Author Archives: Thorzar

Guns Are for Shooting "All Black People" and Other Horrifying Quotes From the NFL’s Dolphins Investigation

by Thorzar Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In November, after Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin left the team due to bullying from teammate Richie Incognito, the NFL commissioned an independent investigation to look into the matter. The results of that investigation, released today, reveal a pattern of racist, homophobic, and generally awful instances of harassment that took place inside and outside the Dolphins’ locker room. Read the lowlights—which are vulgar and graphic—below.

Incognito leaves a racist voicemail for Martin (page 10):

“Hey, wassup, you half-nigger piece of shit. I saw you on Twitter, you been training 10 weeks. I’ll shit in your fuckin’ mouth. I’m gonna slap your fuckin’ mouth, I’m gonna slap your real mother across the face laughter. Fuck you, you’re still a rookie. I’ll kill you.”

Incognito and others taunt and harass an Asian American trainer (page 22):

Incognito, Jerry and Pouncey admitted that they directed racially derogatory words toward him, including “Jap” and “Chinaman.” At times, according to Martin, they referred to the Assistant Trainer as a “dirty communist” or a “North Korean,” made demands such as “give me some water you fucking chink,” spoke to him in a phony, mocking Asian accent, including asking for “rubby rubby sucky sucky,” and called his mother a “rub and tug masseuse.” Martin and others informed us that Incognito and Jerry taunted the Assistant Trainer with jokes about having sex with his girlfriend. Incognito admitted that these types of comments were made to the Assistant Trainer.

On December 7, 2012 (the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor), Incognito, Jerry and Pouncey donned traditional Japanese headbands that featured a rising sun emblem and jokingly threatened to harm the Assistant Trainer physically in retaliation for the Pearl Harbor attack. Martin reported that the Assistant Trainer confided to him that he was upset about the Pearl Harbor prank, finding it derogatory and demeaning.

Incognito and an anonymous teammate exchange text messages joking about shooting black people (page 103):

Player B: Fuck yea! That what I’m doin my .338 in. Badass

Incognito: That’s gonna be sick

Player B: Especially if u plan living in Arizona in the future, that’s exactly what you want

Incognito: Yea. For picking off zombies

Player B: Lol isn’t that why we own any weapons!?

Incognito: That and black people

Player B: Mmm def all black ppl

Incognito and others, including a coach, engage in homophobic taunting (page 19):

Incognito and others acknowledged that Player A was routinely touched by Incognito, Jerry and Pouncey in a mockingly suggestive manner, including on his rear end, while being taunted about his supposed homosexuality. Incognito specifically admitted that he would grab Player A and ask for a hug as part of this “joke.”

Martin said that on one occasion, Pouncey physically restrained Player A and, in full view of other players, jokingly told Jerry to “come get some pussy,” and that Jerry responded by touching Player A’s buttocks in a way that simulated anal penetration. Pouncey and Jerry both denied this allegation. Given the seriousness of this allegation and the conflicting recollections, we decline to make any findings about this particular alleged incident.

The evidence shows that offensive line coach Jim Turner overheard and participated in this behavior toward Player A. During the 2012 Christmas season, Coach Turner gave all of the offensive linemen gift bags that included a variety of stocking stuffers. In each gift bag except for Player A’s, Turner included a female “blow-up” doll; Player A’s bag included a male doll.

Incognito tries to get teammates to get rid of evidence—a “fine book” that lists financial penalties for offenses like wearing “ugly ass shoes” or being a “pussy” (page 42):

“They’re trying to suspend me Please destroy the fine book first thing in the morning.”

Martin tells his parents about the taunting and his struggles with depression (page 15):

“I care about my legacy as a professional athlete. But I’m miserable currently. A therapist & medication won’t help me gain the respect of my teammates. I really don’t know what to do Mom.”

“People call me a Nigger to my face. Happened 2 days ago. And I laughed it off. Because I am too nice of a person. They say terrible things about my sister. I don’t do anything. I suppose it’s white private school conditioning, turning the other cheek”

Martin texts a friend with the pros and cons of continuing to play football (page 112):

-Football games are fun

-I can make a lot of money playing football and be set for life

-I have a legacy that will live after I die

-not many people get to live their childhood dream

-I am the left tackle for the Miami dolphins

-if I quit, I’ll be known as a quitter for the rest of my life

-my legacy at Stanford will be tarnished

-I will never be able to look any coach from my past in the eye

-I hate going in everyday.

-I am unable to socialize with my teammates in their crude manner

-I already have a lot of money. I could travel the world, get my degree. Then get a real job

-I could lose 70 lbs and feel good about my body

-I won’t die from CTE

-Maybe I’ll start to LIKE myself

-I don’t need to live lavishly. I could live very frugally

-why do I care about these people? All I need is my family

Read the full report here:

DV.load(“//www.documentcloud.org/documents/1018353-paulweissreport.js”,
width: 630,
height: 500,
sidebar: false,
container: “#DV-viewer-1018353-paulweissreport”
);

Miami Dolphins investigation (PDF)

Miami Dolphins investigation (Text)

Jump to original: 

Guns Are for Shooting "All Black People" and Other Horrifying Quotes From the NFL’s Dolphins Investigation

Posted in Accent, Anchor, Casio, Dolphin, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Guns Are for Shooting "All Black People" and Other Horrifying Quotes From the NFL’s Dolphins Investigation

Watch NASA’s Next Mars Lander Be Put Together, Piece by Piece

by Thorzar Posted on September 16, 2013

In just two months NASA is going back to Mars. The agency’s MAVEN orbiter, set to launch November 18, will circle the red planet, studying Mars’ incredibly thin atmosphere and trying to figure out how it interacts with the solar wind. But before MAVEN can be launched from Cape Canaveral, it had to be put together, by hand, piece by piece.

Lockheed Martin, the company that built MAVEN, recorded this time lapse of the satellite’s construction, showing you just how much work goes into assembling one of these things.

h/t Emily Lakdawalla

More from Smithsonian.com:

This Is What a Watery Mars May Have Looked Like
Curiosity Nails It: Mars Used to Have Flowing Water

Read article here:

Watch NASA’s Next Mars Lander Be Put Together, Piece by Piece

Posted in GE, Smith's, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch NASA’s Next Mars Lander Be Put Together, Piece by Piece

Alyssa Milano Weighs In on Her "Sex Tape" About the Bloodshed in Syria

by Thorzar Posted on September 4, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

No, you don’t get to see actress Alyssa Milano have sex. Yes, you get to hear some depressing bullet points on the bloodshed in Syria.

Early Wednesday morning, Funny or Die—Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s comedy website—posted a “leaked!” sex tape of the 40-year-old Milano (who’s famous for her roles on the TV shows Who’s the Boss? and Charmed). The video is, of course, a staged comic bit. Milano and a handsome man start getting it on right as their camera “accidentally” swivels to a TV broadcasting an evening news report on the crisis in Syria, and the Obama administration’s push for military intervention. The TV set is mounted next to a mirror, in which the viewers can see limbs flopping and a bed sheet moving.

“I think it was a really fun way to get people to realize that there are important issues our country is dealing with right now,” Milano tells Mother Jones. “If people end up learning something about the crisis in Syria that’s a good thing—even if I had to do a sex tape to lure them in.”

The video ends with Milano saying to her lover, “This is boring, change the channel, put it on the Swamp People,” referring to the History channel’s reality TV series that documents the lives of alligator hunters.

To promote the “Syrian sex tape,” Milano tweeted out the following on Wednesday:

Funny or Die’s Nick Corirossi, one of the writers and directors of the “sex tape,” is keeping up a similar act. “I was the tape’s finder,” Corirossi says. “Funny or Die every once in a while tries to purchase sex tapes…but this time it was more boring than ever. It was all about all this Syrian stuff. It’s the most boring sex tape debacle I’ve ever been involved in.” (Corirossi did say that he does not believe the video takes a political position on intervention, but does serve as “an update” on Syria news.)

Milano has dabbled in political fare before. Since 2003, she has been (along with a bunch of other celebs) a UNICEF ambassador, and has traveled with the UN program to Kosovo, India, and Angola. She’s voiced her support for same-sex marriage. And she starred in a 2010 Funny or Die video (Ron Livingston, Gillian Jacobs, and many more) urging Americans to vote. Funny or Die posts a lot of political satire and content—and has done fake celebrity sex tapes before, as well.

Continued: 

Alyssa Milano Weighs In on Her "Sex Tape" About the Bloodshed in Syria

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Alyssa Milano Weighs In on Her "Sex Tape" About the Bloodshed in Syria

Why This Year’s Gulf Dead Zone Is Twice as Big as Last Year’s

by Thorzar Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

First, the good news: The annual “dead zone” that smothers much of the northern Gulf of Mexico—caused by an oxygen-sucking algae bloom mostly fed by Midwestern farm runoff—is smaller this year than scientists had expected. In the wake of heavy spring rains, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been projecting 2013’s fish-free region of the Gulf to be at least 7,286 square miles to 8,561 square miles—somewhere between the size of New Jersey on the low end to New Hampshire on the high end. Instead, NOAA announced, it has clocked in at 5,840 square miles—a bit bigger than Connecticut. It’s depicted in the above graphic.

Now, for the bad news: this year’s “biological dessert” (NOAA’s phrase) is much bigger than last year’s, below, which was relatively tiny because Midwestern droughts limited the amount of runoff that made it into the Gulf. At about 2,500 square miles, the 2012 edition measured up to be about a quarter again as large as Delaware.

NOAA. Data source: Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON)

Smaller than expected though it may be, this year’s model is still more than twice as large as NOAA’s targeted limit of less than 2,000 square miles. Here’s how recent dead zones stack up—note that the NOAA target has been met only once since 1990. Low years, like 2012 and 2009, tend to marked by high levels of drought; and high years, like 2008, by heavy rains and flooding.

Dead zones over time. NOAA

Why such massive annual dead zones? It’s a matter of geography and massive concentration and intensification of fertilizer-dependent agriculture. Note that an enormous swath of the US landmass—41 percent of it—drains into the Mississippi River Basin, as shown below. It’s true that even under natural conditions, a river that captures as much drainage as the Mississippi is going to deliver some level of nutrients to the sea, which in turn will generate at least some algae. But when US Geological Service researchers looked at the fossil record in 2006, they found that major hypoxia events (the technical name for dead zones) were relatively rare until around 1950—and have been increasingly common ever since. The mid-20th century is also when farmers turned to large-scale use of synthetic fertilizers. Now as much a part of Mississippi Delta life as crawfish boils, the Gulf dead zone wasn’t even documented as a phenomenon until 1972, according to NOAA.

Source: LUMCON

The very same land mass that drains into the Gulf is also the site of an enormous amount of agriculture. The vast majority of US corn production—which uses titanic amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus, the two main nutrients behind the dead zone—occurs there.

US Department of Agriculture

The region is also where we shunt much of our factory-scale meat farms. This Food and Water Watch map depicts concentration of beef cow, dairy, hog, chicken, and egg farms—the redder, the more concentrated.

Big Ag interests like to deflect blame for the annual dead zone, claiming that other factors, like runoff from lawns and municipal sewage, drive it. But the US Geological Service has traced flows of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Gulf, and there’s no denying the link to farming. “In total, agricultural sources contribute more than 70 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus delivered to the Gulf, versus only 9 to 12% from urban sources,” USGS reports.

The Gulf isn’t the only water body that bears the brunt of our concentrated ag production. Much of the eastern edge of the Midwest drains into the Great Lakes, not the Gulf. And they, too, are experiencing fertilizer-fed algae blooms—particularly Lake Erie. The below satellite image depicts the record-setting, oxygen-depleting bloom that smothered much of Lake Erie in 2011, which peaked at 2,000 square miles (about Delaware-sized). “That’s more than three times larger than any previously observed Lake Erie algae bloom, including blooms that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when the lake was famously declared dead,” a University of Michigan report found. The culprit: severe storms in the spring, plus “agricultural practices that provide the key nutrients that fuel large-scale blooms.”

University of Michigan

Then there’s the Chesapeake Bay region, site of a stunning concentration of factory-scale chicken facilities (Food and Water Watch map) …

Food and Water Watch

… and a massive annual dead zone. “Livestock manure and poultry litter account for about half of the nutrients entering the Chesapeake Bay,” the Chesapeake Bay Program reports:

Source: NOAA

All of which raises the question: Are dead zones inevitable, a sacrifice necessary to feeding a nation of 300 million people? Turns out, not so much. A 2012 Iowa State University study found that by simply adding one or two crops to the Midwest’s typical corn-soy crop rotation, farmers would reduce their synthetic nitrogen fertilizer needs by 80 percent, while staying just as productive. And instead of leaving fields bare over winter, they could plant them with cover crops—a practice that, according to the US Department of Agriculture, “greatly reduces soil erosion and runoff” (among many other ecological benefits)—meaning cleaner streams, rivers, and ultimately, lakes, bays, and gulfs. Moreover, when animals are rotated briskly through pastures—and not crammed into factory-like structures where their manure accumulates into a dramatic waste problem—they, too, can contribute to healthy soil that traps nutrients, protecting waterways from runoff.

View original article – 

Why This Year’s Gulf Dead Zone Is Twice as Big as Last Year’s

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why This Year’s Gulf Dead Zone Is Twice as Big as Last Year’s