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MEH!!!
MEH!!!
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JUNE 4TH- THE LADIES’ MAN
This Day In History: June 4, 1798
“As well as good looks he possesses the rare gift of befriending women. He has the knack of addressing them as if they were his equals, and undressing them as if they were his superiors.” – Casanova biographer Judith Summers
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, whose name became forever synonymous with a smooth talking playboy, died on June 4, 1798 at the age of 73. He packed a lot of living in those years. Along with his countless erotic exploits, he cavorted with the likes of Pope Clement XIII, Mozart, Voltaire and Ben Franklin. Casanova documented his colorful romps and adventures in the innocuously titled History of My Life.
Casanova started his life destined for the priesthood. He studied at Padua University and went to work for Cardinal Acquaviva, second only to the pope in terms of power and influence. The young cleric lost his position over a scandal involving a young lady. He left for Constantinople and Corfu, beginning a lifelong penchant for world travel. Among other things.
Living by his wits, charm, and exceptional good looks, Casanova made his way across Europe, as comfortable in royal circles as he was among the seedy, criminal underbelly. …
Bill Maher hammers Megyn Kelly’s Trump interview: ‘You know what was out of bounds? Journalism’
Real Time Bill Maher got upset with Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch on Friday when Welch listed Megyn Kelly as a journalist who has been able to stand up to Donald Trump.
“Can we go through this bullsh*t for a second?” Maher said. “Megyn Kelly asked him one tough question at the debate.”
He then recounted Trump’s belligerent response to the Kelly File host, which included insulting her in interviews and distributing online harassment from his fans toward her.
“Then she comes begging him for an interview where she says, ‘Nothing is gonna be out of bounds,’” Maher recalled. “You know what was out of bounds? Journalism. She didn’t ask one tough question. It was a profile in cowardice.” …
THANKS to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher for making this program available on YouTube.
Trump and the Fear of Evil in America
The U.S. presidential candidate appeals to white evangelicals in part because he taps into common suspicions.
Donald Trump is deeply divisive among the Republican base of white evangelical Christians in the U.S. In a recent story on NPR, one evangelical called the billionaire New Yorker a “reprehensible” and “wicked” man. A popular evangelical novelist, Joel Rosenberg, has said Trump “would be an absolute catastrophe as president.” Even so, Trump has done well enough among conservative Christians to become the GOP’s presumptive nominee. In May’s decisive primary in Indiana, where about half of Republican voters were white evangelicals, exit polls showed Trump winning their votes by a margin of six points over Texas Senator Ted Cruz. They preferred a man who has been married three times, and who has been pro-choice much of his life, to the most outspoken evangelical Republican in the race. Why?
Trump has promised to seal off the nation’s borders from perceived “outside” threats, namely Mexicans and Muslims. His signature policy proposal is to build a wall along the entire southern border, and he has called for a moratorium on allowing Muslims into the U.S. These proposals, and his habit of stirring up fears related to nationality and religion, no doubt speak powerfully to many his supporters. But that animus isn’t the primary source of Trump’s appeal among white conservative Christians.
For more than a century, white evangelicals have been unsettled and infuriated by what they view as the nation’s subversion—not by forces outside the nation’s borders, but those within its most powerful institutions. These actors have corrupted and secularized one sector after another, evangelicals argue, especially universities, public schools, and the federal government. …
What Does It Mean to Be a Republican?
Donald Trump is putting that question to the test.
Donald Trump’s surge has been anything but subtle. He climbed the polls throughout the primary season while his rivals exited the race one by one. His controversial rhetoric rarely made a dent on a campaign built on ardent, loyal supporters. And now, Trump’s candidacy is complicating the relationship between party identification and party allegiance within the GOP.
Historically, party identification is weaker among Republicans than Democrats. A Pew Research analysis released in 2015 found 23 percent of Americans identify as Republicans compared with 32 percent who identify as Democrats. The findings align with a pattern in the United States. As Pew put it: “For more than 70 years, with few exceptions, more Americans have identified as Democrats than Republicans.” But that may also be contingent on who’s running that election year—and in 2016, Trump poses a conundrum for the Republican Party. “Party ID is very strong, but that depends on the candidate actually being clearly a Republican,” said Tammy Frisby, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The nominee is expected to be the party’s standard-bearer, embodying its conservative values—even as they evolve. …
10 Graveyards Supposedly Haunted By Vampires
Although many people entertain the idea that ghosts may be real, few even humor the suggestion that vampires might exist. Likewise, the very notion of vampire ghosts probably drives most people to sniggers or outright bursts of condescending laughter. As crazy as it may sound, there are certain places in this wonderful world of ours that are supposedly haunted by real-life vampires. In this list, the places are cemeteries, and each one may have their own blood drinker or blood drinkers.
[Ed. Oh, goody… right down the road from here]
10. Lafayette Municipal Cemetery ~ Lafayette, Colorado
For some unknown reason, certain cemetery headstones attract urban legends. In Rhode Island, the headstone of Nellie Vaughn, which reads “I am Waiting and Watching For You,” garnered enough attention from thrill-seekers that they made the dead woman into the undead.
Elsewhere, ordinary headstones or ordinary tombstones become the objects of irrational fear. This seems to be the case with poor Theodore “Fodor” Glava, an immigrant laborer who died of influenza at the young age of 43. A pauper, Glava was given a simple headstone reading “Mr. Glava.” Even worse, Glava was likely buried in the same coffin right beside John Trandifir (sometimes spelled Trandofir), a fellow immigrant doomed to a cramped eternity because of his meager income.
Over the years, a legend began to percolate that claimed that Glava was a vampire. Supposedly a native of Transylvania (how convenient!), Glava was believed to have been a tall, thin man with dark hair and abnormally long fingernails. One could search for years and still not find better indicators of vampirism than these. …
Why Our Politics Are What They Are: The View From 3 Generations
The United States that 25-year-olds (top row) were born into is very different from the one of the 45-year-olds (middle row) and 65-year-olds NPR spoke with. Those differing circumstances and events have shaped very different political outlooks.
When it comes to politics, it’s voters’ life experiences that count, not just the experiences of the candidates they’ll vote for.
What national events have shaped your political views? And how do those similar events play out within and between generations?
NPR’s Robert Siegel put those questions to Americans in three different age groups: 25-year-olds, 45-year-olds and 65-year-olds. They are from different parts of the country and across the political spectrum.
Among them: a 25-year-old who joined the military during the economic recession, a 45-year-old who became a U.S. citizen under President Reagan’s immigration reform, and a 65-year-old who was one of the first black female firefighters in New York City. …
STOP USING PAPER CHECKS
Someone can empty your bank account with the information on the front of every check you write
You have to have a bank account these days. Without a bank account of some form it’s almost impossible to participate fully in our economy. You can’t buy anything which costs more than what you have in cash, be it a house, a car or even a mattress. You can’t borrow money from an institution. You find yourself constantly paying through the nose for things like check-cashing fees, a predatory practice which most Americans are privileged never to encounter. And you certainly can’t write checks of your own.
It turns out, however, that you probably shouldn’t write checks of your own – even if you have a checking account. The organization in charge of processing check payments says so explicitly: “stop using paper checks,” they wrote, in a statement to Fusion.
Why would they say such a thing? …
My present check register only contains information from June 2014 forward. Apparently, I haven’t written a paper check in more than two years.
10 Bizarre Ways Our Ancestors Explained Disease
We all admire and respect medical experts for their knowledge and ability to help us overcome various sicknesses and diseases. We forget, however, that doctors are only human and as capable of mistakes as the rest of us. This was especially true in the past, when the diseases that afflicted the human race led doctors and medical experts to some truly bizarre theories and explanations.
10. Spread Of Diseases Caused By Night Air
In the Middle Ages, the theory of miasma was born. According to this theory, “bad air,” which emanated from decaying organic matter, caused diseases such as cholera, Chlamydia and the Black Death. It seemed to worsen around swamps and during the night. Thus most people avoided the night air by going indoors and keeping their windows tightly shut.
When John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, two prominent American figures, were traveling together in 1776, they were forced to share a room in a crowded inn. Adams later noted in his autobiography that “the window was open and I, who was an invalid and afraid of the Air in the night (blowing upon me) shut it close.” However, Franklin objected and convinced Adams to reopen the window. The fact that a highly educated man like Adams, who later went on to become president, believed that nighttime air was noxious, shows us that the miasma theory was widespread and not solely limited to the poorer, uneducated classes. Indeed, doctors and other highly educated men supported the miasma theory for over a century. …
How to Listen to and Delete Everything You’ve Ever Said to Google
Here’s a fun fact: Every time you do a voice search, Google records it. And if you’re an Android user, every time you say “Ok Google,” the company records that, too. Don’t freak out, though, because Google lets you hear (and delete) these recordings. Here’s how.
Head over to Google’s Voice and Audio Activity page and start deleting all those recordings. You can delete them individually or all at once, just click the More > Delete Options > Advanced to get there. Each file will also have a plaintext transcript and recording information associated with it for your perusal. While you’re shoring up privacy settings, you can also tell Google to stop tracking which web pages you visit here, or turn off everything from a map of stored locations to YouTube watch history on this page. …
You Probably Don’t Need to Optimize Your SSD Anymore
When solid state drives were first becoming commonplace, most sites (our own included) suggested ways to optimize your SSD. With the exception of very rare cases, this just isn’t necessary anymore.
As tips site How-To Geek points out, most SSD optimizations involve reducing the number of writes you make to your drive. SSDs have a limited number of writes, so the more you use it, the more likely it is to fail. However, most modern SSDs have such a high write capacity that you’ll likely never reach that point before you need an upgrade anyway. As Tech Report puts it after an 18 month long stress test:
Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need. Errors didn’t strike the Samsung 840 Series until after 300TB of writes, and it took over 700TB to induce the first failures. The fact that the 840 Pro exceeded 2.4PB is nothing short of amazing, even if that achievement is also kind of academic. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JUNE 4TH- NATION’S FIRST MINIMUM WAGE
This Day In History: June 4, 1912
The state of Massachusetts enacted the nation’s first minimum wage law on June 4, 1912. The law only protected women and children, but since these groups were the ones most often exploited by unscrupulous employers (relatively speaking), it made a huge difference to those toiling in sweat shops six days a week for peanuts.
Conditions for working women at the beginning of the 20th century were certainly grim. Women were paid what their bosses saw fit to pay them – period. Working 10-12 hours a day was the norm. Women couldn’t vote in 1912, so weren’t exactly in a position to change things politically. The notion that women should make anywhere near what a man did was completely laughable. And the children working in the sweatshops fared even worse. …
Promising Drugs Stoke Talk of Cancer ‘Cures’
Robert Waag is alive and apparently cancer free more than two years after advanced melanoma reached his lungs, hips and other parts of his body – a feat only recently considered unthinkable for such patients.
Waag, 77, is on the immunotherapy Keytruda, a new type of drug that enlists the body’s defenses in the fight.
The first new immunotherapy drug for cancer was introduced in 2011, so long-term efficacy is unknown. But the approach is showing promise. Before these drugs, the prognosis for most patients with advanced melanoma was a year at best.
In one study of Keytruda, 40 percent of such patients survived at least three years, and 10 percent showed no evidence of cancer. …
Chinese Consumers Embrace New Balance’s ‘Made In USA’ Label
In an old brick mill building in Skowhegan, Maine, production line workers are cutting, stitching and gluing New Balance sneakers. The company calls them lifestyle shoes, better known for their looks than their athletic performance.
“The lifestyle shoes have really been on fire, especially with the younger market that we’ve been after for years. It’s more of an iconic fashion statement,” says the plant’s manager, Raye Wentworth. She is watching a steady stream of New Balance 1400s being assembled. They’re classic-looking sneakers in grey suede and blue nylon, with the letter N prominent on the sides.
Most of New Balance’s shoes are made in Asia, and Americans love them because they are cheap. It was Chinese factories, in part, that killed New England’s once-vibrant shoe industry. But some are still made in America, and in a twist on global trade, Chinese consumers, who love the American-made shoes for their high quality, are helping to keep some of New England’s last shoe factories afloat. They seek out that “Made in USA” label. …
5 Ways Adults See Their Best Memories Turn Into Nightmares
I’ve talked before about how, despite what adults tell you, your teens are not the best years of your life. There are some pretty awesome things that happen during that period, but your enjoyment of them has nothing to do with a lack of bills or not having to support a family. That’s what an adult says when they’re fed up with the stress of their own lives and projecting it onto yours. It’s short-sighted and idiotic. Suck it, mom.
It has everything to do with the little milestones that represent growing chunks of freedom. They are, in essence, rites of passage that mean you’re putting your teenage years behind you. You’re escaping. When they happen, you’ll mentally log those as some of the funnest times in your life. Then, when you get older, you’ll flip through your skull’s Dewey Decimal System, pull up those memories … and be absolutely goddamn horrified when you picture your own kids doing seemingly insignificant things like …
#5. Getting Their First Job
Why It’s Important:
Aside from just straight up giving your parents the finger and moving out of the house, getting your first job is the ultimate transition from adolescence into adulthood. If you work a night shift, curfew is more flexible. You likely have your own car, or will soon be buying one, so you’re not dependent on mom or dad’s level of sobriety in order to drive you places. If parents are the ones buying your clothes and entertainment, they likely have a say in what you get, so a job frees you up from all of that. It’s your money. You’ll buy a katana if you want to, goddammit.
In the general public’s idea of “adulthood,” the word “job” is more important than “age.” And it should be. I have 40-year-old relatives rotting away in prison right now because smoking foils and stealing shit was more important to them than seeing their kids graduate high school. Those people aren’t adults. The adults in their families are the kids who figured out this one basic financial formula: “Work for the shit I need. Save for the shit I want. Oh, and don’t fuck with meth.”
Don’t vape, either. It makes you look like a twat.
…
This ‘ancient city’ below the sea wasn’t built by humans
When tourists snorkeling near the Greek isle of Zakynthos first spotted mysterious structures about 20 feet under the sea, they thought they might have stumbled upon a lost city. And you can’t blame them: The site features what appear to be clusters of cobblestones and symmetrical stone cylinders with Hellenic flair. It’s easy to see the waterlogged structures and imagine a bustling square full of artists and philosophers.
A study published Thursday in Marine and Petroleum Geology confirms what archaeologists have suspected since the discovery of this “city”: It isn’t a city. But its real origin is just as cool, and perhaps even more surprising. These structures, which seem so obviously human-made to the untrained eye, were actually built by bacteria. …
Facebook officially addressed the conspiracy theory about listening to your phone calls
Conspiracists, stand down
Facebook has shut down rumors that it uses your mobile device’s microphone to eavesdrop on conversations so it can better target ads. In a statement issued on June 2nd, Facebook said it “does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed.” The company says it only shows ads based on people’s interests and other profile information.
Facebook is responding directly to claims made by Kelli Burns, a professor of mass communications at University of South Florida. Burns told The Independent this week that she thought the company was secretly listening to its users’ conversations, but had no concrete proof. …
10 Eerie Theories On What Happens Inside A Black Hole
Black holes are mysterious bodies that defy the laws of physics as we know it. We can barely grasp the concept of one. We don’t know for certain what exactly black holes exactly are of what they do. It’s impossible to know.
However, what we can do is observe black holes and then theorize on what they’re capable of. Henceforth comes the inevitable question: What would happen if someone jumped into a black hole? Well, here are 10 of the most eerie theories on what would happen if you entered a black hole.
10. Cloning
The black hole information paradox is an enigma that has eluded physicists for centuries now. It has been the trigger for endless debates on what actually happens once you enter a black hole. To fully understand the paradox, we’re going to need the help of your friend, Lucy. Lucy decided to back out at the last second and is currently watching you from afar as you enter a black hole alone. As you proceed closer, she sees you slowly get stretched until you eventually evaporate into a crisp. Lucy now thinks you’re dead and is glad that she didn’t listen to you.
But, wait . . . that’s not how the story ends. You’re actually still alive and well, and you’re venturing endlessly through the black hole. What actually happens to you next doesn’t concern us at this point. What is really intriguing, though, is the fact that you’re still alive, even though Lucy just saw you die.
This is the black hole information paradox. …
Tea, Pride, Mystery: For One Family That Fled The Nazis, A Tin Canister Held It All
Last month, the Two-Way reported on a discovery at Auschwitz: a mug that held a gold ring and necklace, painstakingly hidden from the Nazis and concealed for 70 years. The museum was unable to determine the owner of the jewelry.
A reader emailed soon after.
“I want to share a story of a similar object,” Sabina Rak Neugebauer wrote. “But in this case I know a lot about the people the object belonged to.” We called Sabina and her mother, Eda Rak, to hear the story of Sabina’s grandparents and their tea canister.
It was a rusty tin canister, about the size of a coffee can. Inside — always — were bags of Swee Touch Nee tea, with a distinctive, floral, sweet smell.
The tea was a hallmark in the home of Guta and Mayer Rak. Eda Rak remembers her parents drinking it out of tall glass cups, with a sugar cube between the teeth. It was more than a little embarrassing, she says.
Before World War II, Mayer Rak had been a writer in Europe. In the decades after, he worked in the garment industry in the Bronx. In between the two lives, he and his wife spent years fleeing Nazi and Soviet persecution.
They didn’t talk much about that time. And they didn’t talk about the tea canister, a humble-looking household object, at all. Until one day, they finally mentioned to their daughter that it might hold something more than tea. …
Feed the Beast: A Hot Mess of a Restaurant Drama
David Schwimmer and Jim Sturgess star in AMC’s tonally chaotic show about best friends opening a restaurant in the Bronx.
Feed the Beast, AMC’s new drama about two friends compelled by fate, financial ineptitude, and dramatic necessity to open a restaurant in New York, is a lot of things, but it isn’t afraid of metaphor. There’s its title, for one thing, which contains multitudes (but could also possibly be overworked TV writers making a point). There’s the way scenes are punctuated with close-up shots of flames being ignited. Most of all, there are the show’s parallels between food and addiction: the perpetual sniffing of a coked-up chef versus the exaggerated inhalations of a sommelier, the butcher who doubles as a drug dealer, the sense that being a restaurateur, like being an addict, is something you never recover from.
That it’s not a good show is clear fairly early in the first episode, but it is occasionally an interesting one. Tommy (David Schwimmer) is a widower struggling to raise his son after his wife was killed in a car accident, who’s declined from being an advanced sommelier to an alcoholic wine salesman. Dion (Jim Sturgess) is Tommy’s childhood best friend, a brilliant chef fresh out of jail who’s also a stupidly reckless cocaine addict in trouble with the mob. There are questions the show fails to answer right off the bat: Why does Tommy live in a vast empty warehouse? Why would anyone agree to do anything for or with Dion, a violent lunatic who burned down his last restaurant on purpose? Why is every primary adult character in a show set in the Bronx white? Answers are sacrificed in Feed the Beast’s quest to be 18 different things at once: a Bourdain-esque tale of bad-boy chefs made good, a gritty crime drama, a superhero show, a touching tale of familial reception. …
THE DC COMICS CHARACTER WHO GAINED HIS POWERS FROM COCAINE
Comics are littered with weird and obscure heroes and villains with powers that range from the mundane to the ridiculous, but there’s one character that ranks among the most “interesting” ever conceived- Snowflame, a villain with powers that were intrinsically linked to the character taking copious amounts of cocaine. As the character himself explained in the comic, “I am Snowflame, every cell of my being burns with white hot ecstasy. Cocaine is my god! And I am the human instrument of its will!”
Snowflame was conceived as a villain by DC writer Steve Englehart for an incredibly short-lived comic series called “The New Guardians”, appearing in just one of the series’ eventual 12 total issues. The New Guardians were a superhero team comprised of some of DC’s more obscure heroes and, according to the first issue, were specifically chosen to be an accurate representation of the various segments of the human race. It was also noted that the ultimate goal of the New Guardians was to pass on their genetically superior genes to the next generation. …
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