he seems obsessed with a 15 year old kid who made a clock.

I could be sympathetic. I agree with Dawkins that suing the school that suspended him for $15 million dollars, as Ahmed Mohamed’s parents are doing, is absurd and unjustifiable, especially when it got him so much positive attention. There is a point to slapping the school down hard for prejudiced behavior that they don’t seem to realize even yet that was bad and bigoted, but to the tune of many millions of dollars? It’s a ridiculous sum that is just going to dissipate what good will he had, and inflame people like Dawkins who resented his notoriety already.

But Dawkins goes further. Yes, he made a clock. Yes, he reassembled components from a clock to do it, but that is still a legitimate effort. It’s like complaining that someone built a circuit board with a standard timing chip, and then claiming that they didn’t really build it because they didn’t design the contents of the IC. Or like claiming that The Selfish Gene wasn’t a real contribution because it just repackages the work of Maynard Smith and Hamilton (no, I’m not arguing that: despite having no new math or observations, that book was a powerful telling of the story). A kid taking electronics apart and putting it together again isn’t revolutionary, but it’s a step in his education that ought to be encouraged.

And now the anti-Muslim sentiment has gone too far. Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher — a combination to bring out the worst in both — got together to damn everything Muslim.

Oh, that’s their culture, you have to respect it, Dawkins said mockingly.

That’s right! That’s what they say. It’s just insane, Maher said, swooning.

Liberal about everything else, but then this one exception, ‘It’s their culture.’ Well, to hell with their culture, Dawkins concluded, to a storm of applause and a passionate yelp of approval from Maher.

To hell with their culture? I despise all religions, and I can sneer at every hateful thing that emerges out of a culture, every culture — but to ignore the good to condemn the bad, to make sweeping dismissals of entire complex traditions…I am sorry, Professor Dawkins, but that is bigotry. To forgive the sins of one culture because of the things one likes about it, while damning another culture wholesale because you don’t like certain parts of it (even when those parts are unforgiveably evil) is something that perpetuates conflict.

Keep in mind that Dawkins likes many things about his culture.

‘I’m kind of grateful to the Anglican tradition,’ he admits, ‘for its benign tolerance. I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do… I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green. I have a certain love for it.’ Would he ever go into a church? ‘Well yes, maybe I would.’

There are billions of people who are culturally Muslim, who have fond sentiments about their experiences and traditions within Islam. What would Professor Dawkins say if one of them said, “To Hell with Western culture”, citing genocide in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, witch burnings, inquisitions, wars of mass destruction, racism, and colonialism? How can you talk about evensong and cricket matches, as if they somehow excuse the rot at the core?

And I can predict his answer, because I’ve heard its like many times before: that Christianity has mellowed, is less destructive, and doesn’t inspire the frenzy of hatred that Islam does, and all of those horrors are in the past. To which I would only say…racist police, Planned Parenthood killings, murders of trans gender people, Scott Lively, Westboro Baptist, the American prison system, the drone war, unfettered capitalism, our predatory attitude towards the environment.

How many cricket fields am I permitted to shit upon for all that? How many Anglican hymnals shall we burn to repudiate those other heinous products of our culture?

Every ex-Muslim can recite a litany of horrors that Islam perpetrates. But I don’t think most would argue that we need to erase the history of the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, and contributions all around the world. We should not ignore the Islamic gifts to literature, poetry, music, mathematics, and science; we must not forget that these are human beings who may feel the deepest love for their culture as a whole, even as they deplore aspects of it.

I want to embrace Islamic culture as a significant part of the human experience, even while I reject the barbarisms within it, exactly as I am a child of Western culture who wants to see our flaws recognized and corrected. My hope for the future isn’t a world of uniformity, but one where we can enjoy each others’ differences and not kill each other for them.

Richard Dawkins is a smart guy, and we see these glimmerings of appreciation for the complexity of human life (how can he not, as a biologist?) in his writings — I hope he can see that he’s taking the wrong path. Even more importantly, I hope atheists everywhere can learn that he’s not the atheist leader we need…and that maybe we shouldn’t be looking for a man to tell us what to think at all.

swagyoulater:

Couldn’t have said it better myself

Yes, he’s a terrorist.

fakescience:

fakescience:

One of our earliest science lessons: fitting, since our new free book features many dinosaurs.

Learn about our interactive story “You’re A Scientist” - free in digital, free to print, and with a giftable copy available.

oldfutures:

On This Day

November 28

1975 • Space:1999 - Episode: Alpha Child

1971 • Earth II (TV Movie)

1967 • The Invaders - Episode: The Captive

1965 • Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea - Episode: The Silent Saboteurs

1965 • My Favorite Martian - Episode: Avenue C Mob

1964 • Doctor Who - Episode: The Daleks

1964 • The Outer Limits - Episode: The Inheritors Part 2

1963 • Planet Patrol - Episode: Time Stands Still

1953 • Space Patrol - Episode: The Doom of Planet X

1953 • Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers - Episode: Money-Makers of Juno

1953 • The Secret Files of Captain Video - Episode: Envoy of Death

1952 • Tales of Tomorrow - Episode: The Invigorating Air

OldFutures

“In case anyone was wondering how the Republican presidential candidates feel about the shooting that took place in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood earlier today, their silence says it all. Not a single Republican candidate has made any kind of statement, ten hours after it began. No empty calls for prayers or even distasteful victim-shaming pro-gun rhetoric. Marco Rubio somehow found time to tweet about sales in his campaign shop and Donald Trump decided this was a good enough time as any to release a statement insulting a disabled journalist for asking too many questions. Democratic candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have both expressed their support for Planned Parenthood and their condolences for the victims.”

- Republican Presidential Candidates Silent On The Terrorist Attack They Incited |

torteen:

itsthelittlebluecar:

You can have your turducken…I prefer the meaterprise

The turkey is for Thursday’s traditional Thanksgiving feast…the meaterprise is for Friday’s hodgepodge leftover celebration! Right? Well, it is at my house!

https://twitter.com/oradebug/status/670382277788983296

mydrunkkitchen:

I don’t understand people that use judgement and criticism to somehow get the results they want. Like parents who tell their children that they are living in a sty and it’s filthy and disgusting and all that stuff. Does that sound motivating to you? It’s like “Oh. Thank you for taking a shit on my existence. I absolutely want to clean it now.”

Why can’t more people be like “Hey, I’ve noticed you’re living in squalor. Are you depressed?” or even better like “You know, honey, you always feel more motivated and happier when your room is clean. Want to spend some time doing that? We can go to lunch later if you get it done this morning.”

I mean like… that sounds awesome, right? Compliments? LUNCH??? I’m game. I trick myself with rewards all the time. For instance, right now I just finished breaking down a bunch of boxes for recycling. You know what my reward was? Writing this!

Anywho. Brain thoughts.

Vtech is a ubiquitous Hong Kong-based electronic toy company whose kiddy tablets and other devices are designed to work with its cloud service, which requires parents to set up accounts for their kids. 4.8 million of those accounts just breached, leaking a huge amount of potentially compromising information, from kids' birthdays and home addresses to parents passwords and password hints. (more…)

The new Raspberry Pi Zero is a $5 general purpose computer, manufactured in Wales, with more power than a 1980s personal computer. (more…)

https://youtu.be/JhuYzIQ1Zos

In China, a cable got snarled in the rotating broom of a street sweeper. A reddit user who understands Mandarin explained what happened in more detail:

A telephone pole was being installed. There was a steel cable that was coiled on the road that (they believed) should have been no problem for cars going over it. The street sweeper truck on the right went over it and wound up the cable in the rotating cleaner. The other end of the cable was attached to the pole on the left of the video. The cable was brought taut and caused all that damage to the trucks and car.

Martin Shkreli, the hedge-fund douche-bro who hiked the price of an off-patent drug used by AIDS and cancer patients from $13.50 to $750, then promised to lower the prices after becoming the Most Hated Man on the Internet did no such thing, because he is a liar. (more…)

The Katering Show Season 2 - Premiering on iView in 2016
iview.abc.net.au

Guys! You've waited so long and been so patient. But now the wait is over. It's finally here! Another fucking update about The Katering Show Season Two. You're welcome.

Get more Katering:
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