US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died yesterday. The news travels quickly, these days. Wikipedia was the first to break the story to me. “…Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the Court’s conservative wing” was the sitting terminus to his introductory paragraph. “Then he died”, appended a…
Order of Operations is a Lie
If you know anyone over 40 on the internet, you have probably come across some image with literally hundreds of thousands of likes/comments/tweets/whatever: What is 2 x 2 + 3 x 4 ? 99% of people won’t get this! There are only 5 actual comments, made tends of thousands of times over: 40 28 16…
The Puppet Queen Bey
The key to the Super Bowl‘s awesome power as an entity is its egalitarianism. For what is essentially a holiday that emerged from a football game, it commands the cultural gravitas it does because it manages to trap far more than just football fans into its maw. Aside from the godawful, overrated ads that attract…
Musings on the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl is it’s own weird holiday. For the most part, only a few people are going to have a horse in the outcome of the football game. Not that the culmination of the NFL season isn’t worth a watch for football fans, it commanded this year an impressive 112 million viewers. This is…
Is HR Biased Against Fat People?
The Germans say “yes”, although their study leaves much to be desired. This article was brought to my attention by a friend, so let the record show I take requests. “Stigmatization of obese individuals by human resource professionals: an experimental study” You can skip the part under “Abstract”. That’s just the teaser. The paper itself…
Insecure Comedians and Ads Masquerading as Editorials
A 17-year-old kid attended some shindig and managed to grab a selfie with comedian Amy Schumer. This kid, being one of those young people always doing shit on their phone, reflexively posted the picture to his Twitter account, because he is a normal 17-year-old. In the longstanding tradition of accompanying pictures with captions, the young…
Central African Republic Anticipates Shot At Being Republic Again
The Central African Republic will be holding a runoff election at the end of the month after none of the prospective presidential candidates received a majority of votes this past Friday. Accusations of fraud have come from about 20 of the 30 candidates who applied for the job, but despite trepidation, the election seemed to…
Saudi Executions and Iran Row
Saudi Arabia started off the new year by executing 47 people in a single day, many of them convicted as terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda and involved in terror attacks during 2003-2006. One of the condemned was a Shia cleric named Nimr al-Nimr, who was convicted of “seeking ‘foreign meddling’ in the kingdom, ‘disobeying’ its rulers,…
The Oregon Militia Standoff
Tl;dr version: A militia group occupied a park office to protest ranchers who were given trumped-up charges for setting controlled fires on land the feds shouldn’t own, but they forgot to bring enough food so PETA send them vegan jerky. A self-described militia organization occupied an office building at the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s…
Stop Apologizing!
Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do. It’s a free country–don’t tread on me! A comic on my Facebook feed triggered my wanting to write this, but I’ll save it for the end because it’s substantively different than what’s been irking me. This is one of those thing’s that’s floating around the aether. It…