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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."
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A lady at CNN is upset that a man on death row will be killed via lethal injection because his lawyers claim he has a rare condition that will make him bleed internally and chocks on his own blood...if he is lethally injected.

But really it’s because she thinks the death penalty is only about “barbaric revenge”.
This Supreme Court ruling is exceptionally cruel


9:50 PM EDT April 2, 2019


Editor's Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in Washington and the author of the book "The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness." Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.


Russell Bucklew is on death row in Missouri, and the United States Supreme Court just gave that state the go-ahead to kill him in one of the most torturous and cruel ways possible. Bucklew, who has a rare condition that leaves his body riddled with bleeding-prone tumors, will convulse, choke, and eventually suffocate on his own blood if he is executed by lethal injection, according to his lawyers. If this is true, his death will be slow. It will be brutal. It will be excruciatingly cruel.


A nd according to Neil Gorsuch and the other right-wing members of the Supreme Court, it will be legal, even in the face of the Eighth Amendment, which says in full, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."


Previously, the Supreme Court had, in accordance with the Eighth Amendment's bar on cruel and unusual punishment, held that inmates who would essentially be tortured by the standard methods of execution could be killed in another, less painful way. The court never required that executions be painless, and indeed recognized that killing a person usually means he feels some pain (this fact alone should disturb any decent human being). But previous iterations of the Supreme Court typically held that, where less potentially painful methods of execution were available, they should be used.


This court has gone in a different, exceptionally barbarous direction. As long as a state isn't intentionally trying to make an execution super-painful, they say, then it's fine. At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern cuts to the chase, writing that with this decision, "five justices of the Supreme Court authorized Missouri to torture a man to death."


The United States is already an extreme outlier when it comes to the death penalty. We are in the company of the world's very worst human rights abusers when it comes to the number of people we execute: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, and Somalia. More than a hundred countries (that is, most of them) worldwide have abolished the death penalty; some others have death penalty laws on the books, but don't utilize them.


In the United States, the death penalty serves no purpose other than raw, barbaric vengeance. It is more expensive to keep someone on death row than it is to sentence them to life in prison. Whether a person receives a penalty of death depends more on their race, the race of the victim, and which state they live in than on the crime itself -- black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty, as are people whose victim was white, as are defendants tried in the South. That's not blind justice; it's racism that means some people live and some die. And that certainly is not how the criminal justice system is supposed to operate.


Many studies have been conducted on whether or not capital punishment has the deterrent effect of lowering homicide rates, and nearly all of them conclude that it does not. Between 1973 and 2016, 150 people on death row were found to be innocent and released. It's indisputable that there are many more innocent people who are sentenced to death; many have surely been killed by the state.


Human beings are capable of remarkable cruelty, and many of the crimes that land people on death row are horrifying. It can be tempting to let our most basic human instincts decide that people convicted for doing the unthinkable should pay with their lives.


But we can also choose, like most of the rest of the world, to evolve, to recognize that the state should simply not have the right to murder its own citizens, and to see that the stakes are simply too high to exact such an extreme and permanent penalty.


Instead, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has embraced its most barbarous impulses, and denigrated our constitution in the process. Human beings who act with that level of cruelty -- who torture, who murder -- should be the ones we put in jail. And those who put a legal veneer on judicially-sanctioned torture and murder shouldn't be the people interpreting our laws from the most vaunted bench in the land.
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This is apparently the guy: http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/bucklew-russell.htm
 
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SteelPlatedHeart said:
A lady at CNN is upset that a man on death row will be killed via lethal injection because his lawyers claim he has a rare condition that will make him bleed internally and chocks on his own blood...if he is lethally injected.

But really it’s because she thinks the death penalty is only about “barbaric revenge”.


This is apparently the guy: http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/bucklew-russell.htm
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So, anesthetize him first. Problem solved. He's almost certainly full of shit anyhow. I like how the article is STILL somehow about to turn this into a race thing when the guy is white.
 
Why can't we just shoot them up with a bunch of phentonyl(I'm sure I spelled that wrong)? They get the high of a lifetime, we get to make them dead and not feel bad about their suffering, and it's readily available. Win win!

I mean... the death penalty is at least partially about vengeance, but then, the justice system in general is partially about vengeance. Due to human psychology being what it is, the appearance of justice is as important or more than any sort of rehabilitation.

The problem with someone getting away with a crime isn't that one person and that one crime, it's that people take it into their own hands if they don't feel justice is being served. Random people are worse at justice than the state, usually, so then someone else wants justice for the previous attempt at justice. See all human conflict ever.

Human civilization is about keeping the human apes from freaking out and throwing shit all over everything. Quality of life, advancement of the species, science, etc, these are all secondary. We can't do any of those things unless the shit flinging is kept to a minimum.
 
Corbin Dallas Multipass said:
Why can't we just shoot them up with a bunch of phentonyl(I'm sure I spelled that wrong)? They get the high of a lifetime, we get to make them dead and not feel bad about their suffering, and it's readily available. Win win!

I mean... the death penalty is at least partially about vengeance, but then, the justice system in general is partially about vengeance. Due to human psychology being what it is, the appearance of justice is as important or more than any sort of rehabilitation.

The problem with someone getting away with a crime isn't that one person and that one crime, it's that people take it into their own hands if they don't feel justice is being served. Random people are worse at justice than the state, usually, so then someone else wants justice for the previous attempt at justice. See all human conflict ever.

Human civilization is about keeping the human apes from freaking out and throwing shit all over everything. Quality of life, advancement of the species, science, etc, these are all secondary. We can't do any of those things unless the shit flinging is kept to a minimum.
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I think we should just give them a gun with one bullet and then make them read A&H until they kill themselves
 
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It's hard to decide on which thread, I should left this vlog from Timcast who talked of Twitter who blocked the French government with its own fake news law. Talk about a case of "be careful for what you wish for" and the unintended consequences. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47800418

Twitter blocks French government with its own fake news law
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A social media campaign from the French government has been blocked by Twitter - because of the government's own anti-fake-news law.

Since December, France requires online political campaigns to declare who paid for them, and how much was spent.

But now Twitter has rejected a government voter registration campaign.

The company could not find a solution to obey the letter of the new law, officials said – and opted to avoid the potential problem altogether.

The #OuiJeVote (Yes, I Vote) campaign encouraged voters to register for the European elections ahead of the deadline.

It was operated by the French government information service, which had planned to pay for sponsored tweets, according to news agency AFP.

Twitter's refusal to take money from the state to promote the message baffled many in France. One MP, Naïma Moutchou, tweeted: "I thought it was an April Fools!"

Interior Minister Christophe Castanter also took to the platform to express frustration with the decision.

"Twitter's priority should be to fight content that glorifies terrorism. Not campaigns to register on the electoral lists of a democratic republic."
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Ginger Piglet said:
Today on breakfast television, a woman who calls herself Kimberel Eventide and claims to be actually an elf.


Her explanation for this involves lots of misunderstanding of quantum physics.

Good Morning Britain's pedigree as a point and laugh show confirmed beyond all doubt.
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Time for another Kinslaying.
 
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chicago.cbslocal.com

Aurora Police Investigate If Boy Found In Newport, Kentucky, Is Timmothy Pitzen, Missing Since 2011

Detectives from Aurora are heading to Cincinnati, to check into reports a boy found wandering in nearby Newport, Kentucky, claimed to be Timmothy Pitzen, who has been missing for nearly eight years.
chicago.cbslocal.com chicago.cbslocal.com
Detectives from Aurora arrived in Cincinnati to check into reports a boy found wandering in nearby Newport, Kentucky, claimed to be Timmothy Pitzen, who has been missing for nearly eight years.

Newport police told CBS affiliate WKRC-TV a 14-year-old boy found wandering a neighborhood told officers he had been kidnapped and his name is Timmothy Pitzen. The boy was taken to a local hospital and later transferred to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Cincinnati is across the Ohio River from Newport.

WKRC-TV reporter Brad Underwood said witnesses told him the boy’s face was bruised and “he was very scared and agitated”.

Police in Sharonville, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, were alerted by other law enforcement to check a Red Roof Inn.

The 14-year-old told police he was being held by two white men with bodybuilder builds. He said one man has black curly hair, a spider web tattoo on his neck, and was was wearing a Mountain Dew shirt and jeans. The other man is described as short with a snake tattoo on his arms.

The boy told police he was staying with the alleged kidnappers in a Red Roof Inn, but he didn’t know where it was located. He described the vehicle the men were operating as a newer model Ford SUV with unknown Wisconsin license plates. It is white with yellow transfer paint, a dent on the left back bumper and a second row.

Authorities in Campbell County in Kentucky alerted surrounding agencies with Red Roof Inns in their jurisdictions about the incident.

Aurora police confirmed they were notified about the boy in Newport. Detectives from Aurora arrived in Cincinnati Wednesday afternoon and were meeting with FBI officials.

Timmothy’s grandmother, Alana Anderson, of Antioch, said she hopes the boy found in Kentucky turns out to be her missing grandson.

“Don’t want to say anything until I know for sure. I just don’t want to comment until I know for sure, praying its him and he’s okay,” she said.

Timmothy has been missing since May 2011, when his mother, Amy Fry-Pitzen, was found dead inside a Rockford motel room after slitting her wrists.

Six years old at the time, Timmothy was last seen with his mother around 10 a.m. on May 13, 2011, when he accompanied her as she checked out of the Kalahari Resort at the Wisconsin Dells. Timmothy’s father had reported them missing the day before.

The two apparently visited Brookfield Zoo two days earlier and checked into the Key Lime Cove Resort in Gurnee on May 11, 2011. No one heard from either of them until Friday afternoon, when Fry-Pitzen called friends and family and told them she and Timmothy were fine and not in danger. Police said Timmothy also talked to at least one relative at the time and did not seem to be in distress.

Fry-Pitzen checked into the Rockford Inn on May 13, 2011, but Timmothy apparently was not with her. Her body was found in her motel room the next day. She left a note indicating Timmothy was fine, and she had left him in the care of unnamed people.

Aurora police said they are being very cautious about the reports the boy in Newport says he is Timmothy, as there were several false sightings of the missing boy in 2011.

Police have received several tips in the intervening years, but have found no sign of Timmothy.

Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age-progressed image of what Timmothy would look like at age 13.

Aurora police said they are being very cautious about the reports the boy in Newport says he is Timmothy, as there were several false sightings of the missing boy in 2011.

Police have received several tips in the intervening years, but have found no sign of Timmothy.

Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age-progressed image of what Timmothy would look like at age 13.
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www.wcpo.com

Everything we know about the vanishing (and fake reappearance) of Timmothy Pitzen

A skinny, bruised young man found in Newport on Wednesday said he was an Illinois boy who had been missing for years. According to federal investigators, he was lying.
www.wcpo.com www.wcpo.com
 
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motherboard.vice.com

An Internet Fan Fiction Archive Is Nominated for a Hugo

Archive of Our Own is a finalist in the prestigious Hugo award's Best Related Works category—which means thousands of fanfics are Hugo finalists.
motherboard.vice.com motherboard.vice.com
An Internet Fan Fiction Archive Is Nominated for a Hugo
Archive of Our Own is a finalist in the prestigious Hugo award's Best Related Works category—which means thousands of fanfics are Hugo finalists.

Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. LeGuin’sThe Left Hand of Darkness, andNeuromancer by William Gibson—these classic Hugo award nominees, everyone has heard of. But what about the thousands of fanfiction works all addressing the question, “what if Steve Rogers and Tony Stark from the Avengers fucked?”

This week, the Hugo awards—a set of literary awards given to the best science fiction and fantasy works of the year—announced that Archive of Our Own (Ao3), a massive internet fanfic archive, is a finalist in the Best Related Works category for 2019. If the archive wins a Hugo this year, hundreds of thousands of user-created transformative works—much of it horny, weird, and beautiful fan-made takes on existing pop culture like the aforementioned Avengers fanfic—will join the past and current honorees.

According to its website, Ao3—a project founded in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit organization dedicated to making fan-made work more widely accessible—contains 31,810 user-submitted fandoms (subcultures of existing works), 1,864,000 users, and 46,83,000 individual works, accumulated in the 10 years since its launch. All of these are now nominated for a Hugo.

Read more: The Forgotten Early History of Fanfiction

The winning award in the Best Related Works category is given to a non-fiction science fiction or fantasy work or collection. Basically, this is a catch-all category for works that don’t fit in other categories like Best Novel or Best Short Story. Past winners in the Best Related Works category have included encyclopedias, story compilations and biographies.

Becca Farrow is an illustrator and writer whose short story based on an alternate universe (AU) for the anime Free! Is archived in Ao3, and is now up for a Hugo. Farrow told me in an email that when she wrote the piece, she was just writing for herself: “In retrospect I wrote it as a coping mechanism for post-grad anxiety and stress,” she said.

She posted the story to Ao3, and didn’t expect the positive reaction it received from the community of readers.

“I've had so many people reach out and thank me for writing it because they were able to use it to help work through some of their own mental health things, and that's the part that I thought was the most important,” she said. “One of my favorite parts of fanfiction wound up becoming the connections I could make with people who were using it to create the stories they needed to hear.”

A lot of fanfic (some now Hugo-nominated) is also created just to make others laugh.

Writer Caelyn Ellis told me in a Twitter message that she doesn’t write a lot of fanfic herself, but does have one piece on the Archive of Our Own. The work is “an intentionally-terrible, 233-word piece ofDragon Age smut that I wrote for a group of friends based on a silly joke,” she told me, adding that she’s quite amused that it’s now, technically, up for the top prize in sci-fi literature.

“The fact that this is now a Hugo-nominated piece of writing is absolutely glorious and I'm going to be grinning about it for weeks,” she said.

Read more: Amazon Is Burying Sexy Books, Sending Erotic Novel Authors to the 'No-Rank Dungeon'

Another writer, who goes by “spidersrorg” and sometimes posts stories about cannibalism to Ao3, told me in a Twitter message that this nomination is significant because fanfic authors aren’t often treated seriously as other authors. “It’s nice that all of our unrecognized work is being recognized,” he said.

A writer who goes by “sass” online (but whose Ao3 pen name is “yggsassil”) told me in a Twitter message that fanfic is important to him because it’s an accessible way to express love for a series or fiction.

“I think it’s actually pretty amazing that Ao3 got nominated,” he said. “It means that fanfic—or really transformative fiction in general—is finally getting taken seriously... Also, it’s just really cool to be able to say some of my weird fanfic got nominated for a Hugo award.”

Ellis told me that this nomination represents something bigger than the wild world of online fanfic going up for a prestigious award—it’s a moment to recognize marginalized voices.

“There are so many great writers uploading work there and it's such a valuable service the site provides, especially considering the rocky history of fanfic,” Ellis said. “At a time when minority groups are still struggling to find representation in mainstream media, fanfic writers are doing an admirable job picking up the slack.”
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ATaxingWoman said:
www.dn.se

Johan Schück: Fler nya svenskar ger ökad chans att klara välfärden - DN.SE

Krönika. Det går bra för Sverige, jämfört med de flesta länder. Samtidigt växer befolkningen vilket i längden är till fördel.
www.dn.se www.dn.se
View attachment 713561
Dagens Nyheter 2015: The birth rate is too low! We need more immigrants in order to save the Swedish welfare state!

www.dn.se

Vill du göra en stor insats för klimatet – skaffa inte barn - DN.SE

Skaffa färre barn för miljöns skull?Det är det mest effektiva sättet att minska sin miljöpåverkan, visar forskning från Lunds universitet.
www.dn.se www.dn.se
View attachment 713560
Dagens Nyheter 2019: Don't have kids! The more kids you have, the more you contribute to climate change! (But we will still advocate for lax immigrant laws)

I sometimes think Swedish mainstream media couldn't possibly become more shameless, but they manage to prove me wrong every time.
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Even the first one have toned down the certainty and optimism. "More new Swedes gives an increased chance to handle the welfare state" - 10 years before that there was no doubt that it would not only solve everything but push us to new heights. Hm...
In 2025 they might argue that we need to import two million hard working Chinese to offset the low work rate of the other immigrants. In 2035 we might need five million Germans to balance out the influence that the PRC suddenly have over Sweden. But how will we deal with all those Germans ten years later? That's the beauty of it, when nuclear winter comes everyone dies and we don't have to pay out pensions anymore. Problem solved.
 
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http://www.dagensjuridik.se/2018/09...hyreskontrakt-skarpningar-pa-bostadsmarknaden

Short summary and a bit of background because I'm not translating that.
The living situation, especially in Stockholm, is completely fucked. There's nowhere to live and there's a black market of selling second hand contracts, or even third hand contracts, for rental apartments and jacking up the rent. The sellers can be involved in organized crime, it's a racket they're running. It's even stretched out into the troubled suburbs where no one sane wants to live and it wasn't uncommon for immigrants to get apartments like that, they weren't paying the rent anyway so what do they care, but welfare services have cracked down on that in recent years and are unwilling to pay for those kinds of apartments. (part of that is also the scam factor, the person living there isn't registered as the inhabitant or have a contract, so they just have to take him/her on their word and there have been situations where a whole mess of different people supposedly lived in the same small apartment and they were just pocketing the rent money)

On to the article in itself.
There's a proposal for a new law that raises the penalties for selling contracts and also makes it illegal to BUY a second hand contract for a rental, with the maximum penalty for that being FOUR YEARS IN PRISON! That's equivalent to, let me run the numbers... 330 rapes of minors(a guy got convicted not long ago for close to a thousand rapes against boys, got 12 years, 14 years is the absolute maximum, his brother who he was raping with got 14 years though).
 
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https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/girl-cant-free-fries-mcdonalds-14234344
An 11-year-old girl was barred from claiming 'free fries' at McDonald's because of her age.

Mum Lynsey Mead said her daughter Amber was upset when she was allowed to purchase an adult meal but staff refused to let her redeem her winning promotional sticker.

Staff at McDonald's said that they could refuse her because she's under the age of 16, reports Hull Live.

Mum-of-one Lynsey from Willerby has called on McDonald's to give unbranded packaging to children who purchase food to stop promoting gambling.

She says it leaves children disappointed when they win but can't claim the prizes.


0_A-disgruntled-mum-has-been-left-furious-after-her-daughter-was-barred-from-claiming-her-free-fries.jpg

Amber had purchased her meal with her own saved-up pocket money (Image: Peter Harbour)

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Lynsey has called on McDonald's to give unbranded packaging to childrenREAD MORE

"At the end of the day, it's a game, but it's encouraging gambling for young children," said Lynsey.

"My problem mainly is that you wouldn't sell a child a lottery ticket and then a scratch card, but not be able to scratch it off or claim the fortune."

Lynsey had allowed the schoolgirl to go with her friend to the Willerby branch of McDonald's on the shopping park at the weekend.

The pair had purchased their meals with their own saved-up pocket money and Amber's friend had peeled off an "instant win medium fries".

0_A-disgruntled-mum-has-been-left-furious-after-her-daughter-was-barred-from-claiming-her-free-fries.jpg

Lynsey Medd with daughter Amber (Image: Peter Harbour)

However, when Amber went up to the counter to cash in the Monopoly token she was told she wasn't allowed the free food due to the fact she wasn't old enough.

"If I'd have been with her, I'm sure it would be fine, but McDonald's need to stop this promotion," said the mum-of-two.

"It probably would be better if McDonald's did ban her from going inside but all the kids love getting the stickers, don't they.

1_McDonalds-Shares-Hit-Record-High-After-Strong-Earnings-Report.jpg

Amber had a coupon for a free fries through the Monopoly rewards scheme (Image: Getty Images)
"But, on a serious note, I just think this promotion with the McDonald's stickers promotes gambling and promotes unhealthy eating.

"The larger meals have more stickers on them - so why wouldn't they want an adult meal, or a larger meal to get more stickers."

0_A-disgruntled-mum-has-been-left-furious-after-her-daughter-was-barred-from-claiming-her-free-fries.jpg

McDonald's says the rules on its popular promotion - barring Amber from claiming her prize - are clear (Image: Peter Harbour)

McDonald's says the rules on its popular promotion are clear - and that is the reason Happy Meals do not include stickers on packaging.

However, Lynsey says children of Amber's age range want more than just a Happy Meal because they aren't "filling enough".

A spokeswoman for McDonald's said: "In accordance with relevant advertising regulations, our Monopoly promotion is unsuitable for those aged under 16.

"To avoid causing unnecessary disappointment as a result of this age-restriction for the promotion, it is clearly stated on all McDonald’s Monopoly promotional advertising, packaging and on our website."

Prizes on the monopoly promotion range from £100,000 as the top prize, along with cars, expensive tech, holidays and free food and meal vouchers.
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What a terrible injustice!! She should sue them all!

No but seriously, only in a first country is something like this considered a horrible travesty. I hope her and her "mum" get diabeetus.
 
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