‘Huge a**hole': People are mad at Jets coach Rex Ryan for wearing a #NYPD hat

A man of healing, a saga of suffering

e was a world-famous medicine man, a traditional healer and spiritual leader. Followers would travel long distances to this tiny hamlet on the Great Plains to be in his presence and pray in the darkness with him in a sacred sweat lodge.

But Charles Chipps Sr., a medicine man on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, had a dark secret, federal prosecutors say.

For years, they allege, Chipps sexually abused and raped girls, including some of his own daughters and granddaughters; many of the alleged victims were younger than 12 and several were as young as 5. A girl from Colorado whose aunt brought her to meet Chipps for spiritual guidance committed suicide after revealing the abuse she allegedly suffered.

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Child sexual abuse on the reservations is at the root of the many problems that follow for Indian children — depression, alcohol and drug abuse, juvenile detention and suicide, according to Indian country experts. The challenge of getting victims to speak out — common in child sexual assault cases anywhere — is exacerbated by the close-knit nature of the remote communities where they live.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/12/28/a-man-of-healing-a-saga-of-suffering/

Franken takes on Obama

Source: The Hill

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on Sunday called on supporters to reject one of President Obama's nominees to the Treasury Department.

Franken criticized nominee Antonio Weiss in no uncertain terms, arguing Obama had nominated the wrong person for the job of Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance.

He argued Weiss would not put the middle class first, and that he was too close to Wall Street.

"Join me in asking the President to withdraw Antonio Weiss’s nomination," Franken wrote in an email to supporters on Sunday, with a link to the petition. "We need a nominee who will put the middle class first."


Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/228141-franken-touts-petition-denouncing-obama-treasury-nominee

Straight into Compton: house prices soar as murderous gangs reach truce

WTF is Cultural Appropriation

The World’s Largest Clairvoyance Experiment Has Begun

Icelanders call it Berdreymin—the ability to see the future in dreams. On my travels collecting dreams from around the world, clairvoyance has been one of the most persistent themes. I've met Ukrainians in Donbass who report having dreamed about the war before it began, New Yorkers who recounted dreams of plane crashes and smoke-filled rooms on the morning of 9/11, and people across the globe who claim to have foreseen the deaths of loved ones.

Historically, there has never been a scientifically rigorous way to evaluate these experiences. Still, clairvoyance and other forms of ESP have been taken seriously enough that both the KGB and CIA had extensive Cold War Era programs. More recent experiments into the phenomena have yielded inconsistent results. Skeptics commonly cite false-memory research to dismiss believers, while supporters often blame unfavorable results on unrealistic laboratory settings.

A new app called Shadow is poised to answer skeptics and believers alike. The app records dreams (which you submit upon waking) and enters them into a massive database, allowing thousands of the time-stamped transcripts to be searched by keyword. Clairvoyance could be identified through specific keyword spikes before major events. While the app was first envisioned as an introspection tool for the Quantified Self Movement, it may end up finally answering a fundamental question about the nature of consciousness.

Read More: http://www.vice.com/read/the-worlds-largest-clairvoyance-experiment-has-begun-1226

Obama hopes to enlist GOP in push for trade pact, despite Democratic resistance

President Obama is preparing a major push on a vast free-trade zone that seeks to enlist Republicans as partners and test his premise that Washington can still find common ground on major initiatives.

It also will test his willingness to buck his own party in pursuit of a legacy-burnishing achievement. Already, fellow Democrats are accusing him of abandoning past promises on trade and potentially undermining his domestic priority of reducing income inequality.

The dynamic, as the White House plots strategy for the new year when the GOP has full control of Congress, has scrambled traditional political alliances. In recent weeks, Obama has rallied the business community behind his trade agenda, while leading Capitol Hill progressives, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have raised objections and labor and environmental groups have mounted a public relations campaign against it.

The administration is moving aggressively in hopes of wrapping up negotiations by the middle of next year on a 12-nation free-trade pact in the Asia-Pacific region before the politics become even more daunting ahead of the 2016 presidential campaign.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-hopes-to-enlist-gop-in-push-for-trade-pact-despite-democratic-resistance/2014/12/26/81236a34-8600-11e4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html

The attacks on the American middle class are relentless.

How Israel stupefies so many brilliant Jews

On the eve of Passover 1988, I was working at the Technion, Israel’s prestigious technological institute in Haifa, writing fundraising prose. It was a few months into the First Intifada, and Israel’s image had been taking a battering overseas like never before, with scenes being televised continually of heavily armed soldiers and tanks putting down a rebellion by teenagers with stones.

We workers in the administration building gathered for the traditional pre-Passover toast with the college president. In his remarks, he noted that many of us would be going abroad for the holiday, and that the issue of Israel’s high-profile behavior could well come up in our conversations with people who wanted to hear what Israelis had to say. His advice: “Speak in one voice.” All around me, people were nodding.

I found this pretty depressing. The president of a leading Israeli college sending the employees out into the world to be PR robots for the government and army. Did this happen in other countries, democratic countries? It was another example of the ultra-nationalism, conformist political thought and self-righteous paranoia that I didn’t like about the country – and it was setting the tone even at the top of one of its best colleges.

Since then, the Technion has come up in the world. Three of its professors have won Nobel Prizes for science, it’s going to share with Cornell a $2 billion campus being built in New York City, its international ranking has climbed and its fundraising has multiplied.

But in some ways, evidently, it hasn’t changed.

http://972mag.com/how-israel-stupefies-so-many-brilliant-jews/100418/

Americans don’t want to drink soda anymore

SodaStream International Ltd. (SODA) Chief Executive Officer Daniel Birnbaum says he has an answer to the share slump that’s keeping him awake at night: sparkling water.

The company’s shares have tumbled 57 percent this year as demand for its at-home beverage maker has stalled. With a recent Gallup poll showing Americans souring on sugared drinks, Birnbaum is shifting the company’s strategy from touting SodaStream as an environmentally friendly alternative to billions of bottles of cola, to focus on another virtue, health.

“We realized that there is a major transformation going on in the beverage industry in America, and it’s that Americans don’t want to drink soda anymore,” Birnbaum said in an interview at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. “What they really want to drink is water. Our product is already licensed to make sparkling water.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-23/sodastream-ceo-offers-h2o-to-skeptical-investors-israel-markets.html

Jesse Jackson: Get rid of foreign tech workers

Foreign high-tech workers are taking American jobs and making Silicon Valley's diversity problem worse, Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a Fortune interview.

"There are Americans who can do that work, and H1B workers are cheaper and undercut wages," Jackson said, referring to the class of visas most often used by tech workers. He said the tech community had a problem letting new people in and giving them opportunities.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102290336