Tila Tequila’s face turned bloody this past Friday at the Gathering of the Juggalos, and I was onstage behind her when it happened. (…) This was the first year the Gathering of the Juggalos, an annual Midwestern pilgrimage for Insane Clown Posse fans, had scheduled a Ladies’ Night. (…) It’s worth noting that Insane Clown Posse fans routinely throw things at these annual Gatherings–many times at each other; many times at the humans onstage.
There were several rubber dildos hurled at her–pretty sure the sex toys missed her, but it was hard to keep track at the time– along with beer cans, Faygo containers, Stryofoam cups, liquor bottles, cigarettes, mustard, half a lemon, a pizza slice, a pearl bracelet, a pudding cup, an unopened can of ICP’s self-branded energy drink Spazmatic, part of a watermelon allegedly soaked in feces and urine, a clothed baby doll, a mini Mag Lite, a bag of chicken tenderloin. When Tequila first came out, a sign reading CUNT was there to greet her.
Over the past few months, we have learned about extraordinary levels of excessively bad corporate behavior.
As bad as the Bailouts were from an economic, wealth transfer, and moral hazard perspectives, it turns out that the grim reality was an order of magnitude worse than previously believed.
We have since learned that many TARP recipients, bailed out banks and other ne’er-do-wells were actively engaged in cooking their books. I don’t mean various FASB 157 permission to lie, and other legal but nefarious activities. I am referring to the 2002-2007 era of scams, frauds, and outright theft.
The public’s righteous indignation over the lack of just desserts for the perpetrators of these frauds has morphed since September 2008 into an unresolved, unfocused anger. When this all plays out, we might very well see bonus clawbacks, fines and penalties, disgorgement of ill gotten gains, and criminal arrests for some of the major names at the biggest brokerage houses.
Why do I think that 2 years later, some justice might be done? The truth is slowly coming out, as insiders provide testimony, release papers, and even offer up recordings of conversations to various investigators and prosecutors.
Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges.
What they do doesn’t show up in Google Finance, let alone in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. No one really knows how they operate or why. But over the past few weeks, Nanex, a data services firm has dragged some of the odder algorithm specimens into the light.
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
In his book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls From Today’s Pressures,” Stephen Hinshaw, chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that sexualizing little girls — whether through images, music or play — actually undermines healthy sexuality rather than promoting it. Those bootylicious grade-schoolers in the dance troupe presumably don’t understand the meaning of their motions (and thank goodness for it), but, precisely because of that, they don’t connect — and may never learn to connect — sexy attitude to erotic feelings.
That ongoing confusion between desirability and desire may help explain another trend giving parents agita: the number of teenage girls — 22 percent according to a 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy — who have electronically sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves.
The Instinctive Drowning Response is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.
To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents). (…) In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning.
1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
Although the current spill still limited to the US coasts of the Gulf, this accident is already unprecedented in history because its injury to such a large variety of ecosystems of uniquely rich biodiversity that is impossible to cleanup. As the oil asphyxiates mangrove trees, perturbs microbial communities and disrupts the ecological stability affecting animals and microbes throughout the food chain– It may be hundreds of year before these ecosystems recover, making it the worst and possibly the most far reaching of any previous oil disaster in the history of this planet.
A few years ago I decided that I’d be happy as long as I spent most of my time doing my three favorite things: reading, writing, and fucking (the three R’s).
General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.
President Merkin Muffley: You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war!
General “Buck” Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.
{ Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964 | imdb | Continue reading }
Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years
Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.
Errors in the way physicists estimate the effects of dark matter and dark energy on the leftover heat from the Big Bang has thrown their existence into doubt, say British scientists.
Physicists’ general model of the universe includes two ‘dark’ concepts.
Dark energy is a force that explains the way that galaxies accelerate away from each other, while dark matter was postulated to explain the observations that galaxies have more mass than can be accounted for by stars and gas.
Evidence for the ‘dark side’ comes primarily from studies of the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB), the leftover ‘glow’ from the Big Bang, which has been analysed in detail by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a NASA satellite telescope launched in 2001 that provided the first full-sky map of the CMB.
Now, some scientists say errors in the WMAP data may be larger than expected.
This would mean that there is no need to include dark matter and dark energy in models of the cosmos.
The Andy Warhol Film Project began in the 1980s when the Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) agreed to collaborate on the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema: to catalogue Warhol’s massive film collection, investigate its history, and preserve and re-release all of the films in conjunction with a program of scholarly research and publication.
