October 30, 2015

Let us all have a good laugh at the leaked playbook for Jeb's campaign:

Even before Jeb Bush's uninspiring debate performance Wednesday night, his sputtering presidential campaign was working to prevent defections.

Bush's top lieutenants convened with donors in sopping wet Houston on Monday to calm their fears and retrench for the unforgiving haul ahead.

After the confab, Bush's team distributed a 45-page PowerPoint presentation to select reporters, summarizing an optimistic view of the race, touting the Republican candidate's cash and organization, and assuring supporters that early polls are rarely indicative of ultimate success.

But in that leak to select media, the campaign purposely left out more than half of what was furnished behind closed doors.

The full presentation, obtained exclusively by U.S. News, spans 112 pages and includes a trove of new details, including Bush's internal polling, his vote goal in Iowa and his advertising plan for January.

Additionally, while the slides released to the media outlined Bush's overarching argument against Florida Sen. Marco Rubio – that he's the GOP's Barack Obama – the complete offering contains more biting, detailed slights, pointedly questioning the character and ethics of Bush's home state rival.

The document provides a rare behind-the-curtain look at the gritty details of a campaign at a crucial inflection point. Here's a breakdown of the most illuminating pieces of intelligence contained in Bush's 2016 blueprint.


http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/run-2016/2015/10/29/jeb-bushs-campaign-blueprint

October 30, 2015

Can *anybody* explain this to me? Because I sure as fuck don't get it.

Students Walk Out in Support of Fired Deputy

Hundreds of students walked out of Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina on Friday morning in support of the deputy sheriff who was fired after violently arresting a black student. Students reportedly chanted “Free Fields” in support of Ben Fields, a school resource officer and football coach who was caught on tape forcibly removing a black student from her desk, allegedly because she was disrupting class. The students walked into the school atrium and then returned to class after administrators addressed them.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2015/10/30/students-walk-out-for-fired-deputy.html?via=twitter_page

http://www.live5news.com/story/30393934/spring-valley-students-stage-walkout-in-support-of-ben-fields

October 30, 2015

Gamergate: Video game war over women spills into real life

Los Angeles — Questions of sexism and video game culture once again spilled off the screen and into real life this week.

The popular South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, abruptly canceled two panels that focused on online harassment in video games. The reason for the cancellations: The festival started getting harassed, too. According to officials, the festival had received unspecified threats of violence if the panels went forward. Since then, SXSW has been in damage control mode, as major sponsors Buzzfeed and Vox Media threatened to withdraw if the panels were not reinstated.


The particulars are specific to the video game industry – a backlash to female game designers and players critiquing what they consider negative depictions of women and minorities in games. But the broader issues raised by the controversy are at the heart of today’s popular culture, some experts say.

Not only are festival organizers missing an opportunity to discuss the roles and perceptions of women, they add, but also the increasing use of violent media and real-life threats to express violent desires – whether or not they are ever acted upon.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/1029/Gamergate-Video-game-war-over-women-spills-into-real-life

October 30, 2015

What was fake on the Internet this week: Why do we even bother, honestly?

Typically, we use this space to debunk the various hoaxes, charades and conspiracy theories that afflict social media each week. But this week, I can’t do it. I must abstain. Because someone’s done a study on debunk efforts like this one, and bottom line? They’re all in vain.

To reach this heart-rending conclusion, Walter Quattrociocchi — the head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca — and a team of seven (!) other researchers studied how two groups of U.S. Facebook users interacted with news on the site. One group was comprised of people who interact with reputable science pages. (Those are the ones who presumably have a level of news literacy.) The other group was made of people who like far-out conspiracy pages — anti-vaxxers, Illuminati-watchers, that kind of thing.

They quickly came to two conclusions about the conspiracy and non-conspiracy groups. First off: They didn’t overlap at all, which means the misinformed, as we’ll politely call them, were unlikely to ever see the truth. And second, when the conspiracy group did encounter “debunking” information, it didn’t change their mind. In fact, it just made them more resolute: After encountering a post that challenged a conspiracy theory, theorists tend to like and comment on pages about that theory even more.

Do debunk efforts change people’s minds? Well — not really. The orange line shows the rate at which people stop engaging with conspiracy posts if they HAVE seen debunks. The green line is the same rate, but if they haven’t: It’s faster. (Quattrociocchi et al)

That counter-intuitive effect, Quattrociocchi writes, has something to do with the conspiracy echo chamber: Because social environments like Facebook allow users to mold it to their own tastes, they’re only ever exposed to people and information “that conforms with their beliefs.” (More research will be needed, Quattrociocchi has said, to determine if Facebook’s algorithms exaggerate that tendency; a controversial study, published last May, suggests that it does — albeit modestly.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/10/30/what-was-fake-on-the-internet-this-week-why-do-we-even-bother-honestly/?tid=sm_tw

October 30, 2015

Belief in ghosts rises across secular Sweden

Fake ghosts and ghouls will be taking to streets around Sweden this weekend, as towns and cities celebrate Halloween. But it seems that more and more people are embracing the idea of supernatural beings year-round.

According to a new survey, the number of Swedes polled who believe in ghosts has increased from 12 to 16 percent since 2008. The research was carried out by the Demoskop polling firm for The Swedish Sceptics' Association (Föreningen vetenskap och folkbildning), a not-for-profit organization designed to raise the public’s awareness of scientific methods and results.

Meanwhile 37 percent people asked for the study said that they believed in “paranormal phenomena” that could not be explained by science, up from 33 percent seven years ago.

The growing interest in the living dead comes amid a huge drop in belief in a god.

Only 21 percent of people quizzed said that they were believers, down from 35 percent. If the trend continues, this means that more Swedes could soon believe in ghosts than in a god.

"I’m not surprised at all," said David Thurfjell, professor of religion at Södertörn University, who has carried out separate research on the secularization in Sweden.

http://www.thelocal.se/20151030/belief-in-ghosts-rises-in-secular-sweden

October 30, 2015

Bloody brilliant:

Christina Welch@cwelch97
@BreeNewsome My daughter Madison dressed up like for heroes day at her school.





https://twitter.com/cwelch97/status/659932333789847552

October 29, 2015

Russia raids Ukrainian library in Moscow, arrests head

Armed, masked police raided a Moscow library specializing in Ukrainian literature, arresting its director before dawn on Thursday and carting off books that the authorities called illegal anti-Russian propaganda.

Russia's Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case against Natalya Sharina, the director of Moscow's Library of Ukrainian Literature, to determine whether she was guilty of inciting ethnic hatred and "denigrating human dignity".

Investigators had confiscated "anti-Russian propaganda", including "extremist" writings by Dmytro Korchinskiy, a Ukrainian nationalist author banned in Russia, the committee said. If convicted, Sharina could face up to four years in prison.

Kiev, which accuses Moscow of waging war on its territory on behalf of pro-Russian separatists in a conflict that has killed thousands of people, said the raid showed that the Kremlin had effectively outlawed expressing Ukrainian identity.

"This is another insolent act from the Kremlin aimed at intimidating the ethnic Ukrainian minority in Russia and launching a new round of repression against people linked to the Ukrainian language and culture," Ukraine's Culture Ministry said in a statement.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/29/us-ukraine-crisis-library-idUSKCN0SN0VI20151029?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

October 29, 2015

Crime scene photos, new info released in Charleston church shooting case

Source: WYFF NBC Channel 4

CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) —Charleston police released limited details including crime scene photos and documents relating to the fatal shooting of nine members of a Charleston church and the arrest of the suspect.

Information released includes photos taken outside the church on the night of the June 17 incident, photos inside the church taken days later after the crime scene had been cleaned, additional photos taken after the arrest of the suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, in Shelby, North Carolina the day after the shooting, and incident reports from police on the scene and dispatchers from the night of the shooting.

The release of information followed a Freedom of Information Act request. In response, Charleston Asst. Corporation Counsel Will Bryant explained the reason authorities were denying parts of the request in an accompanying letter addressed to "Members of the Media."

"While the public and the media have a legitimate interest in aspects of the case, those interests are not served by the release of gory and disturbing videos and photographs," he wrote "Nor is the interest of the public and media served by the release of information that would 'constitute an unreasonable invasion of privacy' of the families of the nine people who were killed in the incident or those who lived through it."

Read more: http://www.wyff4.com/news/crime-scene-photosnew-info-released-in-charleston-church-shooting-case/36116682

October 29, 2015

Astronaut Scott Kelly Hits Spaceflight Milestone

Source: ABC



No U.S. astronaut has been away from Earth longer than Scott Kelly, who today became the American astronaut who has lived in space the longest during a single mission. Kelly spent his 216th consecutive day in space today, surpassing the previous record held by U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria who spent 215 days in space as commander of the Expedition 14 crew in 2006.

Earlier this month, Kelly reached his 383rd cumulative day in space, beating astronaut Mike Fincke’s record of 382 cumulative days and cementing him as the American who has spent the most days in orbit.

The 51-year-old astronaut took the first spacewalk of his career Wednesday, lasting seven hours and 16 minutes as he worked on upgrades to the exterior of the International Space Station.

Kelly is set to return to Earth in March after spending a year in space as part of a NASA study to understand the effects of long-term space flight on the mind and body. His results will be compared to his identical twin, former astronaut Mark Kelly, who has remained on Earth.


Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/astronaut-scott-kelly-hits-spaceflight-milestone/story?id=34821206

October 29, 2015

70s gameshows sucked so hard it ain't even funny...

EDIT: I wasn't trying to say the Gong Show was bad; clearly some here let my double meaning of "SUCK" fly right over their heads...



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