"An audit of lucrative resource deals in Liberia has found that almost all the concessions awarded by the government since 2009 have not been compliant with the law. In a damning report commissioned by the Liberian government, international auditors found that only two out of 68 resource contracts worth $8bn (£5.1bn) were conducted properly. Concessions granted in agriculture, forestry, mining and oil – including a lucrative deal with oil company Chevron – were either wholly or partially flawed."
Everyone else's life sounds more interesting than mine on the internet.
"(609): I just had sex in the men's bathroom of a Chinese buffet...
(856): YOU ARE MY HERO"
"(513): You're a five foot adderall and caffeine fueled ball of sexual frustration and suppressed rage. It's only a matter of time before you snap. We're taking bets on when."
"(801): Mid stroke she told me she'd had bigger. Replied I could tell. Sex ended right at that moment."
"(913): I'm drunk at 3:28
(816): I'm jealous as shit at 3:34"
"(573): Do you participate in Sunday morning booty calls?
(816): Dammit! I didn't see this message, of course I do."
"The battle for control of dangerous digital shapes may have just begun. On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
...that doesn’t mean the government has successfully censored the 3D-printable gun. While Defense Distributed says it will take down the gun’s printable file from Defcad.org, its downloads–100,000 in just the first two days the file was online–were actually being served by Mega, the New Zealand-based storage service created by ex-hacker entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, an outspoken U.S. government critic. It’s not clear whether the file will be taken off Mega’s servers, where it may remain available for download. The blueprint for the gun and other Defense Distributed firearm components have also been uploaded several times to the Pirate Bay, the censorship-resistant filesharing site...
Despite taking down his files, Wilson doesn’t see the government’s attempts to censor the Liberator’s blueprints as a defeat. On the contrary, Defense Distributed’s radical libertarian and anarchist founder says he’s been seeking to highlight exactly this issue, that a 3D-printable gun can’t be stopped from spreading around the global Internet no matter what legal measures governments take. “This is the conversation I want,” Wilson says. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing?”"
"Yesterday's dramatic congressional testimony about the deadly Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Benghazi, Libya convincingly corroborated what was widely reported within days of the attack: that senior American officials on the ground knew immediately, despite the Obama administration's storyline to the contrary, that the assault did not arise out of a "spontaneous" demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in protest of an obscure YouTube trailer of a homemade anti-Islam movie called Innocence of Muslims...
Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression...
It should give even Obama's strongest supporters pause that the same administration so wary about characterizing Benghazi as a "terrorist attack" was simultaneously so eager to characterize an artistic provocation as a (potentially criminal) incitement."
"In our culture, we socially reinforce shame in each other for our failed sexual intentions. You see it in movies and TV shows, where the bumbling idiot with the girl is always the loser character, where the sexually expressive character is almost always the bad guy. You see it in high school and colleges where kids make fun of each other for their unrequited sexual intentions. Many families in our culture refuse to openly talk about sex to their children. Kids are discouraged to “experiment” when they’re young. Nudity is something to be ashamed of and hidden. Public displays of affection are ridiculed and people are told to “get a room!” so others don’t have to be exposed to their sexual interest in one another...
The paranoia and fear, particularly in American culture, doesn’t help either. Girls cockblock each other out of some deranged honor code, as if every guy in every bar is America’s next serial rapist. Women are slut-shamed by both men and other women. Men are ridiculed for their lack of sexual conquests and then ridiculed even more for trying. There’s shame everywhere. It’s a sickness. It causes epidemics of emotional/sexual dysfunction. And it inspires weird and inefficient strategies of displaying affection...
AFFECTION THROUGH TEASING AND INSULTS
In the process of implying affection through other actions and words, it seems we agreed as a society to perceive teasing and insults as a socially acceptable form of affection and attention. This is most common in the UK, but exists everywhere in the English-speaking world. You bond with your friends by trashing them and embarrassing them...
When everybody decides that insulting someone in a humorous way is an indirect way to show affection, then it becomes the new norm. Guys make fun of each other. Girls challenge guys and are “sassy” when they actually like them. Men tease women and attempt to make them insecure and vice-versa. All of these behaviors aren’t just avoiding the actual emotions and intentions, but they become the socially acceptable way of demonstrating sexual interest.
A society that agrees that sexual interest should be demonstrated through dehumanizing and insulting another person is a screwed up society.
...The two best-selling dating advice books for men and women are The Rules (for women) and The Game (for men). In The Rules, women are advised to pretend they don’t like men that they’re actually interested in. They’re told to make him call her multiple times and to pretend to be unimpressed with him at all times. In The Game, men are advised to “neg” women into being insecure about themselves, usually about their appearance. This is honestly what we’re taught in our culture.
... teasing and some natural jibing between friends or two people who trust each other, there’s nothing wrong with it. It can be good, honest fun. The problem is when it becomes a basis of showing affection and appreciation to one another.
Different cultures developed different cultural norms to enforce this social order. Latin cultures have an intense fixation on romance, jealousy and possessiveness (it’s no coincidence that they have more infidelity than anywhere else). Islamic cultures do it through pure fear and retribution. Hindu culture does it by arranging marriages. Japanese culture does it through codes of honor and integrity. And the English-speaking cultures do it through shame. There is no “good” solution in any of these. All of them are repressive in their own way. Ours is repressive in that it inhibits open communication. It’s no surprise that the English-speaking countries have the highest divorce rates in the world (and it’s not even that close)."
"Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness
Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians...
Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one. I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments."
"...we must recognize that police are incentivized to go after certain crimes -- like drug crimes -- and not other, far more heinous crimes, like rape. In the first place, federal cash giveaways make police departments' reactions to drug cases much more swift and severe. “The statistical demands of the drug war and the grants that come from the federal government --- all they do is incentivize our local police to chase drugs and chase seizures so they can supplement their budgets," Downing said. "We call that 'policing for profit.'” Furthermore, allowing military training of local police has “turned our police into drug warriors,” instead of “police officers and peace officers.” “Every police department, every sheriff’s department, and the federal government have personnel that are dedicated 100 percent of the time to drug enforcement,” said Downing, “and the result of that is to use police resources for that purpose.”"
Even I've heard this one. Like most urban legends, utter nonsense.
"Myth: Marilyn Monroe was a size 12-16. From Roseanne Barr stating, “I’m more sexy than Pamela Lee or whoever else they’ve got out there these days. Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. That says it all”, to Elizabeth Hurley stating, “I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat…I went to see her clothes in the exhibition, and I wanted to take a tape measure and measure what her hips were. She was very big”, you’ll often hear people saying Marilyn Monroe was around the same size as the average American woman today (12-16). In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, at least by today’s sizing systems.
How this myth got started isn’t exactly known. One possible contributing factor to this myth was Marilyn Monroe’s atypical extreme hour glass shape. More directly, it probably partially stems from the fact that women’s sizes today are not at all equivalent to women’s sizes in the 1950s. In the 1980s, in order to accommodate people’s vanity and ever expanding girth, the U.S. Department of Commerce got rid of the uniform sizing system and instead allowed for more ego stroking sizes. As a result of this, today, a size 8 would have been roughly equivalent to a size 16-18 in the 1950s, obviously though this varies a shocking amount from brand to brand.
...So what size was Marilyn Monroe actually? Luckily, many of her dresses, carefully preserved, are still around to measure off of. Further, one of her dress makers also chimed in with exact measurements he took. Those measurements were 5 ft. 5.5 inches tall; 35 inch bust; 22 inch waist (approximately 2-3 inches less than the average American woman in the 1950s and 12 inches less than average today); and 35 inch hips, with a bra size of 36D. Her weight fluctuated a bit through her career, usually rising in times of depression and falling back to her normal thereafter, but her dressmaker listed her as 118 pounds and the Hollywood studios tended to list her between 115-120 lbs.
...As a direct example of her size, the white dress she wore in The Seven Year Itch was recently auctioned off and was put on a mannequin that was a size 2, but they were still unable to zip up the dress as the mannequin was too big."
"One [story] is about the asshole CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, who is pursuing a niche marketing strategy (which has never happened before in the history of the world).
...Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t even MAKE clothing above a size 10 for women because ASSHOLES, obviously. And we are talking an American size 10, which is pretty fricking roomy.
See this chick, with her beefy thighs and huge belly and rolls of back fat? 
She’s a size 12. That’s how fat you have to be before you can’t shop at A&F...
This is about a business targeting a very specific market and offering exclusivity. Why? Because you can charge a price premium, that’s why. It’s not a novel concept. Why do people go to Starbucks when they can get pretty similar coffee at 7-11 for a quarter of the price?
Starbucks sells the Special Snowflake illusion. Why there are 87 000 possible drink combinations! For a mere $5, we will brew something that meets your exacting and exquisite taste. It’s all for you! And only you!
...Of course, Starbucks sells 8.2 million cups of coffee every day, so the odds that you ain’t really that special are pretty good. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? Oh who cares.
A&F follows a similar strategy. They want young, attractive, cool people to buy their clothes and part of the value is that ONLY young, attractive and cool people CAN buy their clothes. Actually, anyone a size 10 or under can buy their clothes, but you will feel young and attractive and cool because MARKETING...
Okay, so A&F are jerks for excluding fat people, but Destination XL is awesome for excluding thin people? It’s all part of the same mindset: have your cake and eat it too...
We can have stores for fat people, and stores for all people, but we can’t have stores for thin people. We can have gyms for everyone and gyms for women, but we can’t have gyms for men. We can have clubs for everyone, and clubs for women, but we can’t have clubs for men.
...they are all on the wrong side of history. Fat people are a biological anomaly. Humans were not intended to be fat, which probably explains all the negative health consequences that come along with choosing to eat until you can’t move."
"Victim culture. Victims of misogyny, Victims of Crimes, Victims of Abuse, Victims of The System, Victims of The Obesity Epidemic, Victims of Cancer, put down your whine and Listen Up, because I have had it with your self-pity bullshit. No matter what has happened to you, if you are still alive and reading this, you are not a VictimTM. If someone, professional or otherwise, has brainwashed you into thinking that you are a Victim you need a serious dose of reality. Sure, the attention feels good. The constant bathing in showers of pity and sympathy from friends, family and total strangers can be addictive, but you must let it go. The endless well-intentioned, hand-wringing and cheerleading masses will bombard you with “poor-baby, this isn’t your fault” for the rest of your life. If you foolishly accept that, you die. You are actually killing yourself by drowning in your own personal sea of self-pity or, worse, anger towards your perceived offenders, and, trust me, you are strong enough to withstand being offended once in a while, and eventually, you won’t even bother being offended, you will just roll your eyes and walk away."
"It’s not my fault! “It’s genetic/medical/baby-weight-gain/blah-blah-blah and moo-moo-oink.” This is the shopping cart of a fat woman and her fat family.
Boxes. Bags. Barcodes. Ingredient labels a freaking mile long. That’s why you are fat. You are too lazy to cook your food yourself from scratch you silly piggies. That and you probably need to get more exercise than lifting the feed bag to your mouth. Read the freaking labels. Do you have that shit in your kitchen? OK then – don’t eat it! See how simple that is? Take cottage cheese. It should have three ingredients, not fifteen. Cream, which I love in my coffee, should have one ingredient listed on the label, and that is – gasp! – Cream. Nothing else, because, duh. If that’s too difficult try this method: See the carrots? Know what’s in them? Carrots.
...If you are fat, then you know who else is fat and unhealthy? Yep. Your fat-ass kids. Stop abusing them by providing them crap to eat and shut off the TV and video games and send them outside to get some sunshine and learn to use their minds to entertain themselves and burn off some of that nasty, nasty life-ruining fat. Once, again, it goes back to the labels. If the yoghurt you are eating, or the cheese, or the sour-cream is fat-free, you’re doing it wrong. Those things are made from fat. If some food processing voodoo is used to take out the fat, it is being replaced with chemicals. Pay attention: They have removed the nutrients and replaced them with chemicals; poisonous, toxic chemicals.
"Natural_Red is married. Young brunette Samantha would stop if she got a boyfriend. Nina1987, a fan favorite, is a medical student. Some worry about being found out. Others have been recognized dozens of times. All of them are naked on Reddit. These are the ladies of r/gonewild, an amateur porn community where “normal” women, like those at the grocery store or in English class, upload nude or sexually explicit photos of themselves for a grateful, complimentary (and occasionally rude) online audience.
"Described as a “mature, low-pressure environment for true exhibitionists,” GoneWild (or GW) is one of the premier destinations on Reddit, with around 3,000 viewers at any given time. The community is overseen by a team of eight moderators, who help manage an average of 278 submissions and 4,779 comments per day, according to Stattit. Both men and women can post to GW, though women contributors far outnumber men. Photos are submitted regularly by users, so the posts update constantly.
...Natural_Red, a 24-year-old who works in advertising and design, came to the subreddit during a rough patch three years ago. “I was kind of in a boring slump in my life, going to school and work, then coming home, eating dinner, and going to bed,” she wrote. “This was something new and exciting, so I thought, Why not?” It’s a common reason for posing nude on r/gonewild. The six women I interviewed said they wanted to do something out-of-character, taboo, and “brave,” something to prove they were secure enough to show their bodies on the Internet. Some just wanted honest feedback..."
"I had a HUGE problem with negativity until I was 26 years old. The ironic part is- I didn’t even know it. Concerning this matter- ignorance isn’t bliss. Negativity can seriously lower your quality of life, prevent your from accomplishing your goals and even take years off your life by keeping a constant level of cortisol (stress-hormone) circulating in your veins. It can even make you fat (again, cortisol). Negativity is a lifestyle. Not a healthy one. The good news is, using a lot of suggestions below I was able to become a super positive person and reap the benefits.
#1 ADMIT THAT YOU ARE A NEGATIVE PERSON
(and that it’s negatively effecting your life…)
Just like Alcoholic’s Anonymous- the first step is admitting you have a problem. I grew up in Washington DC. The people in DC smile a little more than people in Philadelphia and New York. But not by much. It’s a goal driven, socially-cutthroat and high-stress city. Just that type of environment tends to produce very uptight, pessimistic and sometimes- straight up ANGRY people. I was one of them. It never occurred to me that I was a negative person. I liked to think of it as “realistic” or “happy but never satisfied”... It wasn’t until I moved out west to San Diego, where everyone is smiling, playing or high, that I truly realized that I was a pretty negative person. At first, I had a difficult time fitting in – everyone was always so happy and positive... I realized that my life great. It probably always had been. I just never let myself realize it. I thought back to my life on the East Coast (in DC and Florida) and how there was always one-more-something I needed to do to be happy (lift a certain amount of weight, be a certain weight, have a certain GPA, buy a certain item, hook up with # girls, etc.). I realized how many hours I spent in my head thinking “what is wrong”. I realized how many hours I had spent with friends “venting” (just bitching about stuff and not doing anything about it) and listening to them do the same...
#2 IDENTIFY NEGATIVE THOUGHT PATTERNS...
#3 RECOGNIZE NEGATIVE BEHAVIOR FROM OTHERS...
#4 DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM NEGATIVE PEOPLE...
#5 STOP BEING SARCASTIC...
#6 STOP BEING A HATER...
#7 DO WHAT YOU WANT...
#8 GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK. ..
#9 REWARD YOURSELF...
#10 RECOGNIZE YOUR ACCOMPLISHMENTS...
#11 NO MORE NEWS, NO MORE POLITICS.
The people I know that watch the most news and political commentary are also that MOST NEGATIVE people I know. Case in point- My Family. They have no idea how hard it is for neutral/positive people to be around them... 99.99% of the stuff in the “news” doesn’t even effect your life and even if it does- you can’t do anything about it and it can put you in a bad mood...
#12 CLEAN YOUR ROOM!
#13 LOVE SOMEONE OR SOMETHING OTHER THAN YOURSELF...
#14 GET SOME SUNLIGHT...
#15 SET ONE SMALL, SPECIFIC, ACHIEVABLE GOAL...
#16 STOP MULTITASKING...
#17 START EXERCISING / STOP EXERCISING... #18 HAVE AT LEAST ONE NEW EXPERIENCE EVERY 10 DAYS...
#19 USE BOREDOM TO DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE...
#20 DO ANYTHING ELSE THAN BE NEGATIVE...
#21 EVERYTHING YOU DO SHOULD HAVE A PURPOSE YOU CAN DEFINE..."
"We’ve all gotten used to those ubiquitous pump-topping TV screens that scream inane chatter at us while we wait for our hilariously overpriced gas to top up. But what if one of them started talking directly at you? Such is the nature of this "Tonight Show" prank, in which a talking head on a gas pump screen charmingly bantered with Will Sims. Sims took the prank in-stride (we would have screamed "Big Brother is watching!" and fled the scene) and then, with the help of his wife, Monifa, the couple dipped into some impromptu karaoke with more charisma and musical talent than an episode of "American Idol." Well played, guys! People — the best thing about the world."
"Lawmakers from both parties sharply questioned the Justice Department late Monday over its reported effort to secretly obtain two months of phone records from Associated Press journalists, with House Speaker John Boehner’s office saying “they better have a damned good explanation.” The AP disclosed the department’s actions Monday afternoon, revealing that the news service had recently learned the department obtained records listing outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of AP reporters and various AP offices. In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012."
History is instructive.
Oh, Japan.
"...it all began in 1912 when Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan for The All-Story magazine. When the Earl of Greystroke, his wife and their infant child are marooned on the African coast, things get worse — the wife dies, an ape named Kerchak kills the husband, and the little Earl is taken in by Kerchak’s tribe and raised by an ape named Nala. "
Well, this is just awesome.
Some new TV looks really good.
And some old, as well.
Afghanistan is such a huge fuckup. I watched all 90m of this, and it's worse than you probably think. If you think about it at all.
